What is your definition of Kindness?

This poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, is one of my all-time favorites which I like to revisit frequently.  It should be memorized and recited often, IMHO.   I have also been pondering what kindness means to me.  I want to add that kindness is often the little things, like acknowledging emails and texts with small signs, like a happy face, things that let people know you see them, or you hear them, and they matter in your life.  Even a "Like" on a Facebook page, or a simple smile at a stranger can be a moment of kindness.   "Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things."  (Robert Brault)  More and more, as I age, kindness seems like the "little things".  This poem also has a generous amount of compassion, which comes through age and experience.  

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.

 "Kindness" by Naomi Shihab Nye,

 from The Words Under the Words: Selected Poems.

 © Eighth Mountain Press, 1995. 

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2014

A new year is always a chance to "Do Over".  We are standing on a threshold of hope.   We don't get that opportunity very often.  We have to be responsible for what we have created based on our choices, and sometimes it's not very pretty. 

Every January 1st we get to review, release and recreate aspects of our selves on our journey of discovery and awakening.  In the musical, Scrooge, there is a song that sums up this determination to be a more intentional human than we have been in the past.   While it is probably not the best poetry, it's meaning is focused and pertinent.   Enjoy your journey of creating the best self you desire as you begin again with renewed hope.

      I'll Begin Again

Scrooge: 
 
I'll begin again 
I will build my life 
I will live to know 
I fulfilled my life 
I'll begin today 
Throw away the past 
And the future I build 
Will be something that will last 
I will take the time 
That I have left to live 
And I'll give it all 
That I have left to give 
I will live my days 
For my fellow men 
And I'll live in praise 
Of that moment when 
I was able to begin again 

I'll begin again 
I will change my fate 
I will show the world 
That it is not too late 
I will never stop 
While I still have time 
'Till I stand at the top 
Of the mountain I must climb 
I will start anew 
I will make amends 
And I will make quite certain 
That the story ends 
On a note of hope 
On a strong amen 
And I'll thank the world 
And remember when 
I was able to begin again 
I'll begin again! 

SELF-PORTRAIT

(Many people have heard Oriah Mountain Dreamer's more famous version of this, called The Invitation, which begins, "It doesn't interest me what you do for a living.  I want to know..."
She does attribute her poem to David Whyte's original as her seed thought.  Here is his poem.)

Self-Portrait
by David Whyte

It doesn't interest me if there is one God 
or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel 
abandoned,
if you can know despair or see it in others.
I want to know
if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need
to change you.  If you can look back
with firm eyes, 
saying this is where I stand.  I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living,
falling toward
the center of your longing.  I want to know
if you are willing
to live, day by day, with the consequence of love
and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.

I Am Too Alone

by Rainer Maria Rilke

I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough

to make every minute holy.

I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough

just to lie before you like a thing,

shrewd and secretive.

I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,

as it goes toward action,

and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times

when something is coming near,

I want to be with those who know secret things

or else alone.

I want to be a mirror for your whole body,

and I never want to be blind, or to be too old

to hold up your old and swaying picture.

I want to unfold.

I don't want to stay folded anywhere,

because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

And I want my grasp of things

true before you.  I want to describe myself

like a painting that I looked at

closely for a long time,

like a saying that I finally understood,

like the pitcher I use every day, like the face of my mother,

like a ship that took me safely

through the wildest storm of all.

from 

Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, 

translated by Robert Bly (Harper & Row, 

Edna St. Vincent Millay

This is the final stanza in the long poem Renascence, which is a beautiful piece of writing.

The world stands out on either side

No wider than the heart is wide;

Above the world is stretched the sky,—

No higher than the soul is high.

The heart can push the sea and land

Farther away on either hand;

The soul can split the sky in two,

And let the face of God shine through.

But East and West will pinch the heart

That can not keep them pushed apart;

And he whose soul is flat—the sky

Will cave in on him by and by.

Rabindranath Tagore

Where The Mind Is Without Fear

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake 

Rabindranath Tagore

WEATHERING

by Fleur Adcock

Literally thin-skinned, I suppose, my face
catches the wind off the snow-line and flushes
with a flush that will never wholly settle. Well:
that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young for ever, to pass.

I was never a pre-Raphaelite beauty
nor anything but pretty enough to satisfy
men who need to be seen with passable women.
But now that I am in love with a place
which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,

happy is how I look, and that’s all.
My hair will grow grey in any case,
my nails chip and flake, my waist thicken,
and the years work all their usual changes.
If my face is to be weather-beaten as well

that’s little enough lost, a fair bargain
for a year among the lakes and fells, when simply
to look out of my window at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what
my soul may wear over its new complexion.