Another Day of Grateful Living

Every morning it is cold when I rise at 5:30 or so, no matter how warm it was the day before.  My routine is to sit in front of my beautiful kiva fireplace with my coffee, meditate and wait for the first morning light to greet the desert. 

At the risk of sounding like a cliche, I like the focus of my early mornings to be on gratitude.  That I am able to wake up in this magical place every day is truly miraculous.  So I clear my head of the strange and melancholic dreams of night and my body of its arthritic pains with contemplative prayer and yoga.  Only then can I face another day.

This week, having completed their grueling screening process, I was finally able to volunteer at Casa Alitas (which translates as House of Little Wings).  At the basic clinic there, I followed the volunteer doctor around seeing patients. When she finally turned me loose, I was overwhelmed by my first patient.  He was an African man, who spoke a language I'd never even heard of (Pulaar), but when I called the interpreter service, they had no one who could translate.  So he found another migrant who spoke French.  Like the proverbial game of "telephone", I managed to get some version of his story from his Pulaar to his friend's French to the interpreter's English to me.  What I was able to gather from this young man (who was wearing a back brace and pushing a walker) was that he fell off Trump's Wall and broke his back and leg. His friend, who was ambulating on crutches and in a leg cast, also broke his leg trying to get across the border. These are the desperate measures people will take to get away from violence, oppression and crushing poverty to come to the Land of the Free.

No matter what our political leanings are, it is clear that the migrant crisis is complex.   Those who are pulled to the US by visions of a better life will most likely be turned away.  Those who are pushed out by gang violence, persecution, and war stand a small chance of eventually getting humanitarian parole or asylum. Many of the root causes of migrant desperation are related to climate change. Our Western lifestyle is supported by our government's involvement in international conflicts and dependence on the natural resources of developing countries.  On the backs of the poor, we live comfortable lives, and yet we refuse them the same opportunities.  So, while I realize the US needs to have a more organized immigration policy, I find this irony very disturbing.

I don't know the answers to these problems, but being an uber-empath, I plan to show up at Casa Alitas and Humane Borders for the next month or so.  I will keep dropping little pebbles in the pond in hope that some of the ripples make it to the other side.