Friday, March 3 – – “you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.” – – Naomi Shihab Nye

Wednesday, March 3, 2017  “Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,”

Four days ago, a friend emailed me some lines from Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Kindness.”  The poet finds words to connect kinship and love with those elements of living in the world that wear us down.  Meanness and violence become a context for enduring kindness.  No wonder my friend thought to send “Kindness” in these times; no surprise either that it found a place in “Work Day/Hard Times” so soon after the poem landed here. Naomi Shihab Nye is becoming a welcomed presence here.

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Friday, a delicate dusting of snow in the parking lot, early, before any of us 22 Jesuits had left footprints.   Not the 20” blizzard I’ve been hoping for, but pretty damn beautiful even so.  Have a blest weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post  “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 everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye
(b. March 12, 1952)