Good Kin

Yesterday I listened to a talk by Wendell Berry where he made the connection between kin and kind. Today I was about to write a little piece about my name when I discovered I had already done so, some five years ago. Here’s what I wrote then: 

 

Oct. 31, 2021—When my grandparents arrived at Ellis Island more than a century ago, they might have carried the name Goodkinsky, shortened to Goodkin or perhaps, Goodkind (the version adopted by my Aunt Flo). I’ve never loved saying my name, the harsh consonants of the paired d and k in the middle like sharp stones interrupting some melodic flow. But last night, I thought about “good kin” and extending my sense of connection far beyond my relatives, felt a certain destiny in my inherited name. My Uncle Harold always told me that family and loyalty to family was everything but failed to mention that our job is to extend that sense of family to include all people and yet further into all animal and plants and even rivers and stones and stars. And indeed, when putting together my 70th birthday slide show and revisiting the photos of so many people I’ve met in my teaching and travels, I felt that satisfaction of feeling akin to such a rich mix of people. All the diverse nationalities, races, religions, economic status, genders, sexual preferences, languages, the whole nine yards of things that people use as an excuse to exclude and dismiss becoming the very fabric of the sense of kinship I cultivated with all of humanity (minus those with the content of character that harms and hurts, though even those somehow having to be included). I now can see my life as my attempt to live up to my name, to see the goodness in my kin and to feel an ever-expanding kinship with all of creation. And then further, taking my Aunt Flo’s version, to myself try to be always one inch more good and one inch more kind until the inches add up to a worthy length. 

 

That’s pretty much what I would have written today. Though there is certainly a great deal of unkindness within blood families and relatives, the assumption is that we are obliged to take care of each other, to be kind to our kin. The Oxford English dictionary traces “kind” to qualities like “compassionate, loving, full of tenderness,” notes “mankind/ womankind/ humankind” connecting those qualities with the greater human family and includes “godcund” as an obsolete Old and Middle English adjective that means "divine," "belonging to God," or "proceeding from God." It’s a short leap from Godcund to Goodkin and I don’t claim any of it personally but happily accept my name as a reminder that we are all gifted with a divine nature and all that remains is to recognize it and act accordingly. 

 

In his book There Is No Other, Ram Dass tells a story similar to my Uncle Harold story above. His father was praising him for a book Ram Dass had published that was selling very well but criticized him for charging such a cheap price for it. Ram Dass asked his father, a lawyer, about a case he tried for his Uncle Henry and asked him if he charged him a lot of money for taking on his case. His father replied, “Don’t be an idiot It was Uncle Henry. I didn’t charge him a penny. He’s family.”

 

Ram Dass countered, “That’s my problem. If you can find me somebody who isn’t Uncle Henry, I’ll rip them off.”

 

We are all kin to each other. So we might as well be kind to each other.