From Darkness to Light

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I first discovered the poem “Kindness” at a time when I was struggling to face my son’s illness and to find some meaning, some purpose, in that struggle.  The beauty and wisdom of the poem’s words gave me those gifts.  Years later insights from this poem would ripple across my class and change my student Ella, Jason, and others. Recently, poet Naomi Shihab Nye shared with me the story of how she first penciled this poem in a bent pocket notebook years ago.

Perhaps it is fair to say the magic began with Michael. Naomi lived in San Antonio when she first met Michael at a humble old diner called Quincey’s Just Good Food. The lunchroom was crowded that day and they had to share a table. When the conversation turned to their travels, lunch became about more than food, much more. Three months later they were married.

 Each of them had traveled in Guatemala the previous summer and they traded notes about their journeys. Each wanted to go further south. They planned an ambitious honeymoon, hoping to travel from the top to the bottom of South America by land.

Their journey began in Columbia. They were young, in love, and excited about the journey ahead. On the sixth night as they traveled in a packed bus through hills toward Ecuador, bandits abruptly stopped their bus and ordered everyone off. Passengers were told to hand over their valuables and every bag they carried. When one local Indian insisted he had nothing, he was pulled away from the group, shot in the chest, and left beside the dusty road, bleeding through his white poncho. Dying.

The passengers watched in shock. Hurriedly the robbers grabbed everything of value. Michael and Naomi lost their money, their travelers checks, their passports, their tickets home, and all of Michael’s camera equipment. After the bandits took off, the passengers reboarded the bus. The driver left Namoi and Michael stranded at the border of Ecuador without money or passports.

“You go from a happy moment in your life,” explained Naomi, “to the worst. A local person being murdered. It could have been any of us.”

It took many hours before the penniless newlyweds were able to convince another bus driver to them back to Popayan where they had originally started their journey. Once there, they visited the police station to seek restitution. While Naomi typed up the police report on a rickety manual typewriter, the policemen laughed at the futility of trying to bring the robbers to justice. While she wrote, Michael decided to hitchhike to the larger town of Cali to check into an American Express office for help.

Still rattled by the experience Michael left Naomi behind, sitting on a bench in the Plaza Popayan near the Catholic church. Surrounded by large, white colonial buildings that shimmered in the sunlight, Naomi meditated quietly. Eventually a calm came over her. Suddenly she heard words. When she looked around, there was no one nearby, but she could hear words coming from beyond her in the voice of a woman speaking softly. At that moment Naomi remembered she had a small bendable notebook and a short nub of pencil in her back pocket.  She dug them out and copied the words the voice was saying. It was like a song in the air. A gift from another sphere.

Here are the words she was given.

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 gaze at 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.

Michael and Naomis’ passports were found in a garbage can and returned to them. Michael was reimbursed by American Express in Cali for their lost checks and the couple continued their South American adventure—on a less ambitious scale. And Naomi discovered the words in the air that would help many of us learn that something good can come of our pain.  To find light amid the darkness.

Used with permission from this incredible author. From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye.

 

Kindness

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Remember Ella?  I write about her often. My quiet, sweet student who had struggled with anorexia in her junior year. As her senior year unfolded, she continued to hide out behind her stack of notebooks in my English classroom. While she rarely spoke, she always perked her head up and closely followed every discussion. By second semester I suspect she had added a bit of weight to her thin frame, and I know her dark curls were no longer pinned tightly behind her. They were looser by spring following the latest fashion, and they bobbed down her back as she walked.  I had noticed the change, and I think Jason had, too.  He sat behind her and sometimes he would gaze admiringly at her as high school boys do.

Some days in classrooms something pops open. There is a comment or a shared insight that reveals a truth and a magical feeling floats across the room so big it cannot be held down. And this is how it happened during second period in March about two decades ago.

On that day we read a poem called Kindness. We read it twice. Here are a couple of lines:

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

When we finished the poem, with the words still floating across the room, Ella’s hand unexpectedly shot up. She leaned forward and spoke before I asked a single question. She called out, “I get it!  I know what the poem means!”  And she did.

