On Mother's Day, "The Tender Gravity of Kindness"

Dear Friends and Family,

This letter, coming to you on Mother’s Day, comes with tenderness.

This day we celebrate Mother is, for so many, a day of remembrance.

I admit I circled round and round this letter. I wrote a few drafts and tossed them aside. In the end, I come to you with words not my own but words that come to me all the same every Mother’s Day.

Perhaps, it is because the first time I heard these words the year my mother died, they came as if she was giving me a good talking to about life . . . and the loss of her and other losses, too. I would come to understand "the tender gravity of kindness” on my own. In truth, we all must. We can only hope we do.

Mother’s Day has always been about remembrance. We may date the day back to May 12, 1907 when Anna Jarvis honored her deceased mother. In truth, though, the holiday began some thirty-five years or more prior. Mothers were mourning the loss of their sons to the ravages of the American Civil War. Mothers’ Day was their outcry. This day is borne of brokenheartedness.

Maybe we come a little closer to the tenderness stirred in the poem that follows.

With love,

Renée

PS: Next week, along with weekly reflections, I’ll share your responses to the recent survey and more. If you wish to order a bottle of CURAlive, email me: renee@reneeeliphd.substack.com.

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 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.

~Naomi Shihab Nye, Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (in public domain)