Sibling Assignment #59: Kindness

I assigned this sibling assignment to acknowledge April which is National Poetry Month. My sisters and I were to post and poem that is important to us right now. InlandEmpireGirl posted her poem here and Silver Valley Girl posted her poem here.

Here's the poem I selected and a few comments:

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

Nye's vision of kindness is that it's grounded in loss. It's a good thing. Otherwise, kindness would never prevail. Our lives are filled with suffering and loss, and if we only extended kindness when our lives or the world were in a happy state, we would rarely be kind.

Indirectly, this poem also speaks to the refining and chastening nature of suffering. It's a mystery. Suffering has an inexplicable power to move us to see the suffering in others, to share in that suffering, and extend compassion. Nye's word is kindness.

My hope, in reading this poem, is that I have the capacity to translate my disappointments and pain into kindness. Honestly, I know that I am a source of difficulty for others at times. I am grateful when the suffering or discomfort I have caused is returned with kindness.

Nye says it so well: "it is only kindness that makes sense any more." Indeed. Why should we extend our misery or sorrow to others, when kindness "goes with you everywhere/like a shadow or a friend".