I am on week 6 of The Artist’s Way and I decided that I will complete this journey before I go back to my staple musing posts/essays/poems original content.

Instead, I will continue to share my journey with you, and bring you more of the work that influences me. Today’s share is kindness wrapped in a poem by Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye. She is incredible, and reading her words makes me a better human and poet.

Sunday Gratitude 🙏

Today I am so grateful to have met Staci Haynes and found out about her book The Politics of Trauma, which is helping me go through a very rough emotional time.

This book is helping me learn about the incredible healing power of Somatics, and has reconnected me back to my body, my integrity, and my deeply wounded activist but oppressed Self. Thank you Staci! (on behalf of the whole world)

Expect a Musing essay on Somatics and this book once I am done reading (and healing).

The Artist's Way Week 6

✍️ I continue my weird and fulfilling journey to become a fantastic writer in 10 years…day in and day out.

Morning Pages ✅

Keep making them happen. They are automatic at this point. They take 20-45 minutes depending on how I am feeling. I don’t mind the commitment at all.

Emotions keep coming up- mostly anger and deep, deep sadness for me.

I let them pass by screaming and crying. I feel better, and I revisit the next morning. This has become my most significant practice.

Join me on habitshare and let’s keep each other accountable! Download it, add me (shaker118@gmail.com) and share your habits with me.

Artist's Date ✅:

They are getting crazier and crazier. I love them.

Craft Updates ✅

• Revising my book of poems around heart break. Almost done and confident that this will become my first published work. More soon.

• Gumpcast is on its slow but steady way, recording episode 7 this week and building the team and capacity to bring you Season 2. Thrilled about this.

• The novel is also taking shape, I feel much more comfortable with taking out characters and scenes that do no make sense. It feels like killing my own children, but I guess that is the price I will have to pay. It is the greatest act of letting go, (helpful in other aspects of life too).

Without further Ado…Ladies and Gentlemen….I leave you today with:

Kindness
by Naomi Shihab Nye - 1952-

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 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.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Daaaaayumn girl…This poem speaks so much to me these days.

She is becoming a huge source of influence on my work alongside Mr. Bukowski, Khalil Gibran, Emily Dickenson and Rumi. More from these giants in the upcoming posts.

Keep on keeping on and share this with a friend. Just one friend, I promise I’ll take good care of them every Sunday.

✌️+ ❤️

Omar

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See you in the stars, my friend. May you fall and land on your purpose and in complete alignment with you truly are.