Good Thursday, Dear Ones,
Allie here.
I've been waiting and wanting to share with all of you something my dear friend Lillie Cohn (also a Brownie) shared with me earlier this month. It is something that hummed resonance down to the bottom of my soul. This is a piece I've been wanting for years and didn't know it.
Even in our enormous and gorgeous human capacity for empathy, we can never fully enter the pain of our friends, lovers, and family. We are alone. We come in that way, and that's the way we go out. But here's the good news: Tanya Davis and Andrea Dorfman have created something magical to help us greet our aloneness as the friend and ally it is.
We're rounding the February homestretch, sweetpeas. Only 8 days to go. In the meantime, please make space for Naomi Shihab-Nye's words in your hearts:
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.
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