Friday, August 13, 2010

Kindness


 
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
 
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
 
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. 
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
 
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.
 
~ Naomi Shihab Nye ~
 
(Words From Under the Words: Selected Poems)
 

7 comments:

  1. wow, you are able to mail letters and purchase bread? way to go!

    yes, I know that is not your voice. beautiful choice.
    impressed & happy to see you here.

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  2. I love the second stanza.

    You must see how this could be you,
    how he too was someone
    who journeyed through the night with plans
    and the simple breath that kept him alive.

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  3. I think this was the poem that created my definition of the world in the first few months after - Kindness matters. Everything else is arbitrary.

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  4. One of the things that I made a decision about awhile before Don died, was that I was going to try, as much as possible, to take time to be kind to others. Funny thing, but I think it was because I saw so little kindness while Don was ill. So many of our friends and family sort of abandoned us when we could have used the support. However, sometimes a small kindness would come from some unexpected place - a nurse who would go the extra mile at the hospital..that kind of thing. During that time, I decided that I would try to pay attention to people around me - even those I did not know so well, or sometimes not at all - and do something meaningful for them when I could. It might be something as simple as taking a piece of the baklava I'd baked for a friend and I to eat on our back country trip and giving it to a homeless war vet panhandling at an interstate rest stop, or stopping to help an older woman loading a piece of furniture into the trunk of her car. I thought, "Why not? These things don't cost me anything other than a little of my time and perhaps an occasional rejection, but for that person, they might help them get through an otherwise difficult day." I guess you could call them "random acts of kindness" except that perhaps they aren't quite as random as other people realize. In truth, these are the only things that really matter when you strip away all of the other meaningless stuff that is floating around in the world.

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  5. strip away all the meaningless stuff - exactly. Who knows what is actually going on with anything at any moment. You can't fix anything or change anything or make anything other than it is going to be. but you can be kind while you have to be here.

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  6. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
    you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.


    As much as I hate the notion that I must suffer in order to know how to give, I do tend to rely on the notion of yin-yang in my world. I suppose it is only in knowing both sides, both extremes, that we begin to regain as sense of balance in our life. Perhaps that is my quest.

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  7. I totally resent that idea that I have to suffer in order to give, or to know what is important, or any of those things. I was a pretty darn good, giving, loving, knowing-whats-important person before this happened. I certainly didn't Need this. I think we can learn through goodness, through living and receiving a beautiful, love filled life - giving from the full cup. That idea that we have to suffer in order to be any good at all, sand makes the pearl and all that, well that just irritates me.

    For me now, it is both things, both thoughts and realities at the same time - this SUCKS. and. Kindness is. How to balance, or even allow, those two things. I didn't Need this, but I've got it. How do I believe what I believed, what I lived, before, with this grand suckage present too.

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