Why I Keep Writing

Weekly wisdom to bring you home in 2 minutes, or less.

A SHORT STORY

I have been writing this newsletter each week for the past three years.

I remember when my mom passed away ten years ago, I instinctively began saving poems wherever I could.

With the poems I saved, it was as if the poem knew me before I knew the poem. This is something I have come to understand more deeply over the years.

It began with Naomi Shihab Nye's poem 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 I have come to learn is that the poems that stay with us often arrive before we are ready for them. They recognize something in us that we have not yet fully seen ourselves.

I think that may be the space you and I share each week: a chance to pause, listen, and pay attention to what is quietly calling us forward.

What has been calling you forward lately?

A POEM

“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.

Grateful,

Michael