Refugees of the Future Heart

My path has led me to a community of refugees, some from other countries, some from the streets of our own fair nation. I have been tutoring a young man from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is a high school student at an independent school, studying Goethe's Faust and the optics of Edwin H. Land. Tonight I had the privilege of hearing him tell of a small part of his childhood in Africa. His assignment was to write something relating to the work of Emerson and Thoreau. We chose Thoreau's essay, "Walking," and I prompted this young man to tell me of his memories of walking in his own country. The first memory to arise was of running away from home to avoid a stern lashing from his mother for a misdeed apparently serious enough to provoke such a punishment. The story unfolded cautiously, as if the memories were timid, peering out from behind the tropical trees of the Congo, unsure if it was safe to come out and live again, live in words and feelings. As they stutteringly approached and allowed themselves to be revealed, I walked with him on streets, roads, paths, muddy from the rains, past a river than ran brown from far away up in the mountains, past the field where soccer was played, with birds flying overhead, no, no, we can't see the birds, we hear them in the forest, calling and then we met a man who told us to get cigarettes then stole our shoes and we had to return to our mother crying over our stolen shoes, and she was stern, but loving. and we were not beaten for our earlier transgression, the running away and the stolen shoes retribution enough. I was transported but I could not decipher the movement of feeling within this young man as his tale unraveled. It was a time and a place so far from both of us, and we so far from one another even while we sat close enough on a small bench in the kitchen of a home created for people displaced from their own home that our shoulders touched. In this experience lived the future I both fear and for which I have hope. An uncomfortable future in which the number of individuals unable to remain in their homes and forced to flee to other countries, foreign and strange lands, continues to increase at a pace nearly unmanageable- and yet, a future in which human beings from vastly different environments and situations and circumstances can sit at a kitchen table sharing stories, offering help in small yet unmeasurably significant doses, enlivening and warming hearts in ripples and echoes. These challenges the future is offering will be opportunities for us to grow into true humans, humans swelling toward our full capacities as compassionate and empathetic beings capable of awakening and finding ourselves within the consciousness of other people, attending to their suffering and knowing it, and by seeing it and knowing it, somehow healing wounds and recognizing the illusion of our separateness and feeling our bare feet, our toes filling with mud as we walk the road home, where our mother is waiting, angry but full of love for her children.