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On a beautiful December day in 2008 I lost my life’s savings. My loss was not unique, thousands of us were watching our money disappear - either in one fell swoop as mine did, or drop by painstaking drop. What saved my life, however, was a poem.
In August and September I had watched with the rest of the world as the stock market careened like a dying beast. My life’s savings had shrunk by a third within a few weeks and seemed headed for oblivion.
I turned to a close friend who had all her money in a stable fund. Even now, as my nest egg was turning into a gumball, hers was slowly, surely continuing to grow. Apparently the fund was invested with some Wall Street wizard who had figured out how to make money when the rest of the world was losing it. Though her fund was closed, she happened to know of another - with the optimistic name of “Starlight” - that was invested with the same guy.
On October 2nd I left the check, enclosed in a greeting card sporting happy, hopeful fish on the front and a note of thanks inside, with Starlight’s secretary. I felt lighthearted. I went across the street and bought an expensive sweatshirt with a faux fur collar in an upscale store I would never have entered a week earlier.
Two months later, the friend who had connected me with the fund left a message on my voicemail: “Bernard Madoff was arrested today. The fund was a fraud. We’ve lost everything.”
It turned out that Mr. Madoff, who was arrested for the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, was the secret of Starlight’s twinkle. The fund had been 100% invested with him. And now it was 100% lost. Or, to be more accurate, stolen.
“To replay this message press 1, to save it press 9, to erase it press 7, for more options press 0,” the voicemail lady was saying over and over into my ear. I sat down on the floor (it seemed the only appropriate place to land given the drama of the moment), and pressed 1.
I listened to the message a second, then a third time. My hands were shaking, I could hear the pumping of my heart, but I felt weirdly numb. Without a clue what to do or who to call, I sat on the rug frozen. The phone dangled from my fingers like a murder weapon found at the scene of the crime.
Then the strangest thing began to happen. The words of a poem I’d heard ages ago, called “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye, began to play in my mind. I didn’t choose it. The poem seemed to choose me. It was like the part in a movie where suddenly the noise of the scene fades into the background and all you hear is the thunderous throb of the protagonist’s heartbeat over a kind of otherworldly hum. In my case the hum was there, but it was the lines of this poem that pulsed over it:
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things.
I hit replay once more. But louder than the voice on the machine was a fragment of the next line of the poem. Something about the future dissolving “like salt in a weakened broth.” Behind the pounding in my head I heard myself thinking, Oh, I get it, “a weakened broth.” You add salt to it because you don’t have enough money for the real ingredients. I had never understood that line before.
Nothing seemed to matter but looking up the next lines of the poem. I tried to reason with myself: there was so much more to worry about than the second stanza of “Kindness!” Googling a poem at a time like this seemed crazy. Look up a lawyer, an accountant, even a professional assassin (just kidding), but not a poem. |
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Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised at the poem’s sudden appearance. For several years I had been writing and teaching about how poetry, our most ancient form of prayer, can cause profound shifts of consciousness when read, spoken aloud or heard. In fact, I had just finished writing a book on the healing power of poetry. There was even a chapter about people all over the world who had turned to poems in the direst of circumstances - a suicidal teenager, Sunnis and Shiites on the bombed-out streets of Baghdad, a grief-stricken woman after her brother’s suicide, and many more.
Maybe this crisis was some kind of final exam in my own teachings? If it was, I had definitely failed the test. In the moment of that fateful message, poetry was about the last place I thought to turn. It was almost as if “Kindness” had flown in on some kind of deus ex machina to say, “It’s clear you don’t have a clue how to handle this, so I’m going to take over your mind and show you what really matters right now.” If it hadn’t, I might still be sitting on that rug, paralyzed.
In the frenzy of days that followed - full indeed of lawyers and accountants, sleepless nights, hours of obsessively Googling “Madoff” as if an answer might somehow rise up out of the morass of gossip - “Kindness” was my lifeline. The images in the poem - an Indian dead on the side of the road who “could be you,” a cloth of sorrow that wraps round the planet, a breed of kindness that “lifts its head from the crowd of the world” in the face of the deepest loss - opened the tight fist of my own little drama to the constant awareness that I was not alone.
I don’t know how I would have navigated this loss without “Kindness” to guide me. Even now, almost a year later, occasional floods of grief rush in without warning - for the life I thought I’d be living, the home I may never be able to own, the financial support I’d planned to give to people and causes I love. I still have no idea if I’ll have money for food and shelter when I’m 64, or even in six months. But because of the constant guidance of Nye’s poem, when the wave of loss swallows me, I emerge with my voice more tender, my eyes more open, and a deeper well of kindness in my heart.
Kim Rosen is the author of Saved By a Poem: The Transformative Power of Poetry (Hay House, October 2009). She is an award-winning poet, spoken word artist, healer, and teacher of Self-Inquiry. Naomi Shihab Nye's poem can be found in her book, Words Under the Words (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1995).
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