Here Is What I Know Today, September 24,2017

I have returned to writing on my blog. I enjoy both my siblings' daily postings, so I am jumping in to join them. You can find their daily writings here and here. I have done much thinking and writing in the past months, but haven't put any of it here.

Here Is What I Know Today, September 24, 2017

Getting a new puppy during a time full of grief and stress was a good idea for me. We said good-bye to our Springer Spaniel Annie in July. Mom was struggling with congestive heart failure and complications that come with it. Hard decisions were required. As I was often surrounded by a fog of grief and depression, Riley, our new Soft-coated Wheaten Terrier brought sunshine into the household. He gave his herding brother Tucker a job, a big job!vWhen Mom died, he provided love.

Music transports me to other times and other places. I am putting together a play list for my mother's memorial service and in listening to songs I am remembering the memories those songs  evoke. Here is one of those songs, remembering how much Mom and I loved watching this film together.

As a form of written word, poetry has often provided me a way to understand the world. Here is a favorite I often return to. I have been surrounded by kindness during my mother's illness and death. I will never forget all that kindness.

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 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 every where like a shadow or a friend.

Naomi Shihab Nye from The Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

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,