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- 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, and 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 plansand 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 any 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 - Naomi Shihab Nye
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- Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings
and flocks of redwing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children
and freshly mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen
and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
Wage peace with your listening:
hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools:
flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.
Make soup.
Play music, learn the word for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty
or the gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.
Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.
have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Don't wait another minute.
Wage Peace - Mary Oliver
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- "Sometimes when we work in this way, we touch into emotions from somewhere else, some other time, some other place, some other person. It is my belief that we simply begin again... there is the emotion, we acknowledge it, feel it, know it is there and begin again. We try... as you are doing... not to let it 'stick' to us, drag us, hold us in it. And so we come slowly to balance once again, not pushing the emotion away, not holding it too close. This is our work."
Helen Duquette
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- "It's important that we honour our work, knowing how it heals, strengthens, pulls us to the moment and knowing that healing is often an acceptance of what is, and in that acceptance and curiousity, what might be. We will learn from one another - wonderful, frustrating, longing... whatever it is...that is what it will be."
Helen Duquette
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- "The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is."
Spinoza
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- "You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to love everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Resolve to be always beginning - to be a beginner"
Rainer Maria Rilke
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