only kindness

You know when beauty so completely overwhelms you, a direct injection to some hidden part of your soul, to this place inside yourself that you never even knew existed prior to that moment?

A side effect of this for me is instantaneous tears: Drop-to-your-knees, lift your hands in prayer or gratitude or I-don't-know-what sobbing.

Beauty, the kind of reverberating beauty that fills you up beyond capacity or comprehension -- Well. That's about as close to God as I think you can get.

Somehow, some way, the poem below does that for me. The ability to connect words to convey that which is beyond words . . . . This gift alone leaves me in absolute awe.

photo via Jen Loves Kev

Naomi Shihab Nye

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.