He Rides A Bike Now

My heart hurts a little every time he rides away.  He is growing up, and Joy & Loss are constant bedfellows...
i don't even want to think about when he goes to kindergarten.
Somebody please hold me.

Sometimes My Heart Feels Like This

Kindness

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 hold in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between 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

Life Will Break You - by Louise Erdich

Life will break you.
Nobody can protect you from that,
and living alone won’t
either
for solitude will also break you
with its yearning.

You have to love.
You have to feel.

It is the reason you are here on earth.

You are here to risk your heart.
You are here to be swallowed up.

And when it happens
that you are broken
or betrayed
or left
or hurt
or death brushes near

Let yourself sit
by an apple tree and
listen
to the apples
falling all around you in heaps

wasting their sweetness.

Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.