I discovered Naomi when I was writing something on the need for kindness to fill our lives, and a friend said “There’s nothing new to be said. Naomi Shihab Nye has said it all in her poem Kindness.” It was a poem which moved me beyond words. The first four lines - much like the rest of the poem - still moves in me like an ocean -
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
I heard her interview with Krista Tippett in On Being, where she talks about her life, this iconic poem, and so much more. She became mine.
I have been reading her book Voices in the Air, and I don’t want it to end. This is what she writes in just the foreword about listening -
Poet Galway Kinnell said, “To me, poetry is someone standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”
William Stafford, great twentieth-century American poet and teacher, tireless encourager of dialogue and nonviolence, is still speaking in the slant shadows falling across the path. If we only knew how to listen better, he said, even the grasses by the roadsides could help us live our lives. They’re flexible, for one. What might he say about our current moments in history? Would he be surprised by the divisive rhetoric, mysterious backsliding? Or not surprised at all?
When I see a highway sign, “No Right Turn onto Whirlwind Drive”—Stafford comes to mind. He carried a decisive calm.
Recently, when I had the honor of visiting Yokohama International School in Japan to conduct poetry workshops, student Juna Hewitt taught me an important word—Yutori—“life-space.” She listed various interpretations for its meaning—arriving early, so you don’t have to rush. Giving yourself room to make a mistake. Starting a diet, but not beating yourself up if you eat a cookie after you started it. Giving yourself the possibility of succeeding. (Several boys in another class defined the word as when the cord for your phone is long enough to reach the wall socket.) Juna said she felt that reading and writing poetry gives us more yutori—a place to stand back to contemplate what we are living and experiencing. More spaciousness in being, more room in which to listen.
I love this. It was the best word I learned all year.
Perhaps we have more voices in the air now—on TV, in our phones and computers and little saved videos—but are we able to hear them as well? Are these the voices we really need? Is our listening life-space deep enough? Can we tell ourselves when we need to walk away from chatter, turn it off entirely for half a day, or a full day, or a whole weekend, ease into a realm of something slower, but more tangible?
Can we go outside and listen?
But how do we find our ways home? Continually, regularly? With so much vying for our attention, how do we listen better? Reminding ourselves of what we love feels helpful. Walking outside—it’s as quiet as it ever was. The birds still communicate without any help from us. In that deep quietude, doesn’t the air, and the memory, feel more full of voices? If we slow down and intentionally practice listening, calming our own clatter, maybe we hear those voices better. They live on in us. Take a break from multitasking. Although many of us are no longer sitting on rocks in deserts watching camels, sheep, and goats heading out to pasture, we could sit. In a porch swing? On the front steps? In a library or coffee shop? On a park bench? Quiet inspiration may be as necessary as food, water, and shelter. Try giving yourself regular times a day for reading and thinking—even if just for a minute or two. Mindfulness, many agree, is profoundly encouraged by regular practice. A different sort of calm begins feeling like the true atmosphere behind everything else. If you’re an “I read before I go to sleep” sort of person, why not add a little more I-just-got-home-from-school-or-work reading?
In the modern world, we deserve to wind down. Or perhaps some morning reading, to launch yourself ? How long does it take to read a poem? Slowing to a more gracious pacing—trying not to hurry or feel overwhelmed—inch by inch—one thought at a time—can be a deeply helpful mantra. It’s a gift we give our own minds.
This is a poem from the book -
She writes to me—
I can’t sleep because I’m seventeen
Sometimes I lie awake thinking
I didn’t even clean my room yet
And soon I will be twenty-five
And a failure
And when I am fifty—oh!
I write her back
Slowly slow
Clean one drawer
Arrange words on a page
Let them find one another
Find you
Trust they might know something
You aren’t living the whole thing
At once
That’s what a minute said to an hour
Without me you are nothing
And here’s the poem which I recited in the video, with an angelic cherub in my home. It’s a poem which fills my heart.
So Much Happiness
It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.
But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records . . .
Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.
How couldn’t I write a poem featuring Naomi?
So Much Happiness