Kindness

by Naomi Shihab Nye

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 any 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 everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

I've always loved this poem and may have even posted about it before but today really needed and wanted to read it again and share it with the universe. It amazes me how at times people can choose to be other than kind to one another. Life is hard enough without the added stress of unkindness but alas through loss and we begin to feel how connected we really are to every other living being.

"What we reject out there is only, after all, what we reject in ourselves; and the most numbing pain comes from the protected heart." Roger Housden in "Ten Poems to Open Your Heart"

May you see your connection to every thing you come into contact with and may you not only show kindness to those people or things, may they recipricate in kindness.

Peace