A Tibetan Heart

I was gone just 3 weeks, but I lived a lifetime during those 3 weeks and returned home with peacefulness rooting from the center of my core.  My days were filled with getting reacquainted with old friends, meeting new friends, monasteries, Tibetan farmhouses, monks, festivals, children, hard work, and momos.  Returning to Tibet feels like coming home.  Yet, being in Tibet is a paradox. It is the most spiritual of all places, but the fear of oppression is palpable...

After the Chinese invasion, more than 6,000 monasteries were destroyed in Tibet. 

I didn’t need to speak Mandarin to understand the cab driver was belittling my friend in the front seat, who had quickly become like a sister to me.  Outrage began to rise through me, but I resisted the urge to step in and say something.  I sat silently, not because I couldn’t speak the language; I was confident I could convey my indignation with just the tone of my voice.  Instead, I sat silently because the law was not on our side. I felt like I was bound and gagged in the backseat.  Confronting the cab driver would only create problems for my friend.  

She looked over her shoulder with an apologetic expression and explained, the driver took us to the wrong destination and insisted it was her mistake.  First he told her, “you minorities shouldn’t take cabs...you should get out and catch the bus because you don’t have the money to pay for this,” insinuating my friend was trying to manipulate the driver to avoid paying for the cab ride.  After speaking with the person working at the front desk of our hotel, who gave him the same directions as did my friend, the driver said, “it’s your tones...you don’t speak clearly enough. I couldn’t understand you.”  In the same breath he insisted she would have to pay the full fare, more than double the rate it would have otherwise cost because it was her fault he got lost.

   

It is estimated that one million Tibetans have died as a result of the Chinese occupation, through imprisonment, torture and executions. 

When we arrived at or hotel, we got out of the taxi and my friend paid the driver.  I offered to cover the fare, but she wouldn’t allow this, explaining she would get reimbursed by the NGO that employs her.  I was frustrated and uncomfortable with my inherent helplessness.  I am not accustomed to being a bystander when witnessing racism. I asked my friend how she copes with being passive and silent while encountering prejudice daily.  I was trying to understand another way.  My friend surprised me by saying, “this makes me so angry.”  I had not previously heard my Tibetan friends discuss their anger.  They all seem so good at letting go of attachment, I just assumed they had mastered not feeling angry.  My friend explained that in spite of her anger, she finds compassion for the Chinese cab driver because reacting to him will not create change, particularly in China’s political climate. 

She went on to tell me a story from her childhood about her mother, who she described as “hot headed.”  Her mother was gathering water in a bucket when a Chinese man walked by kicked the bucket over.  Her mother was so angered by this, she went to his home and confronted the man in front of his family.  The man called the police and she was arrested.  My friend learned at an early age the consequences of standing up for her rights in China.  She admitted she doesn’t want to stay “here,” in Chengdu.  She would rather return to her home in Lhasa to be with her mother; in a place that feels more welcoming, but for now she says she is gaining experience.

My friend has travelled a great distance for this "experience."  She walked across the Himalayas at age 8 to get an education in India. She went back to Tibet by walking across the Himalayas again at 18, and she was locked up after getting caught crossing the boarder home.  Yet along the way she did not lose her Tibetan heart.

“It is lack of love for ourselves that inhibits our compassion toward others.  If we make friends with ourselves, then there is no obstacle to opening our hearts and minds to others.”

In the Company of Glaciers

“A Man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificant by and by.”     ~Mark Twain

I have always felt a sense of freedom and peace in wide open spaces.  It is here, walking along jagged peaks and soaking up orange sunsets in the desert where I feel most alive.  Yet, I struggle to think of myself a serious adventurer.  Living in Boulder, where so many professional, outdoor athletes live or pass through, I feel like I am simply dipping my toes into the outdoors.  I am surrounded by people who climb big walls and even bigger mountains for a living.  There is no shortage of inspiration and I am learning to find my place in this expansive world of adventure.  Exploring Iceland brought me one step closer to feeling like a true explorer.

Iceland is the yin and yang of fire and ice.  Sparkling glaciers tower over black volcanic rock and everything else seems to fade away.  Hiking the trail that snaked around the moraine, the gravity of the glacier pulled me closer so I could hear the history of the earth unfolding.  As we approached, David wanted to get on the glacier and climb around.  I so deeply wanted to take the risk and feel what it’s like to walk with millions of years of history beneath me but I have this innate cautiousness that I battle more often than I’d like.  

I don’t have any mountaineering experience and the inherent danger of ice and crevasses intimidates me.  As we grew closer, we put on our micro-spikes and David immediately ran out onto the frozen lake in front the the glacier and I pulled out my camera.  While I was shooting I felt conflicted about wanting to be out there too and feeling afraid of being in the center of a presumably frozen glacial lake.  With David’s encouragement, the ice won.  The first couple of steps were nerve-wracking, the ice was fragile and I could hear it crackling under my feet; but with each step my confidence grew and the risk was outweighed by how exhilarated I felt.  I’m not sure which felt more liberating, being on the ice or breaking free of my tendency to be cautious.

photo by David Garcia

Climbing onto the glacier, I felt grounded and connected to the universe in a way I have only known a few times in my life.  I felt roots growing through my feet and sinking deep beneath me. I wanted to go everywhere and nowhere.  Walking around the base of the glacier, I quickly found impermanence in the midst of false certainty when my left leg, and then my right let went through the ice and plunged into frigid water.  Quicker than my brain could process, with camera in hand, I caught myself on the edge of the ice and was standing upright, unharmed....wet, and with a throbbing shin, but otherwise unharmed.  I don’t know how I pulled myself up. I’ve replayed it again and again in my mind, but I can’t recall the details.  I just know for the first time in my life I learned that I do, in fact, have survival instincts and this was somehow relieving.  I feel braver, less fragile knowing I don’t always have to rely on others to keep me safe.  Thanks to the adrenaline pumping through me and wool long-underwear, we were able to continue our exploration. 

Walking amidst ice so turquoise, it looked like the frozen Caribbean sea, I felt the importance of my insignificance.  Tip-toeing to the edge of a crevasse I could have disappeared into the infinite darkness while standing on what seemed like forever.  The wilderness has a way of reminding me of the impermanence of everything so that I remember to hold what I love most, a little closer, for as long as I can.

“No art can reproduce such colors as the deep blue of the iceberg.”  ~Robert Falcon Scott

Weightless

"Standing still is never an option so long as inequities remain 

embedded in the very fabric of the culture.”     Tim Wise

One of the aspects I most love about working with cityWILD is the opportunity to work with young people and their families for multiple years. Imagine the kind of transformation that can occur between the ages of 11 and 18. This month I celebrate 7 years of working with cityWILD and during this time I have been given the gift of supporting some of the most extraordinary young people as they defeat odds to rise above obstacles most people in my life can’t imagine.  I have been working in the field of social work for more than 20 years.  The barriers that go hand in hand with poverty are painfully familiar to me, but not because I know anything about what it feels like to walk barefoot on the hot coals.  Rather, because I have witnessed the impacts of poverty, oppression, and racism over and over again. Yet, even after 20 years I am still learning how much I don’t know.

Not long ago I stopped into a bookstore, the kind with coffee and couches that invite people to linger while browsing the aisles and flipping through magazines. These kind of bookstores are one of the places where I feel most at peace.  On this occasion, I had an 17 year old student with me and unbeknownst to me, this was the first time this student had ever been inside of a bookstore.  As we walked through, it became apparent the student didn’t know such a place existed.  As we talked, the student had no idea people could take books off the shelves and sit down to read or that it would be fine to hang out for the afternoon and study without buying anything.  As much as I think about inequity, it had never occurred to me that someone could grow up 2 miles from where I was living and not know what a book store is. If I could overlook this, I wonder how many other privileges I don’t see each and every day.

