What It Means - Day 69

"And warn thy tribe, thy nearest kin, and lower thy wing to the believers who follow thee."
Quran 26:214-215

I don't know if I have that much to add to this short verse that I culled out of surah 26, often referred to as "The Poets." Mainly, I just really love the phrase "lower they wing," which means to be gentle. I have a bad habit, which I suppose most clumsy travelers have, of collecting sayings from overseas, and this is certainly one of my favorites. More profoundly, the notion of treating those around you with gentleness is key to Islam. As I've proposed numerous times, to me the faith most often comes down to the admonition to return the worse with the better, to treat the people that we deal with every day better than they are treating us. All too often we, for no real reason, are harsh to the people that we meet or even to our loved ones. It may sound trite, but if we simply did nothing more than treat other people and animals and, for that matter, nature with kindness we'd probably knock off most of the world's problems fairly quickly.