Sunday, June 29, 2025

Running from Waves

When I was in 8th grade, I flew from Newark, New Jersey to Cleveland, Ohio to visit my best friend who had moved there. It was my first plane trip and taking off on a cloudy day, I was astonished to break through the clouds and see the sun. So my little Middle School revelation, a version of an ancient Buddhist truth, was “The sun is always shining. It’s just the clouds that get in the way. “ (The Buddhist version is "We are already enlightened, but the clouds of ignorance obscure our realization.")

 

You may have noticed how hopeful my posts have been these past seven weeks. A combination of my conscious refusal to be beaten down into despair, despite all evidence that that’s an appropriate reaction to what’s going down, and living the most marvelous seven consecutive weeks (and more to come) I can remember. Wholly immersed in beautiful places with beautiful people and some of the time making beautiful music. Who has time for gloom and doom? 

 

But like all mortal beings, I can see the cup half empty as well. There are times when the light at the end of the tunnel feels like the headlights of a train coming the other way, ready to run me over. 

 

And in the midst of a conversation with Kofi about applying to present at the next American Orff Conference in 2026, the stark reality of immigration officers, despite his Canadian passport, looking at his black skin and his job of telling the truth about Africa made it unlikely that he can cross the border under our new fascist regime. And so the stark reality (and there are so many more worse ones that I don’t have direct experience of at the moment) of that runaway train bearing down without caring a rat’s whisker about my uplifting human connections and hope for a better future, hit me hard. Like Alice down the rabbit hole, I could feel myself spinning to an unknown bottom. 

 

But still we take the next breath and the next step and for me that step was onto the bus to go to the Togo border where Kofi had arranged a short tour from a Ghanaian Immigration official. One of the top officers walked us through a few places explaining what they did. I confess that at the beginning I was thinking, “Why are we here?” I have no love for immigration officers, having experiences first-hand many times their hard-hearted thinking and power to make me miserable and once, almost deport me. (For the record, the worst were Canada and England.) 

 

But it soon became clear that this compassionate young man was mostly concerned about stopping human trafficking and illegal smuggling of harmful things (drugs/ guns) and had great empathy for refugees fleeing persecution and how to help them. In short, the polar opposite for our evil ICE agents “just doing their job” as puppets of a fascist regime trying to create the new Aryan nation. We were all visibly moved by an official choosing compassionate inclusion over unfeeling exclusion.

 

On we went to the beach to meet the Nunya kids and once again, the teachers swarmed in for hugs and greetings. We stood at the water’s edge to let the warm waters of the Atlantic swirl over our feet and the squeals and delight of kids who had had very little beach time in their young lives softened my hurting heart. Then followed two hours of spontaneous play that included frisbee, kite-flying, sand-burying, soccer, tug-of-war, clapping games. The simple delights of childhood that cost nothing, demand no fancy equipment, remind us of the sheer delight of simply being alive on this earth in company with sand, sky and water. 

 

Back at the hotel, an evening lecture from Kofi about religion and I couldn’t help but feel the pitiful adult need to wrap ourselves with so many unnecessary layers of stories and dogma and rituals that seem to have caused more harm than good, turned the simple pleasure of holding hands with whoever is nearby at the ocean’s edge and affirming the grand privilege of being alive on this earth, into a divisive, shaming, forced converting and war-inducing argument about whose invented god is supreme. What the hell is wrong with us humans?

 

So the day slowly lifted me out of the trenches of despair, reminded me that this is the real deal, the norm we deserve and not all that other horror that we have come to accept as inevitable and just the way things are and will always be. I’m here to report that they needn’t be if we would just take a child’s hand and run away together from the crashing waves, laughing with joy. 

 

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