The Path to Kindness

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Edited by Liz Bevilacqua

Art direction and book design by Alethea Morrison

Cover art and illustrations by © Dinara Mirtalipova

Text © 2022 by James Crews except as shown on pages 207–211

Ebook production by Slavica A. Walzl

Ebook version 1.0

April 12, 2022

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Your legacy is every life you touch.

Maya Angelou

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Contents

Foreword

The Practice of Connection

Danusha Laméris, Small Kindnesses

Naomi Shihab Nye, Red Brocade

Shari Altman, Worry Stone for My Grandfather

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Kindness

Reflective Pause: The Soil That Is You

Kai Coggin, Into Wildflower Into Field

Laura Budofsky Wisniewski, A Beginner's Guide To Gardening Alone

Heather Lanier, The Heartbeat of My Unborn Child

Mary Elder Jacobsen, Sponge Bath

Laura Grace Weldon, Most Important Word

James Crews, Only Love

David Van Houten, Breathe

January Gill O'Neil, Elation

Tricia Knoll, My Daughter Meets My White Pine

Julie Cadwallader Staub, Turning

Ingrid Goff-Maidoff, Peace Came Today

Kim Stafford, A Chair by the Creek

Danny Dover, Floodwood Pond

Ted Kooser, Filling the Candles

Mary Ray Goehring, Pinch Pot

Margaret Hasse, Clothing

Angela Narciso Torres, Chore

Reflective Pause: The Sacred Everyday

Twyla M. Hansen, Trying to Pray

Joy Harjo, For Keeps

Barbara Crooker, Sustenance

Ruth Arnison, Twenty Years of Longing

Danusha Laméris, The Heart Is Not

Laura Foley, Learning by Heart

Jacqueline Jules, Billowing Overhead

Penny Harter, Two Meteors

Tom Hennen, Made Visible

Cornelius Eady, A Small Moment

Zoe Higgins, Ode

Donna Hilbert, Credo

James Crews, Self-Care

Reflective Pause: Reassembling the Parts

January Gill O'Neil, Sunday

Laura Grace Weldon, Thursday Morning

Joy Gaines-Friedler, Touch

Heather Swan, On Lightness

José A. Alcantara, Divorce

Susan Moorhead, Shift

Tracy K. Smith, Song

Mark Nepo, Drinking There

Susan Musgrave, More than Seeing

Julia Fehrenbacher, The Most Important Thing

Julia Alvarez, Vain Doubts

Molly Fisk, Before I gained all this weight

Ross Gay, Thank You

Lorna Crozier, Small Lesson

Leah Naomi Green, The Age of Affection

Barbara Crooker, Forsythia

Karen Craigo, Last Scraps of Color in Missouri

Ted Kooser, It Doesn't Take Much

Reflective Pause: Part of It All Again

Ellen Bass, The Thing Is

James Crews, Self-Compassion

Kelli Russell Agodon, Praise

Dorianne Laux, Joy

Jack Ridl, Take Love for Granted

Terri Kirby Erickson, Free Breakfast

Annie Lighthart, Passenger

Christine Stewart-Nuñez, Site Planning

Laura Foley, A Perfect Arc

Michael Simms, The Summer You Learned to Swim

James Crews, The Pool

Joyce Sutphen, Carrying Water to the Field

David Romtvedt, At the Creek

Reflective Pause: Would That Be Heaven?

Michael Kleber-Diggs, Coniferous Fathers

Zeina Azzam, My Father's Hands

Li-Young Lee, Early in the Morning

Terri Kirby Erickson, Night Talks

Julia Alvarez, Love Portions

Kate Duignan, Grandmother

Todd Davis, Heliotropic

Marjorie Saiser, Everybody in the Same House

Lahab Assef Al-Jundi, Hot Tea

Gregory Orr, Morning Song

Annie Lighthart, How to Wake

Alice Wolf Gilborn, Wake Up

Alberto Ríos, Dawn Callers

Reflective Pause: A Welcoming World

Susan Moorhead, First Light

Faith Shearin, My Mother's Van

Ada Limón, The Raincoat

Marjorie Saiser, I Save My Love

Lailah Dainin Shima, In Praise of Dirty Socks

Carolee Bennett, Exactly 299,792,458 Meters Per Second

Kimberly Blaeser, About Standing (in Kinship)

Rebecca Foust, Kinship of Flesh

Chana Bloch, The Joins

Heather Swan, Bowl

Reflective Pause: Where Beauty Is Honed

Natasha Trethewey, Housekeeping

Ted Kooser, Round Robin Letter

Sally Bliumis-Dunn, Mailman

Joseph Millar, Telephone Repairman

David Graham, The News of Love

Linda Hogan, Arctic Night, Lights Across the Sky

Alicia Ostriker, The Dogs at Live Oak Beach, Santa Cruz

Nancy Gordon, Rescue Dog

Dan Butler, New York Downpour

Richard Jones, After Work

Andrea Potos, Abundance to Share with the Birds

Fady Joudah, Mimesis

Rudy Francisco, Mercy

Naomi Shihab Nye, Kindness

Christine Kitano, For the Korean Grandmother on Sunset Boulevard

Reflective Pause: So You Are Here

Paula Gordon Lepp, Gas Station Communion

Annie Lighthart, A Great Wild Goodness

Ellen Rowland, No Small Thing

Jane Hirshfield, I Would Like

Peter Pereira, A Pot of Red Lentils

William Stafford, You Reading This, Be Ready

Connie Wanek, Come In!

Susan Rich, Still Life with Ladder

Alison Luterman, Braiding His Hair

Judith Sornberger, Love in Our Sixties

Susan Rothbard, That New

Susan Zimmerman, Get Close

David Axelrod, The Innermost Chamber of My Home Is Yours

Dave Baldwin, Summer Romance

Anya Silver, Late Summer

Judith Sornberger, Assisted Living

Patricia McKernon Runkle, When You Meet Someone Deep In Grief

Reflective Pause: Here to Listen

Megan Buchanan, Dream Visitation

Phyllis Cole-Dai, Ladder

Michelle Mandolia, The Thing She Loves Most

Marjorie Saiser, Last Day of Kindergarten

Gillian Wegener, Juvie Kid

Emilie Lygren, Make Believe

Brad Aaron Modlin, What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade

Reflective Pause: What You Missed

Dorianne Laux, On the Back Porch

Suzanne Nussey, Lullaby for an Empty Nester

Michelle Wiegers, Moving

Marie Howe, Delivery

Ray Hudson, Unbreakable Clarities

Danusha Laméris, Insha'Allah

Andrea Potos, Where I Might Find Her

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, The Question

Jacqueline Suskin, Future

Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

Poet Biographies

Credits

Acknowledgments

Discover the Joy of Gratitude with More Books from Storey

Share Your Experience!

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Foreword

Most of us spend a lot of time waiting for the right moment, by which I mean the moment when everything is as we want it to be: the laundry done, the faucet fixed, the kids all getting along with each other. We wait for it to rain, or for it to stop raining. For the pandemic to be over. For a baby to be born, or for the kids to leave the house. Wait until we get the promotion, the car, the partner. The conditions we place on our experience of life are endless.

And when I'm struck by a moment of sanity, I notice those conditions falling away, if only for an instant. The house is a mess, and yet, here I am, as I was earlier today, accepting a rose from a woman I don't even know, who, on the small country road where I walk with my husband, ran after me to extend her hand and offer a flower the most brilliant shades of pink and apricot, the petals ruffled like petticoats. "Here!" she said. "For you!" And I don't know what was more beautiful: the rose, or the effort she made to deliver it. For the whole walk, it glowed, a presence, between us.

Meanwhile, wars waged on, the hospital wards remained full, many went to bed hungry. How do we live in the gap between the hoped-for and the real?

We want the world to be less broken. Ourselves to be less broken. To love an unbroken person. But here we are. So many days, it's difficult to carry on. The simple, mammalian pleasure of touch can be the anchor we need. Or witnessing a beloved engaged in an everyday task—like washing dishes, or braiding a child's hair—and there it is, the breath of the sacred.

What we really want to know is, "Am I welcome here? Am I part of the tribe? Do I have a place?" And so, when a stranger offers a flower, it seems possible. Possible that we are meant to be exactly where—and who—we are. That we are meant.

The most memorable moments of my life are often the smallest. Not my college graduation (a blur), but the moment a little girl took the ends of my scarf when I was walking through a crowd at the farmer's market, and began to twirl, inviting me into an impromptu pas de deux. It seemed no one else saw it, and so it felt as if we'd stepped outside of time.

Kindness is not sugar, but salt. A dash of it gives the whole dish flavor. I want to keep remembering, to keep living into these moments and the worlds they contain. To know they are where the world I want to live in is made. That it is made right here, in the heart of the broken, the ordinary. These poems remind me. These voices give shape to that world. They show a way.

Danusha Laméris

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The Practice of Connection

When my husband, Brad, was nineteen years old, he joined the military, hoping to follow in the footsteps of his uncle and grandfather. During his first few weeks at the assigned Air Force base, however, he fell into a deep depression. After a few sessions with the on-base psychologist, he finally realized he was gay and came out. "You know what this means," the psychologist said. It meant that under the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, he was soon discharged from the military and sent home. I can only imagine the shame that followed him to the small town in Vermont where he grew up, and where he told no one for years the real reason he'd left the Air Force.

Brad first shared this story with me not long after we moved in together. "Suicide was a daily option," he said. The idea that this gentle farmer, who uplifts everyone he meets and cares so much for the land, might have ended his life still seems inconceivable to me. Yet what kept him pushing through those dark days, he says, were the small kindnesses offered by neighbors, friends, and customers at the organic farm where he began to work. He would be out for a run or walk, certain that this would be the day he could bear his secret no longer, and someone passing by in their pickup truck would wave, or a friend of the family would stop to ask how he was doing. The weight of his shame became lighter, and he knew he could keep going for another day.

As a lifelong city dweller, I struggled at first with receiving all the caring attention from friends and family in our small community. But after Brad shared his story with me, and then with the whole state of Vermont during his campaign for the US Senate, I soon saw how the daily kindnesses were saving me as well. I felt it when my mother-in-law called if she saw an unfamiliar car in our driveway; when our neighbor Christy would leave mason jars of fresh-pressed apple cider on our side porch; or when my father-in-law would wake early after a nor'easter to plow our driveway. I began to see too that we can create a beloved community like this no matter where we live.

Many of us have faced times when life felt impossible to bear—until a friend texted, or the barista at our favorite coffee shop started chatting with us. Because the sparks of connections like this last for just a few minutes, we might lose heart, believing that what little we can give to each other will have no lasting effect on a world that feels so broken and divided. But my hope is that, as you read through the poems gathered here, you will see kindness not just as a spontaneous act that happens on its own, but as a practice of noticing and naming the many moments of tenderness we witness, give, and receive throughout our days. Over the past year, as I shared these poems with students, family, and friends, I felt profoundly moved by the goodness they seem to prove is our basic human nature. It has become a daily, conscious ritual for me to hold on to as many of my own small kindnesses as possible in what social psychologist Barbara Fredrickson calls "moments of positive resonance."

These poems retrained me to seek out and find connection at a time when so many of us have grown more isolated. Sometimes a simple hello from someone I passed on the trail in the park or a glimmer in the eyes of a grocery-store cashier was enough to restore my faith in humanity for another day. I began to find ways to be kinder to the people in my own life, too, welcoming the task of helping my elderly mother order groceries online, or sending care packages to friends I hadn't seen in months. By showing us all the ways we can still practice being together, these poems encourage us to capture and hold on to the moments that matter the most to us in life. Many of the poems included here also model for us the ways that we might let ourselves surrender more fully to joy, especially in service of self-care. In "Ode," Zoe Higgins uncovers the pleasure of leaving "everything undone" and relieving herself of the constant pressure of the to-do list. And in "Before I gained all this weight," Molly Fisk shares the desire to go back and shake the girl she once was, awakening her to all the beauty she couldn't see around her because of shame and fear.

Because a poem contains just a dose of the author's experience, including the sorrows, pleasures, and struggles all at the same time, it offers us the truest expression of the human condition. If we let it, each poem here can become an invitation to step deeper into our own lives and relationships with others, too. We might read a poem like Christine Kitano's "For the Korean Grandmother on Sunset Boulevard" and remember that we can find pleasure and kinship even in the simplest observation of a stranger to whom we never speak. Or we might take in the motherly sacrifice at the heart of Ada Limón's "The Raincoat" and Faith Shearin's "My Mother's Van," and recall the sacrifices our own loved ones made for us, or that we made for others. These poems also urge us toward a deeper relationship with the natural world so that we notice, as January Gill O'Neil does in "Elation," the way a grove of trees will "claim this space as their own, making the most of what's given them," just like we do. I encourage you to use these poems, Reflective Pauses, and Discussion Questions at the end of the book as companions on your own path. Let a poem bring some memory to the surface or follow the call of an opening line or image to some truth of your own, whether you write it down or share it with someone you trust.

Poetry is an ideal tool in times of uncertainty and change in our lives because it grounds us in the now, opening our hearts and minds to the worlds outside and within. Please feel free to share the poems that move you with family and friends, allowing these deeply felt pieces to bring us all closer together until we see, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put it so well, that we are all "caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." Perhaps that's why, when my husband and I take our daily walks on the roads around our house, we make a point of waving and smiling at every person and every car we pass. We both know all too well that a simple gesture of welcome might change someone's day and might even save their life.

James Crews

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Danusha Laméris Small Kindnesses

I've been thinking about the way, when you walk

down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs