Living Daylight, Part 3

You can’t get there without acknowledging what hurts. There’s a lot of systems out there that are leaning heavily in the direction of eternalism. Everything is meaningful, beautiful, wonderful. Everything is somehow full, not empty. 

Pretty easily that becomes “I should feel everything as meaningful.” But I don’t. There’s lots of stuff that makes me want to wail at God, wail at the universe. Kids dying of cancer. Parents dying of cancer. People driven from their homes during wartime. Slavery. Genocide. I don’t want anyone telling me how to see those things as meaningful or beautiful or full in any kind of way. Fuck off.

One of my favorite poems is Kindness, by Naomy Shibab 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.

For the daylight to reach me, I first have to live here. I must wake up with sorrow until I see the size of the cloth. And when kindness comes to me, my old friend, I get to also know that I live in a world where suffering, experienced fully, begets kindness. It doesn’t negate the suffering. But in my deepest heart, something is redeemed. 

The green of compassion starts to glow from within, allowing my heart to open in the midst of everyday grief.