Nestled between agency and kindness lays the delicate province of my favorite spirit: tenderness. In my meditations, it’s tenderness that ministers compassion.

Sensed like a heartbeat. Internally radiant but unseen, tenderness isn’t made for the spotlight.

In the original Latin, "tendere" referred to something physically pliant or easily stretched. Now, it has transformed into a word that signifies a gentle, careful handling — whether an object, idea, or person.

Tenderness cannot be forced, or mechanically evoked. We sense and feel into its mysterious notes and strands of experience when we arrive in the dominion of what is dear and precious to us.

In its sense-making, tenderness reshapes time into loving memory, then organizes memory into meaning. To behold tenderly is to paint a beautiful intention with the world.

Across time, tenderness still remains true to its earthy roots: in its daily practice, it is self-eviscerating and becomes ordinary.

Steady, small, ploddingly simple in its deeds, tenderness reveals an old-fashioned strength.

We find it in the gentle touch of a wiped tear, in the murmured bedtime story from a grandmother to a child, in the careful passion of a devout love, in the comforting of the sick, in the soft origami of our decisions.

In being tender, and in the seeing of the tender, our eyes are remade into beauty