.

We would like to share a few favorite quotes which guide us through
the darkness that can be part of this Social Impact work.

"Don't turn away.
Keep your gaze on the bandaged place.
That's where the light enters you."
~Rumi



"Darkness cannot drive out darkness,
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate,
only love can do that."
~Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The following poem has held us together "between the regions of kindness"
which can feel so desolate in the challenges we each face in this world.

KINDNESS by Naomi Shihab Nye

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.

From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye.

Please consider supporting these efforts to help us make certain that the
current punitive orientation of the probation system becomes a thing of the past,
paving an emerging future for rehabilitative, regenerative, restorative modes of justice.

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