I was out in front of our house wearing flowy pants and a t-shirt. I was picking up our empty recycling bins and taking them to the back of our house after garbage day.

She was a decade or two older than me and walking down the sidewalk on the other side of the street.

She smiled when she saw me, made eye contact, and said, “Hello, Love.”

I smiled back and said hello, and hauled my recycling bins back up our driveway.

It stopped me in my tracks, though. I came inside and wrote it down. “Hello, Love.” One of my kids saw it written on a scrap of paper at my work station in our kitchen and asked me about it. It was hard to articulate.

It felt like in that warm smile and two words that I had been seen and accepted without condition. I didn’t recognize the woman, but the familiarity of the greeting made me think that she knows me from around the neighborhood. Maybe she’s seen me go down the sidewalk surrounded by my kids on our way somewhere on foot, or watched the Chaplain and I pass by on one of our now many evening walks.

Maybe she was just communicating solidarity about living in this world as a woman. Maybe she greets everyone with such kindness.

I felt accepted on that sunny morning. I didn’t have my face on, I wasn’t dressed to impress. In my own eyes, I was the equivalent of a butterfly just out of the chrysalis. My wings were still crumpled and I wasn’t ready to have my moment. None of my “walls” were in place, but someone saw me without offering judgement that I wasn’t more together.

Part of what I offer professionally as a nurse is not being judgemental or reactionary to my patients’ behavior and their life choices. I know how much harder it is to offer that same nonjudgmental openness to everyone in one’s life: not only our friends and family, but also acquaintances and even strangers.

I’ve been thinking about what it looks like to live in a world where not everyone is ready to accept me at face value, without qualification. For every precious soul who is accepting and open, even if only for a moment, there will be many more who don’t want to deal with me or won’t be able to.

How do I go out into that world? How do I prevent myself from walling off everyone because of the pain a few have caused? How do we know when to keep our faces on? When is it safe to take them off? How can we help others feel truly seen and accepted?

Sometimes the answer to the latter is as simple as a genuine smile and a “hello.”

This is my hundredth post. Using my photography and writing was a dream for a long time before it became reality when the Chaplain set me up with my blog as a gift this past Christmas. The blog started at the beginning of a journey I didn’t fully realize I was on until later. I’ve been grateful to have a place (and a little community) to rest and reflect in along the way.