sweetness & kindness

sweetness - we've had a bumper crop of sweet peas, the more I cut - the more they bloom

Sweet BleetNess is home heathy & apparently has beautiful teeth + he made a few new friends.

I'm listening to Geneen Roth's latest book on audio CD - Lost and Found: Unexpected Revelations about Food & Money. She and her husband lost their entire life savings in the Bernie Madoff scandal she describes the guilt, shame, angst & emotional trauma during the aftermath and the crystal clear realization that they perhaps had been greedy, definitely they had been duped & likely should've known better ... Geneen who has spend most of her adult life very involved in a spiritual, meditation practice, someone who would likely call herself a Buddhist searched high & low for the copy of this wonderful poem that she knew she had tucked away somewhere. She searched & found it knowing that reading it, and eventually memorizing it would bring her comfort ...and ultimate save her. It's a great book (as was Women, Food & God).

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.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Happy Friday !


Nessy Ness apres les vet, sprung from his carrier, plodding around the terracotta gardens