EILEEN ADLER

Naomi Shihab Nye, born in 1952, living in San Antonio, describes herself as self-professed “wandering poet.” Today she’s the Young People’s Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation, also a professor of creative writing at Texas State University. She told Krista Tippet she was six years old when she started writing her own poems, and seven when she started sending them out. It was during this time she made “petite discoveries,” loving that phrase.

Kindness is not the same as being nice or polite, it is really that moment when we must rise above our knee-jerk reaction maybe provoked by frustration, fear, anger, sorrow, or even despair.

Naomi Shihab Nye Reads Her Poem 'Kindness' - here

As care partners, we may need to ask ourselves: Where is our kindness? Who is hard to love just now? Me? And, if on the chance that it is you who is struggling, how can you turn things around for the better? Adding that to "know what kindness really is," first "you must lose things."

Kindness . . . Kindness changes everything.

Life Lesson: Naomi Shihab Nye encourages us to write things down believing that once the words are written, we feel better, even if what you have written was something sad or hard. Stand back and ask yourself, “what do I do now?” The act of writing restores your faith, preserves you, energizes you just by the physical act of writing as you discover what you notice and what brings importance to your life.

Naomi Shihab Nye - Krista Tippet On Being Podcast – March 4, 2021 - Original Air Date - July 28, 2016