Kindness

I was raised in a household in which Kindness was not a value. I had to learn it as an adult.

That is not to say that there weren’t other noble values in my childhood home, but Kindness wasn't prime among them.

 

It was when I found the poem Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye that my journey towards Kindness actually began.

 

I don’t remember how or when I found the poem or who pointed it out to me. What I do know is that it stuck. It was similar to the time in the late 1970’s when I was sitting regularly at Insight Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts. At the end of my 10 minutes meeting with the teacher, I made the statement, “This word compassion, you use it a lot. I don’t think I know what it means.” The teacher just smiled.

Although I didn’t recognize it at the time, finding the poem Kindness was a step along the path towards finding out.

 

When I found that poem, or when it found me, I was living in a ramshackle owner-built house on a gentle hilltop in a community of about 1000 people. I had a partner and we were raising our young kids on that idyllic land. I was starting my own business, landscaping, and we were on as ground as shaky the house that held us.

 

I printed out a copy of the poem and put it on the side of the fridge closest to the kitchen sink. Every day when I washed the dishes, I read and re-read the poem.

Every day after I read it I shook my head thinking, “I get it. But I don’t get it.”

 

Time passed. The partner left. The business prospered. The kids grew. I continued walking my personal path of healing, doing my daily practices, deepening my magical training, and began offering classes and co-creating community and personal rituals and ceremonies in my European-based traditions. 

 

And I continued reading the poem.

 

Now and again, I thought I caught a glimmer. But then I sadly shook my head. “No,” I would think. “I’m not sure. Exactly.”

 

Life unfolded, as it does. In time, with the kids grown and flown from the nest, The Goddess, The Great Mystery, Life Force (call it what you will) picked me up and set me back down in a new life set in a small city far from my beloved hills with a new partner and in need of a new livelihood.

 

And so, I got to work and created myself anew using the skills and tools I had so carefully gathered during my previous chapter.

 

Moving house is a challenge at the best of times. Moving lives is a greater challenge that so many of us face. What to take; what to leave behind.

 

One of the things I took was that wrinkled, stained, somewhat battered copy of Kindness that had graced my fridge for all of those years. Now it lives a gentler life on the bulletin board next to the desk where I write these words.

I don’t actually read it multiple times each day anymore, although I do glance at it frequently. The words are imprinted in my soul.

 

And I have found that, slow learner that I am, that Kindness has permeated my life. 

 

Now, I am not saying that I’m great at it, or that I never stray into old habits of mind. Because I most certainly do.

 

But I am saying that Kindness has become a friend who lives in my heart and calls me back from whatever worn out old patterns may have reasserted themselves.

 

Because after all, that is what Kindness does. But Naomi Shihab Nye says it so much better than I:

 

Kindness

Naomi Shihab Nye - 1952-

 

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 gaze at 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.

From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted with the permission of the author.