Being Kind...

Oh, Shanti-towners...this one goes out to you...

Whether you are a reader of this blog, or just a member of this community because I know you and love you, or even if I don't know you, but still love you...this goes out to you.

Ahem.

Please, for me, Shanti-towners: Please be kind to yourself today.

If you can't do it for yourself, if your own feelings don't quite matter enough to you today, for whatever reason, then please just do it for me.

Please, for me, treat yourself the way I know you treat other people.

Treat yourself with the gentleness and soft-eyes and ready smiles with which you would greet even a perfect stranger if he or she happened to come to your home.

Does a stranger deserve more than your own heart and mind and insides?  Open the door for yourself, beckon yourself in, offer yourself a glass of water.  Take notice of the small things about you that you like...the crinkles of your eyes or the color of your hair or the way your hands move when you speak.  Take notice and appreciate.  If not for you, then for me!

Be sweet to yourself.  Trust only the feeling of sweetness.  I will say that again--trust only the feeling of sweetness, because do you know what TRUTH feels like, as it ripples across your insides?  It feels like sweetness.  That's how you tell truth from fiction.  Truth feels like a drink of clear spring water and fiction feels like chewing on glass.  It's not hard to tell the difference.  But if you won't take your own word for it...take mine.

Be sweet to yourself today, for me.  And if you can't do it for yourself, and you can't do it for me, then think of all the people in your life who love you and need you at your best.  NOT at your thinnest, NOT at your most successful, NOT at your richest, but at your best.  Think of how much you will serve them with your own open-hearted wide-armed-ness and then buck up and be nice to yourself...for them.

Please, Shanti-towners, for me, show yourself true kindness today.  Not the kindness of an owner for a pet or a stranger for one she deems less fortunate--love yourself like you would love your own child, love yourself how your parents love you (or how you wish they did), how you adore your lover (or the dream of one), how you love your friends, your idols, your teachers, your inspirations--shower yourself with love today.  Because you need it, and the world needs, and I can not think of a single good reason why you shouldn't have it. 

So, Shanti-towners, do me this one favor, won't you?  Throw out everything that doesn't make your blood slow, your heart warm and your head quiet, and just be nice to yourself.  Because you're my friend, and I don't take kindly to people who aren't nice to my friends...

Kindness, by Naomi Shihab Nye

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.