a rant

Again, another foto unrelated to the post, except that I felt about the same then as I do now.

I have a lot to be thankful for this year. Thanksgiving was relaxing and restful. Negative thinking seeps in, though, and I focus on all that I don't want to have. It has been about six weeks that I have been fighting off the current malaise. It's frustrating to have to decide each day what I will use my energy to do and what will have to wait. The Spoon Theory describes it more eloquently than I can. 

I'm grateful to not be in the bottom of a canyon wondering if I will have enough strength to climb out. Just one more week until I finish a big project. I hope I can make it.

/rant

climb

This picture makes me happy, so I posted.

Life keeps changing. I've given up trying even to pretend to have a handle on it. It feels messy and unpleasant and draining. But then, just for a moment, I realize, this is it. A million little lessons all around me, if I can only be still and listen.

"Why must we wait for the body to speak before we hear what we really need?"
-Terry Tempest Williams

I wanted to share something that I heard today. It brought a tear to my eye and gratitude to my heart.

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.

-Naomi Shihab Nye