The Direction of Intention

“It takes the brave to come here,” Shelly said, assuming our spirits come to this planet with the intention to learn and grow. We were discussing life-lessons. Earth school.

20 regularly reminds us that relative to many US citizens we are considered poor but relative to the majority of human beings on the planet, we are wealthy. We have sturdy homes. Heat. Clean water. Abundant access to food. “There’s a reason that so many people want to come here,” he says. Promise. Opportunity. A better life.

It’s all a matter of perspective and perhaps perspective is one of the most important things we learn in earth school. Without it gratitude is out of reach. Without it, empathy is null and void, self-righteousness runs amok.

When I was in my 20’s I worked on a concrete construction crew. It was very hard work. I worked alongside a Mexican man in his 50’s. We shoveled dirt. We hefted heavy equipment. We did not share a common language but early on he recognized I was working foolishly, too hard and too fast. He taught me to pace myself. He taught me to work smarter.

At night I went home to have a hot shower, eat my fill, and sleep in my own bed – while he went to a one bedroom apartment that he shared with 20 other people. He sent most of his wages home.

He was corralled in one of the immigration raids and sent back to Mexico. A few weeks later he was back shoveling by my side; a round trip journey of hundreds of miles, none of it in the comfort of an airplane or air conditioned car. He paid a coyote a king’s ransom to make the trip back to his job.

Can you imagine leaving your home, your family, your known world and with few resources, traveling to a place where you don’t speak the language, to a place where you are not wanted, to a place where you share an apartment with 20 other people – all so your family might eat and perhaps one day live a better life? He was typical. He was not a criminal. He was a father trying to feed his kids.

Earth school. I thought of that man when Shelly said, “It takes the brave to come here.” His lot was impossibly hard yet he whistled all day doing backbreaking work. He smiled. He considered himself fortunate. That man was brave. He was also kind. He was patient. He was living a onerous life that I cannot begin to imagine and doing it with a light heart because he knew that his labor might bring hope and opportunity to his family.

Earth school. I wonder how much courage it will take for us as a nation to one day look in the mirror, to come to grips with the distance between our espoused and lived values?

It takes no courage to exploit. To bully. To betray. To feign righteousness. To sit atop the pyramid while claiming victim-hood. Right now, our nation and its very weak and ill-intended leaders are a study in cowardice.

I suspect hard lessons, if not already here, are coming. Perhaps we will discover what it really means to be brave and, hopefully, we will remember what it is to work for the benefit of others rather than exploit them. Perhaps we will forge a light heart in our walk through fire. Perhaps gratitude and empathy will be in reach. Hopefully, we will remember what it is to be kind.*

*Gratitude, empathy, hope, care for others, inclusion…are all attributes of “woke”. I am woke and increasingly more and more proud of it. In this climate, it will take some courage to stand with the people and institutions being demonized, to speak truth to dedicated maga-sleep-walkers.

read Kerri’s blog about EARTH SCHOOL

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