Blessed Day. Blessed Be the Fruit. May the Lord Open.
If you are a fan of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale, then you will be familiar with these greetings — and all that Gilead offers. Obviously within this tale these greetings carry a somewhat dark undertone, but it got me thinking about how we greet each other on a regular basis.
I think that it can be a way of practising kindness and compassion not only for those we are greeting, but actually within ourselves. By using positive, kind mantras and practising saying them to ourselves, we can then start to radiate this level of love and very quickly this is reflected back to us.
I have started to practise this when I go out for a coffee … you see, I like to be greeted when I go into a coffee shop, and there is one particular place that I sometimes frequent where there is no greeting! And although the coffee is good, the food is good, and they have lovely cakes, I am put off of going there because of the lack of greeting.
So when a friend asked me to meet her there, I made a decision that I was going to do the greeting and force the situation. So on the drive there I started the mantra in my head Good morning, lovely to see you, what cake can you recommend today?
So I went in all smiles, and gave them my best good morning, lovely to see you, I haven’t been here for a while, so what cake can you recommend today? and although they looked a bit shocked … they did actually acknowledge, smile back and make a suggestion … I also felt we were served a little quicker than normal … so it made a difference … to me anyway. I am rather hoping that it made a difference to their day too.
I suppose none of us know what is going on in other's lives when we are interacting with them, and there is no way of knowing or controlling that. But what we can do is take responsibility for our own actions, and to practise some loving kindness as this could make a big difference to another's day... and, for that matter, our own.
Blessed Be the Fruit …
