The following is from David Whyte’s collection Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. I highly recommend it.
is what we almost always are: close to happiness, close to another, close to leaving, close to tears, close to God, close to losing faith, close to being done, close to saying something, or close to success, and even, with the greatest sense of satisfaction, close to giving the whole thing up.
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.
– Naomi Shihab Nye
Austin Kleon wrote a great column this week on being able to play the fool – not in order to build intestinal fortitude but to live a full life. Enjoy…
“It’s simple,” writes George Leonard in the “The Master and the Fool,” the epilogue of his book Mastery, “To be a learner, you’ve got to be willing to be a fool.”
“By fool, to be clear, I don’t mean a stupid, unthinking person, but one with the spirit of the medieval fool, the court jester, the carefree fool in the tarot deck who bears the awesome number zero, signifying the fertile void from which all creation springs, the state of emptiness that allows new things to come into being.”
“Consider for a moment,” he continues, “the learnings in life you’ve forfeited because your parents, your peers, your school, your society, have not allowed you to be playful, free, and foolish in the learning process.”
If you share a home with anybody long enough, eventually, you will be revealed to be the fool that you are. “Everybody plays the fool sometime / There’s no exception to the rule.” I think a happy home is one in which each member’s individual foolishness is tolerated, maybe even encouraged and developed, but, no matter what, loved. We all live with fools, and we must “suffer them gladly” in order to let them grow. And if we want to grow, we, too, must learn to play the fool, and suffer ourselves gladly.
In his book Charles Dickens, G.K. Chesterton writes:
“There is an apostolic injunction to suffer fools gladly. We always lay the stress on the word ‘suffer,’ and interpret the passage as one urging resignation. It might be better, perhaps, to lay the stress upon the word ‘gladly,’ and make our familiarity with fools a delight, and almost a dissipation. Nor is it necessary that our pleasure in fools (or at least in great and godlike fools) should be merely satiric or cruel. The great fool is he in whom we cannot tell which is the conscious and which the unconscious humour; we laugh with him and laugh at him at the same time. An obvious instance is that of ordinary and happy marriage. A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool. This largeness, this grossness and gorgeousness of folly is the thing which we all find about those with whom we are in intimate contact; and it is the one enduring basis of affection, and even of respect.”
Emphasis mine. I love this passage, and I’ve been thinking about it for days. My own marriage is a comedy of survival, one of shared jokes and shared foolishness. My wife has let me be the fool I am to learn what I need to learn.
No one said we couldn’t or shouldn’t go outside during Covid, but many of us forget we are free to roam in nature. Instead, we hole up with technology. What is forgetting about “outside” all about, anyway?
When watching the Green Renaissance video this week I was surprised to actually feel my feet when he mentioned being barefoot outside. It was so strange to be sitting inside and feel the bottoms of my barefeet outside. But it was also really strange to SMELL dirt!
The following is one in a series of shared stories Believer Magazine recently ran about “newfound attachments” since Covid. They are charming and to the bone. Yes, my grandmother saved the dough, and, yes, we saved tin foil until it cracked and no longer held together.
If enough people read this Starbucks could, literally, lose business. Why? Alicia Dantico is right!
I am including the link, here, if you want to read a few more of the stories. The one about the Christmas tree is charming.
Writer James Baldwin on hate as a defense mechanism:
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