Kindness

Naomi Shihab Nye, 1952

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.

Rexburg, Idaho

He wore black 501 levis, his wallet in one back pocket and his tobacco in the other. He owned his own print shop in a small mormon town, when printers were galvanized hunks of metal with levers and weights, painted army green. He was abused as a child, adopted by two widows who married one another and wanted to raise another child. His adopted mother was Maxine, whose cookies I can still taste fresh out of the oven when we came running through her door. We rode our bikes everywhere in that little town. Grandma Maxine, who would greet us with all smiles and the warmth of the sun, and scold her son later on for not knowing where we were.

Michaela Kukovicova

"Sometimes I open a book that’s so beautiful I have to shut it because it hurts me. I can’t stand it. It’s like, Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! This is going to drive me into my own heart. A day or two days later I’m saying, All right, and I just surrender to it: Do it to me. Go ahead. I want it. I don’t want it. I want it. I don’t want it.” 

-Marie Howe

       
One of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, spent much of her young adulthood in the solitude of nature,  in the intimate company of authors she loved. Discovering her writing opened up rivers in me that had been stopped up for years. I know it when I hear it, the way a title can communicate the rhythm of a writer's heart. Some writers literally do nothing for me, the ones that hide behind their wit especially.  So many stories get lost in the writer's inability to go far enough or deep enough, and I can sympathize. 


Wendy Mnooken, a talented poet that lives in Boston, read some of my poems a while back, and told me I had a lot of material to work with, that my question was where and how to enter my story.  A poem I wrote about sitting in church with my mother, she aptly caught the moment where instead of moving further into where the pain was I took the poem elsewhere.  I took the poem to a café and sat for two hours, trying to approach that wound and could not write another word. Sometimes I wonder, if words will not cheapen the beauty of my survival.  


This is why I have not been able to finish two of my favorite author's great works.  Marilynn Robinson's books Gilead and Housekeeping. Her ability to capture a spiritual realm in her imagery and in her metaphors is unmatched in my reading.  I could feel the beating of her characters' chests, the very cold in the bodies of the young girls whose father was deep in the Idaho lake where they lived.  Writers who pay attention to their own hearts and to the pulse of the world are what stab me so deeply that sometimes I don't know if I will survive the truth they know.  Writing so beautiful that I feel grief at the prospect of finishing the work, especially when I sense that a character is going to die.  


Terry Tempest Williams, who changed my life. I read the title "When Women Were Birds," and gasped.  Holding the book close to my chest, I opened it slowly, read the first paragraph about her mother, and to my astonishment discovered she was a woman of my own tribe, a daughter of an Pipeline builder in Utah, a woman who with her voice has preserved acres and acres of sacred canyonlands.  A writer with a quiet and stunning power to stand up to the leadership of the LDS church without standing down to threat or reprisal. 


My mother wrote 100 pages of memoir when I was in high school.  She was far into the entangled bramble of a mental illness diagnosis, that I feel did her and our family more harm than help. I do not need a degree in psychology (which I have), nor extensive training in diagnosis (which I am undergoing), to know that repressed memories can turn into monsters that can take on a life of their own. Her memories are mysteries to me, hard to comprehend and even more difficult to corroborate because she was so young. The abuse that was real was warped by a tale her therapist spun with her that both rewarded my mother's narcissim and excused her own abusive behaviors.   I believe her mother was selfish and cruel, and when I read some pages of my mother's writing, one thing that was certain was the darkness of her world, the pain thick and the lies searing with poison.  My mother will always be something of a caged tiger to me, held back by her devotion to what is right, but always capable of a ferocity that she is neither willing or capable of controlling. I fear her retaliation if I speak the truth, I really do. And there is the dilemma of my writing, which I legitimately love to do for its own sake.  I wonder sometimes if my skill is a match for the complexity of my history, if my own heart can handle the beat down of creating a work that liberates myself and others.  


Poets I aspire write like: Marie Howe, Louis Gluck, Rupi Kaar, have approached the secrets you are not supposed to tell in ways that feel like art and not just expose.  I am trying to avoid the kind of attention that would turn me into a meme, while not letting the stories of my life be lost in some literary enclave. So much of my battle to write is the battle of my life, to believe that my voice matters, to say the dangerous things I need to say.