In the coming minutes her hands moved like windmills through the air as she explained how anyone’s future can be dissolved unexpectedly in a moment. Turns out she had experienced a great deal of loss. Turns out she understood a poem about pain, a dead Indian, and our human need to be kind. With her father’s unexpected death her world had crumbled as she knew it.  You could see the pain streaked across the faces of her peers as she shared her story.

When she finished, it was Jason who championed her words. “Yes, Ella. It is the pain that helps us see what is important.” And he spoke of his cousin and his drug death by fentanyl.

In moments like this I dissolved into the class. We became one as we explored the wisdom found in words. Turns out not only Ella and Jason understood the way kindness could weave a path into us after a great pain. Thirty-two minds took it all in, wide-eyed with wonder they tapped into the beauty of kindness.

Here is the Naomi Shihab Nye reading her beautiful poem on You Tube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UF3NolGSHg

Child’s Play

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Laughter is echoing up the stairwells in my home.  Four little cousins are banging around plastic pots and pans in the play kitchen that was a Christmas gift. Intermittently one child bounds up the stairs to ask me what I want to eat and when I try to order elaborate meals, perhaps eggplant parmesan or tiramisu, they bang their toys around until they create it with plastic food pieces or crayon drawings. One of them borrows my iPad to figure out what tiramisu looks like. Pretend food laced with laughter is often the best meal.

When these cousins, my grandchildren, are together they fill the air with their chatter and giggles. A decade ago, I heard a monk sing in a domed chapel in Pisa, Italy. As his notes filled the space, the dome captured and echoed them. It seemed like one voice had become many. The moment was powerful, but it was no more powerful than this moment. Now. As I hear these children’s voices, I tear up. One of my grandchildren rarely speaks.

After months of the pandemic’s social isolation, Annie returned to school, and we were surprised to learn she suffers from selective mutism. This is a form of social anxiety that affects talking. Annie has lost her voice at school with her classmates and in public with strangers.  It hurts to see her to see her struggle when a waitress tries to force her to answer, “What do you want to eat?”  She looks down. Humiliated. I have learned she is not unique.

Since the start of COVID-19, the World Health Organization reports we have seen a dramatic 25% increase in the number of people, especially women and children, who are suffering from anxiety and depression. One in every 140 children now struggle with my granddaughter’s condition. One high school teacher told me three support groups have been created at her school to allow kids who are struggling with anxiety to regain social skills that were lost.  In trying to save our children, we were blindsided by social isolation. The good news is that most of them will overcome it. Treatment and love make a huge difference. Annie has those, and she has the joy of younger cousins who idolize her and always seek her out to play.

Last week her cousin Hope had her birthday, and I asked her what she wanted. The answer was simple. “I want to go skating with my cousins!”  That is how I ended up at a skating rink for the first time in decades. About a dozen friends and relatives came together to celebrate Hope. Once there the kids donned skates that flashed and glowed in neon oranges and purples. Some skated swiftly and others wobbled their way around the rink to the sounds of Taylor Swift and Kelly Clarkson. They laughed, fell, got up and tried again. In the end we sang Happy Birthday. Then we were anxious to get back to the house to celebrate with Annie.

Of course, the best part of the party was the cousins chasing each other around the yard.

As Hope opened her presents, the cousins agreed that face-painting would be great fun. It was. Little Lilly painted my face with a blue Dali-styled moustache and beard.  But when Lilly turned her paint brush lose on Aunt Allie, she created a face mask of blues, oranges, and greens that could compete with any Picasso design.

But our real artist is Annie, and she was the star.  She painted Hope as a leopard and her brother as a tiger. And the two paraded around the party like high-style celebrities.

In recent weeks I have heard many hard stories in my classes and felt the weight of them. Annie’s story is only one.  As I watched her paint, and as I have observed her play with her cousins, I feel her goodness and her strength. I believe in her. And through the four cousins, I have learned to honor fun, laughter, and creativity. These are all part of a child’s play, and they have the power to lift us up and make this hard life a beautiful journey. So today I wish you the joy of child’s play.