“The Tender Gravity of Kindness”

This is a time when we need to lean into kindness. I was going to write about how I am experiencing kindness and what I am doing to engage in kind acts. However, I would rather we look at this poem by Naomi Shahib Nye. It shows us how kindness is the other side of sorrow. Journey with it and let it grow within you.

A bird just flew into my window where I am writing. I wrapped it in a cloth, thinking it might have been in shock and took it to my favorite neighbor who knows everything about birds. We talked while it gently breathed its last. It was the most tender thing I could think of.

Kindness by Naomi Shahib Nye

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

(The photo is from Syria taken most likely by a photo journalist. It expressed to me what “The Tender Gravity of Kindness” can look like.)