Hello, friends.

I am returning to a more regular schedule of sharing this practice, and hope to be on a fully functioning daily schedule of 8:30 AM PST, Monday through Friday, next week. This return from a break, wherein I was intentionally closing inward and not sharing publicly or with many people at all, has been wonderful as well as uncomfortable.

Discomfort is not failure.

We are often uncomfortable because we are finding new ways of feeling and responding, ways with which we are unfamiliar. This is good! This opens us to receive and to give in a way that we have not yet in our relationships, and this is a deepening, not a marker of a lessening. Explore that discomfort, and find the new shape of your growth.

Today, we practice kindness. Poet and Cellist Daniel Austin Sperry shares his reading of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, Kindness. Click his name to go to his website.

Kindness Naomi Shihab Nye 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. From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye.

Thanks for being here today.

All In Love,

Michael