The truth is, regardless of how many students with whom I work get straight A’s, take AP classes, go on Outward Bound courses, learn to be rafting guides, complete service learning projects, travel out of the country, and go to college, they will still struggle for justice in a world stacked against them.

I volunteer for an organization that partners with privates schools with tuition costing as much as $20,000 per year.  This is not college tuition, this is tuition for kindergarten through 12th grade.  $20,000 is more than most of the families in the neighborhood where I work make. When people are raising families on less than $20,000 per year, (often much less,) there is a lot more than bookstores to which their children aren't exposed. The advantages of privilege are so multi-layered sometimes it feels nearly impossible to quantify. 

Since that day at the bookstore, I find myself reflecting on the rituals of my day and wondering how many of them are rooted in privilege I have yet to recognize.  It’s a heavy burden to realize I have so many unearned advantages that I can’t identify them all.  Yet, this burden seems weightless compared to the weight of the struggle people without these advantages carry each day of their lives.

"In my class and place, I did not recognize myself as a racist because I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth."   Peggy McIntosh

Rise from the Ashes...

Often, when a tragedy such as the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut happens, I hear the statement, “things like this don’t happen here.”  I have been pondering this declaration for quite sometime because the truth is, events such as mass shootings don’t happen anywhere... until they do.  There is a subtle, or perhaps not so subtle  message, which states the tragedy is somehow more devastating because “our community isn’t violent.”  I’ve thought carefully about this blog post before sitting down to write it because I’m concerned my perspective might be misconstrued as insensitive.  Certainly, when the media imposes itself on a community in the midst of a crisis, people do not spend time scripting how they will respond to a reporter’s questions.  The greater likelihood is that people are speaking from their gut.  In my opinion, herein lies the problem.  If you listen closely, these moments are when we hear raw, unfiltered truth.  Thoughts shaped by institutions designed to rank the value of lives.  

Like all of you, I remain heartbroken by the senseless violence which took the lives of so many people, most of whom were young children.  This could have easily been my sister’s classroom.  She teaches at an elementary school on the East coast and without a doubt, she too would have protected the students at all cost.  I have a 6 month old nephew; so now, more then ever, I can relate to that gut-wrenching ache at the idea of losing a child.  I am not ambivalent to the anguish caused by this massacre or any of the other recent massacres. In fact, I feel just the opposite.  I believe we should ALL be outraged by ALL the incidents of violence resulting in lost lives, regardless of where they take place.  Yet sadly, the only ones we mourn nationally, and internationally are the lives lost by what we deem unexpected acts of violence.  The ones which occur in places where, “things like this don’t happen.”  

Throughout my career I have worked in communities where young people often risk their lives walking out the front door of their home.  I can tell you the names and describe the smiles of children who had to be escorted to school by groups of parents  in an effort to momentarily halt the flurry of bullets fired off during a drug war, children who were literally beaten to death because their self expression didn’t fit someone’s idea of normal, children whose lives were lost by drive-by shootings, children who were awakened in the middle of the night by gun shots, only to find the bodies on their front lawn, and children whose heads were stomped on against the hard concrete in the middle of the night.  None of these stories made national news, in fact, most of them didn’t make the local news.  These examples are only the ones with whom I have a personal connection.  There are thousands more whose stories are never told, and whose lives are only mourned by the few who knew them.  

Violence takes the lives of people all over the world, in poor urban neighborhoods, in countries ravaged by war, in oppressive political regimes.  In fact, on the very day the mass shooting occurred in Connecticut, a man in China used a knife to attack 22 children as they entered school.  Although these children did not lose their lives, in recent years, more than 20 children have died from similar attacks.  I didn’t know about this until a Tibetan friend shared the news story.  It did not receive major world coverage.

