Seven years ago, I wrote and read a "This I Believe" essay at The Rudyard Kipling. Today, I wrote one for tonight's Finding Our Voices event. What has changed in seven years? Only that I continue to know less and less. I can't wait to see what I write (i.e. learn) in another seven years.
The face of my savior is the face of a young
girl I met in Haiti when I was fifteen years old. Her eyes were warm and
wide-set above a shy, genuine smile, her head crowned with springy dark braids
that glistened in the tropical sun. I knew her for only a few days. I cannot
remember her name, but I will never forget her shining face, nor the way her
voice stirred me as she whispered my name in her beautiful lilting Creole,
calling me to a moment of transcendence that revealed to me the deepest truth
I’ve come to understand in my short life. As we gazed into one another’s eyes,
the barriers of division put in place by the world melted away: we were neither
white nor black, poor nor rich, young nor old. We spoke not the same language,
except that poetry that now danced between us, the wordless expression of
commonality, of shared humanity, of belonging to the world and to one another.
She smiled at me, and I smiled back, knowing that we both understood. In that
moment, I felt that I could sense every heartbeat on the planet, every
pulsation of every creature in the air and the sea, each breath of every tree,
the stars swirling in the cosmos. I would feel this way almost exactly a year
later as I hugged a homeless man at the St. Vincent de Paul shelter right down
the street as he cried that he couldn’t express the gratitude he felt knowing
that someone saw him as more than a bum, a nobody. I sensed this as I fed a
paraplegic man at Active Day two summers ago and he grasped my hand, looked
into my eyes and said, “You are a very beautiful girl,” and I realized he saw
his own beauty reflected in our simple act of taking time to be present to one
another. I am liberated in the same way as I sit quietly under a canopy of
trees or dig my feet into the sand and gaze out across the ocean, recognizing
that I and my sisters and brothers of every species belong to this earth, and
it is all one.
This I believe: we are here for one another.
Dissimilarity is an illusion. We must come to grasp our unity through short
lives lived in a world into which we are seemingly born apart; it is our
deepest and greatest spiritual challenge. Thomas Merton once said, “In the end,
it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.” I am ever
grateful for the gift my Haiti-sister and savior gave to me: a life of
ever-present redemption through relationship, a life lived in reverence of the
oneness that connects us all."
- Mandy Zoeller, "This I Believe"
Essay The Rudyard Kipling, 4 June
2008
~*~
The face of my savior looks back
at me with my own brown eyes and smiles with his father's chin. He came into
the world because his father and I longed to be as close to one another as two
humans can be. He originated in mystery; he grew in secret; all the while, I
felt him as myself. By stretching the most vulnerable places in me so far I did
not think I could hold together, he opened a doorway to the infinite. I did not
hold together. His birth caused me to die...and be born anew.
My body and soul expand as he
grows. My breasts and belly are carved by a tracery of sacrifice and surrender.
My breath, my pulse, my life rhythms no longer belong to me. They never
belonged to me; they were given from an ancient lineage of ancestors who hurt
and bled and birthed and loved. Now, I give to him. Because I carry my son in
my heart, I am reminded each moment that life comes from death comes from life.
His arms around my neck, his breathing "Mama" in my ear - an inhale.
His little feet carrying him away to some new adventure - an exhale. Every day
is an end and a beginning in the story we write on the cosmic tablet of time.
This I believe: only our
children, the Life that comes from and continues beyond us, can save us from
ourselves. Each beguiled giggle, each sharp tear of knowing pain, each wonder
at the complex art of the world unfolding marks a stage in his journey of
becoming something I will never know. My son belongs to a world I cannot
inhabit and can only cultivate in his tending. I have known no greater teacher,
no more humbling master, than the little one who looks at me with my own brown
eyes.
The only response to his lessons
is to change my life. My being is heavier because I cradle the question: What
will his world be like? How can I prepare the way for what he is meant to be?
Loving him has compelled me closer to everyone. In such radical intimacy, our
collective destinies come together in the simple commandment: Hold on to one
another. Walk through the infinite doorway. Give up your life for love.
- Mandy Olivam, "This I Believe"
Essay The Loft, 28
August 2015
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