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.
3 comments
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April 7, 2008 at 11:47 am
maximus mercury
wow – absolutely beautiful and so simply spoken.
I love this line: “Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,”
I actually wonder how much the goal of ‘economic development’ serves humanity. With income & standard of living inequalities widening not only between nations but also within them, it becomes more and more impossible for one to keep faith with one’s neighbours and thus be a harmonious force in society. Sadly, I am beginning to notice that if you’re in such a paradigm, having children does the same thing, by firing up the instinct amass wealth and build small empires for each of your progeny’s well being.
April 7, 2008 at 3:11 pm
VARANGALI
Salam.
MM’s comment got me thinking. The entrenchment of capitalism tends to be associated with two phenomena: overall wealth of the nation increasing in absolute terms, and an increasing divergence of wealth between the rich and the poor. Whether the poor are better off in absolute terms remains debated between champions of free trade and those wary of it.
But does it matter – do we not measure how well off we are in terms of how well off our neighbor is? My mother nowadays speaks of the influx of cash into the Pureland economy, and the social destruction it has wrought. For the first time, public flaunting of wealth is the norm in the upwardly-mobile middle class. Such crass exhibitions of economic well-being (once reserved to the upper crust in their separate neighborhoods) are engendering a desire for “more, more, and more” on the part of the haves, and even more on the part of the have-nots.
My mother also speaks of her childhood where the rich merchant lived on the same street as the local dhobi (clothes launderer), and the social stratification – while ever-present – was tastefully muted. If economic development inevitably erodes extant mores and traditions, then the social crisis engendered by economic development is necessarily a spiritual one. If traditions won’t mute crass exhibitionism of material wealth, will religion not remind us of what is truly important?
April 7, 2008 at 3:35 pm
maximus mercury
@ Varangali: “the social crisis engendered by economic development is necessarily a spiritual one”
exactly.
I’m glad that you intuited what I was hinting at so well. Thanks for taking the time to write it all out! 
In fact, I think in reality, the case might be more extreme. Consumerism, which now has a symbiotic relationship with capitalism, is based precisely on (negative) aspirational tendencies. Indeed, I’ve been reading a spate of newspaper articles (prompted by the recent downturn in the US economy) about aspirational consumption being an explicit target amongst marketers. So, there seems to be almost no question whether economic development will inevitably erode existing social mores. At least in the capitalistic paradigm, economic development *replaces* social values centered on sharing, charity and brotherhood with a more superficial system, where every act, every item can be priced and bought and sold. As you say, this makes a spiritual crisis the inevitable outcome.
I guess the only thing that makes me hold out for more (and not condemn capitalism as a system per se) is that any system can be manipulated towards a more positive outcome. I believe that it takes will power to get there, but just as we cannot give up having children over the risk that having them might turn us all into small tyrants with others, so we cannot give up the basic framework and benefits of economic transactions altogether. We can, however, understand their consequences and put in checks and balances to restrain ourselves from falling prey to them. Indeed, the way I understand Islamic spirituality, it is precisely this challenge of partaking of most things in the earth but recognizing and staying away from the harmful aspects of them that must be the defining feature of Muslim consciousness.