I do not mean to minimize the tragedy of the 26 people who lost their lives in Newtown, Connecticut.  Rather, I am asking you to consider increasing the value of the many other lives lost to violence, to the same worth as those receiving national attention.  How much value we put on a life dictates how we allocate the resources to support it.  This shows up in the way we respond to where tragedies occur, in the quality of schools, and in the way we talk about a community.  It is in the subtlety of what we imply with our words and our actions, where the truth is revealed.  To me...  “things like this don’t happen here,” sounds remarkably similar to  “we are not like those people who are violent; we are different.”  Yet, it isn’t until we collectively crumble at the loss of all lives that we will ever be able rise from the ashes and build pillars designed to support all our children, not just a privileged few.

fluke1    [flook] noun 3. either half of the triangular tail of a whale.

During a training I recently attended, I sat soberly listening, as a colleague described in vivid detail what it's like to face so many encounters of racism  on a daily basis, that most days, he loses count. He went on to explain that he really started noticing this when he hit puberty. His voice deepened, shoulders broadened, and he went from a cute little boy to a black man.  From that moment on his days became an exercise in dodging the never ending hostilities of fear and hate.  I’ve read about racism, I’ve witnessed racism,  I’ve stood up against racism and yet this time I truly reflected on the impact of being treated as a criminal, a second-class citizen, and  as a savage not just once in a while, but every day, all day, year after year.  My colleague talked about how numb he’d grown over the years, as though his body intuitively went into self preservation. It wasn’t until he was given the opportunity to speak his truth, that it seemed like he allowed himself to acknowledge how much pain he stuffs away just to make it through his days.  

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this small glimpse into his reality because it reminds me how much I don’t know.

Not long after, I sat with a parent who shared with me she’d been ordered to be deported. Days before Christmas she will get a final decision from the court of appeals. In the meantime, as the moments of each day slip away, her 3 children come closer to the possibility they will lose their mother because she was born on the wrong side of a river. Before I spoke with her I only knew her son as a sweet, light hearted, kind, thoughtful boy, who always wears a smile.  Already at such a young age, he’s learned to wear a mask.  

On a daily basis we float around like whales swimming in the depths of the ocean, occasionally lifting our tails above the surface just enough to be seen.  But the truth is, who we are as beings, the weight of what we carry in this world remains hidden.  It can be easy to forget how much we don’t know about others, and instead get lost in the small details we see....judging others for being “angry assholes,” or assuming a smile means someone isn’t in pain.  

I am fortunate, or maybe the more appropriate word is privileged, my smile almost always means I am truly happy.  I can choose to indulge in my privilege and exist in a world where I don’t have to think about the color of my skin or my citizenship status, but that isn’t the kind of person I want to be.  Instead, I work hard to think about inequities every day because there are people who have no other choice.  I do my best to move slowly and take time to be curious.  It is only when we are brave enough to ask, will we get closer to understanding.

Simplicity

An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet regardless of time, place or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle but it will never break.      ~Chinese Proverb

Every new year’s eve for more than 15 years I have a ritual of finding a quiet place to sit with my journal and think about what I most want to practice in the upcoming year.  First I read my journal entry from the previous year and reflect on my aspirations, assess whether I accomplished my goals and whether I lived my life according to my intentions.  I then write about my hopes and dreams for the upcoming year. Often these entries become a list of goals I want to accomplish, places I want to explore, lessons I want to learn, problems I want to climb, races I want to run, etc..   However, this year I decided to only focus on slowing down and simplifying my life.  I am fortunate to feel passionate about many things, but this sometimes means the things that most bring my joy and peace in this world can look more like a “to do” list, rather than an opportunity to meander throughout my days... wake up, run, climb, write, take photos, cook, and read.  Instead, I wanted to create time to get lost amidst these passions rather than check them off my list.  However, despite my best intentions, the first half of my year became a balancing act of too much to do.  Each time I stopped to take an inventory of what I could take off my plate I came to the same conclusion: there is nothing I could stop doing or nothing I was willing to stop doing; therefore I decided to embrace the fullness of my days, rather than be burdened by them, ( at least this is what I attempted.)

As winter faded into spring this year, my preparations for my trip to Tibet collided with end of the semester grading for the class I teach at Metro State, scheduling time to visit my new nephew on D.C., wrapping up the school year with cityWILD, and student commencement ceremonies.  Not quite the simplicity I had in mind on New Year’s eve.  Yet, I kept reminding myself to breathe because I would soon be in perhaps the most spiritual place on earth. 

I have been home from Tibet for nearly two months and have sat down to reflect numerous times, yet each time I struggle to find words that capture what I feel. I have concluded, these words don’t exist.  How do I convey what it felt like to walk into our home-stay, which was the home of a Tibetan Monk and his mother, as he welcomed us with a joyous laughter that comes from a place so deep within, I have yet to visit, and she greeted us with a smile surrounded by wrinkles from a road map of the stories she could tell. How do I convey that the Tibetans' voices greeting me throughout the day sounded like a gentle lullaby, or how a peacefulness washed over me each morning when we arrived at the orphanage as the boys chanted Buddhist mantras, or the stillness I felt sitting around the fire inside a nomadic tent drinking butter tea-with nothing else in the world distracting me, or the ache I felt as our guide, who became like family, described crossing the Himalayan mountains alone at 15 and then again at 18 in order to get an education in India, or how for the first time in my life I felt god/buddha/allah while sitting between two Tibetan monks outside a cave at the top of a mountain, where one of them had meditated for 3 years and the other was still there meditating after 3.5 years?

How do I convey being overcome with the playfulness of a child while playing frisbee in a muddy field, under a canopy of rain with 40 orphaned boys learning to be monks, or the despair I felt listening to the monk, whose home we were staying in, describe being bullied by Chinese government officials, to support a government, which is actively trying to abolish his culture, language, and people, or the inspiration I felt as another guide and dear friend shared his plans to build a school in his village to educate nomadic children, or the overwhelming feeling of being one, while sitting inside a monastery crowded with Tibetans listening to monks chant the most transcendental sounds, or the desperation I felt driving past the concrete governmental homes built to cage the nomadic people?

The first week after my return I avoided all socializing. Despite having transitioned home from faraway places, with vastly different cultures, on numerous occasions, I wasn’t prepared to return home from Tibet.  I had no idea how profound my experience in Tibet would be; in fact, I believe I only have a partial understanding of how transformative my time there will continue to become.

Ordinarily I turn to writing as a way to process my thoughts and feelings and on multiple occasions I sat down to write about my trip. Yet, each time I was unsuccessful.  As the days turned into weeks, and then months, I recognized I was avoiding my own reflection.  The idea of trying to capture the depth of what I feel and putting these feelings into words has been paralyzing me.  Before I knew this trip was a possibility, I committed to seeing the Himalayas during my 40th year, but I had no idea this intention would culminate into the most meaningful and poetic lesson in simplicity.  

However, this lesson in simplicity isn’t just about moving through life slowly or about reducing consumerism, it is also about the simple, yet profound reminder of our impact on the world.  The Chinese government is methodically and intentionally trying to eradicate the Tibetan culture; and although injustice happens throughout the world, most, if not all, of these oppressed cultures have formal allies-governments who are coming to their aid.  This isn’t true for the Tibetan people.  China has so much economic power, countries, including the U.S., aren’t unwilling to hold China accountable for the atrocities they commit.  So while many people sleep walk through life, blindly purchasing products made in China, living in insular places, which perpetuate the illusion that the injustices in the world have no bearing on their lives, or that their lives have no bearing on the injustices in this world, the most peaceful, spiritual, kind, and enlightened people are systematically being abolished We must wake up.  It’s that simple.

Turning 40 has inspired me to stray from my usual focus on social justice and revel in reflection.  In the months leading up to my birthday I didn’t feel anxiety about entering a new decade.  Most days I simply feel grateful for the richness of my life.  It always feels like a privilege to wake up to another day.  However, on the eve of my birthday, I felt an overwhelming desire to find meaning in this milestone.  Serendipitously, in my first two weeks of being 40 I found tremendous meaning in the most unexpected places.  In the last couple of weeks I broke bread to celebrate this occasion with friends who’ve become my family in Colorado, my courageous partner interviewed before a panel of fire and police chiefs in order to follow his dream of becoming a fire fighter, I spent the weekend in beautiful Telluride surrounded by astonishing athletes, photographers, artists, and film makers and then continued the road trip through the Black Canyon,  another shooting took place in the community where I work, this time wounding two people and killing two young men (one of whom was a friend of a cityWILD student,)  I co-led a climbing course for 7th graders in Buena Vista, one my dearest friends in the world bravely underwent a bilateral mastectomy, my sister gave birth to a baby boy, I spent a weekend with my nephew, sister, brother-in-law, and my parents, and in two short weeks I will leave for a 3 week journey to Tibet.   I have found so much meaning in these experiences, I struggle with where to begin.

As I grow older, the depth of what I feel intensifies. I feel an urgency to love as fully as I can so the people closest to my heart never go a moment without knowing how much they mean to me.  I am more often moved to tears by the vulnerability of others and their courage to take risks, I am acutely aware of the fragility of life and what a short time we have together, I spend more time being mindful, I am more careful with the earth, I am more intentional,  I am more dedicated to being creative, and I am more determined to live my days with kindness, compassion, and grace.  In these brief weeks I have intimately encountered the tenderness of life and time and time again, the meaning for me, is undoubtedly about connection.  

As I bare witness to David’s tenacity to pursue fire fighting and the vulnerability that comes with taking this risk, I feel a widening expanse within, that repeatedly softens me.  Watching films at MountainFilm that documented both the human capacity to go unimaginably beyond our limits and the critical need for all of us to show up and care about each other fills me with an outpouring of hope and inspiration.  These emotions exponentially intensified on my climbing course when the students bravely stepped off the rock’s edge to rappel into uncertainty.  I stood with each of them moments before they walked  backwards off the rock, voice cracking, bodies shaking, resisting the urge to safely hike back down, and my eyes filled with tears by their willingness to trust themselves and the adults there to guide them.   A few hours later while listening to a cityWILD student, who has left the gang life behind, talk about losing another “homeboy,” I wondered if this young person will ever know how deeply I am in awe by this measure of strength and whether I will find the words to convey my sentiment.  

As cliche as it may sound, I regularly think about how I am not promised another day and this motivates me to express my feelings just in case I am not given the opportunity again.  When I found out one of my longest standing and closest friends was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was reminded nothing is as important as spending time with the people I love. This also resonates with me as David will soon embark on his first fire fighting venture.  Although I know he will take great care to be safe, I can’t help but think about all the things he can’t control in the midst of a wildfire.

I am writing this on the plane, flying home from meeting my nephew for the 1st time.  The weight of responsibility I feel holding him in my arms, to make sure he grows up in a kind and just world is indescribable.  I think the only way this will be possible is to be gentle with each other and to always remember our lives are interconnected.  My sister’s transition into motherhood has deepened my connection with her.  I can’t explain it, except to perhaps wonder if she has awakened an innate bond over the ability to create life.  What I do know is that she is now more beautiful than ever.  While hugging my mom good-bye as I returned to Denver, her eyes filled with tears and I quickly said, “don’t be sad.”  But the truth is, these words were a feeble attempt to hide the inadequacy I felt to share my gratitude for our time together and for the unconditional love I feel both for and from my family.  

While in Tibet I will be charged with the responsibility of teaching global citizenship to 6 high school students in the shadow of China’s occupation.  This is where I expected to find meaning as I turned 40.  Yet life has a way of reminding me that we don’t have to make grand gestures to find meaning, it is all around me in the connections I make with the people I love most in the world.