Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things.

[Bluebear]

For all those who have lost things, who have suffered, may we all have the hope of a new day.

=====

Kindness - - by Naomi Shihab 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.


photo by Cayusa
http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/onblack.php?id=367611767&size=Large

[Amerigo Vespucci]

1. Loss is what makes us available for others who need us

It's a chain, one big chain, called life.

When we have what we want in the way that we want it we never notice the people standing outside our door.

When we lose a few things we keep our door open, and that's when life really begins.

:toast:

[confuddled]

2. Thank you. n/t

[Berry Cool]

3. I have found that there is only one good thing in life about loss

and that is the way it makes you able to feel for others who have lost.

Because only by losing can you truly understand how they feel, and that none of us are immune and protected from it.

K&R

[Lex]

4. Thank you for that, Bluebear.

:hug: