Dear Friends and Colleagues,
I share these reflections on the day of our Winter Solstice, 2022 - this day of maximum darkness here in the Northern Hemisphere, when the earth begins to lean back toward the light. We are enveloped in the beauty of a rare snowfall here on Whidbey Island. I am sitting by the fire, feeling waves of gratitude for the power of small gifts and unexpected openings that I have received this year.
Gratitude for the gift of vigor and continuing good health. Gratitude for the gift of love and deep friendship. Gratitude for the return of my daughter Kristin and her family to Whidbey Island after a decade in Colorado. Gratitude for being the grandfather of two beautiful children.
I was also blessed to spend time this year, in very personal and unexpected ways, immersed in two regions of the world where turmoil has been most explicitly manifesting. Both brought me face to face with the tragedies of endemic violence and displaced peoples, one in southern Mexico, and one in Poland during the height of the Ukrainian refugee crisis last spring. I have already written in previous blog entries about my experience in Poland. In this letter, I want to share some stories about how I was impacted - resoundingly for the better - by my experience of traveling on foot through 200 miles of rural southern Mexico.
Soten and Shinei
Last February, literally on a whim, I flew down to the Pacific Coast of Oaxaca to join my friends Soten Lynch and Shinei Monial, young married Zen priests who were in the midst of a year-long, 3000 mile walk through Mexico and Central America.
I already knew and loved both of them from our shared work through Inside Passages in Alaska. Yet before they left on this trip, I had been among those harboring doubts about the prudence of such a perilous journey. They were traveling exclusively on foot through countries notorious for drug violence and political instability, camping wherever they could, dependent always on the good will of the strangers they encountered. Yet as their journey progressed, I was moved by their Instagram accounts of the extraordinary kindness they were being met with everywhere they went.
1000 miles into their journey we met on Zoom, and I was so struck by the stories they told, and by the radiance on their faces, that - on that strange whim - I asked if I could join them on their journey for a few weeks. When they answered “Yes!”, I had my ticket in hand the next day.
It is one of the best decisions I have ever made. One reason was their own luminous spirits, which I knew and yearned for more of in my own life. What is it like to live in this way? What does it take? Another reason was the strange paradox one often finds, of generosity and hospitality flowing from people who barely have enough for themselves. And the relative absence of that same open hearted generosity in wealthier countries like mine. One has to travel far beyond conventional tourist destinations to experience that paradox up close. During the three weeks of walking with Soten and Shinei through rural Mexico, we never encountered another American, or anyone who spoke English. There were no tourist enclaves that beckoned with the Siren songs of luxury. But we encountered kindness everywhere we went. Our days were physically grueling, for this 72 year old, but my spirit has never been more alive. I absolutely relished the world that opened up to me during those remarkable days.
Mealtime was our best opportunity to connect with locals. We ate outside always, at small family restaurants in the mostly Zapotec villages we were passing through..
To arrive at a place after many hours on foot, and to sit down with people of vastly different life experience, who may not have seen a Gringo in years, is a profound perceptual shift.
It felt at times like we had dropped through the Looking Glass into centuries past. Cooking was always over an open fire, with ingredients made by hand. We were almost always the only customers being served by these multigenerational families. Other relatives and neighbors would drift into the mix, curious about who we were, where we had come from, and why we were traveling on foot. We often lingered far beyond meal time, telling stories to bridge our two worlds.
But perhaps my most potent companion on this journey was the presence of vulnerability itself, which followed me like a persistent shadow. My aging body for one. What were its new limits? Could I actually pull this off? But more to the point, what I had signed up for was the opposite of a manicured tourist experience, with all danger surgically removed. The risks we faced daily were real, and it came down again and again to fresh leaps of faith. Almost every day someone would admonish us, “Don’t go this way! It is too dangerous!” And though our experience was consistently the opposite, these warnings had teeth..
Every day we had to weigh the hidden dangers against the kindnesses we were actually receiving, knowing that such kindness never comes with guarantees. What is the line between real danger and merely habitual fear? It was a constant gut-level process of discernment. As Zen practitioners, we also knew that true “security” is a figment of the human imagination, that kindness is an orientation of the heart that requires dedication, whether it is met with kindness in return or not, and that many of life’s greatest gifts can be squandered when we bend our lives primarily to the avoidance of risk.
Every night we had to camp somewhere, and we could never know for sure whether we had chosen a safe place. One night we made camp in a draw behind an abandoned railroad track, far from any town, where we felt sure that no one would find us.
What we didn’t know was that this abandoned track was part of the underground trail for illegal Central American refugees, making their way north toward the Promised Land of El Norte. The closer we had come to the Guatemalan border, the more illegal refugees we were encountering, often in caravans of pickup trucks dangerously packed with refugees, barreling north along the remote dirt roads that were carrying us south..
As darkness approached that night, we spotted a shadowy figure marching north along the tracks. And he spotted us, veering over to our camp. It was a moment that tested my resolve to follow Shinei and Soten in their practice of generosity and trust. I waited to see what would happen, what they would do. Without hesitation, Shinei showered her sure-fire warmth upon this stranger, offering him most of our remaining food, which he wolfed down. I held my caution in check as his story emerged.
His name was William. He was a nineteen year old Guatemalan, who had crossed into Mexico illegally three weeks earlier, leaving behind a mother and two sisters who - he told us - were slowly starving to death. The day before, he had been robbed by Mexican thugs who stole his cell phone and all his money. He had walked forty kilometers that day without a bite of food, drinking water from the polluted streams along the way. We gauged his words with silent glances between us to confirm our gut sense that he was telling the truth. There seemed to be no guile or malice in him.
Shinei then invited him to sleep in our camp, which was already clearly his intent. She gave him all the money we had on hand - about $30 - which she sewed into a torn seam in his tattered backpack. And since he had only the clothes on his back, Soten then gave him his expensive Patagonia jacket, which William pulled over himself as he curled his exhausted body onto the sleeping pad that Shinei lent him, and went immediately to sleep. We pulled our own packs inside out tents, but there was no need. He was exactly who and what he had told us - a penniless and frightened young man risking everything for a perilous and likely doomed attempt to escape the poverty and violence that had driven him here. He was carrying on his back a level of vulnerability far beyond our own, or anything we could really even imagine.
In the morning, before he left camp, William gave us his mother’s cell phone number in Guatemala, and Shinei called to let her know where her son was, what had happened, and that for now at least he was safe. Soten and Shinei heard from him some weeks later, saying he had found others to travel with, and was still headed north. I often wonder where he is now, whether he is still safe, whether he is still alive?
There was huge learning in all this for me - that one can, at any point in life, choose to embrace risk while also taking the path of kindness and generosity. I have a deeper appreciation for how intertwined these two paths actually are. To both Shinei and Soten, I owe a huge debt of gratitude for all they have taught me.
Wherever this letter finds you on this Winter Solstice, my gratitude extends to you as well for your friendship and companionship over the years. May we each find grace and courage and generosity of spirit as we move into what can only be another momentous year in 2023. It is hard to imagine how we can address the challenges now facing our human family any other way.
Sending much love,
Kurt