Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

Written By Cristy

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 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 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

Cristy

Hola, Piyali, Hello! I am a queer Latina Chicana mestiza ((detribalized Caxcan/ Iberian colonial) mother, storyteller and decolonial somatic psychotherapist licensed in California with fourteen years of clinical experience in the field of depth psychology. My private practice, Imaginal Therapy + Sacred Arts, centers soul care and offers ketamine journeys. I am a graduate of Loyola Marymount University, Pacifica Graduate Institute and the Hakomi Institute of California. I specialize in intergenerational trauma, healing the family soul for personal and cultural transformation, and psychedelic/entheogen integration. I work with clients in a holistic approach to connect to collective wisdom through imagination, intuition, mindfulness, embodiment, dreamwork and creative expression. My treatment focus is on relationship, cultural wounds, trauma resolution, ancestral lineage repair, animist parenting, kinship ethics, and reconnecting to the sacred.

I am a certified Ancestral Lineage Healing practitioner and also an initiated serpent medicine keeper and priestess in sacred arts with 8 years of training. As a ritualist and coach, I offer virtual mentoring and circles globally. I am steeped in my traditions, mythology, cultura and roots, originally from the villages of Juchipila, Zac, Mexico, born and raised in Tongva lands, Los Angeles, residing on Nisenan land, Sacramento. My lineage gifts are in storytelling, dignity, sweetness, relating to the spirit magic of bee, deer, maize, and cacao. I have been given the medicine name, Cloud Serpent. I am honored to reclaim reverence for my mother mountain, Tlachialoyantepec, a sacred site. I hold a vow with my people to live the repair, in service of the anima, mundi, the world soul.

https://imaginaltherapy@gmail.com
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