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 gaze at 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.
From Jack: A quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson in “The American Scholar”: “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.”
Jon Kabat-Zinn has been a pioneer in bringing mindfulness techniques into the mainstream of medical practice to work with stress, pain and illness. You can read an overview of this work 
Tara Brach is a beloved teacher of meditation in the Vispassana or Insight tradition, and founder of the Insight Meditation Center in Washington D.C. Her book Radical Acceptance is a guide to awakening from the trance of unworthiness. She offers a rich archive of meditations and talks on her website,