Sitting at a table with me in a Hillsboro, North Carolina café was a gentleman who lived for seven years in remote sections of China. “The East fears chaos,” he said. “ The West fears death.” He acknowledged there are dozens of examples, but used Medicine to drive the point home. In China they are not so intent on extending life as assuring a natural death. I think of what NATO is doing in Afghanistan and compare that to China buying up all the mining permits there, especially the vast copper reserves. This dualism will catch itself by the tail and take chase into the next hundred years, I suppose, while the people of Afghanistan who have learned to live with chaos and death take their wisdom with them into the earth beneath their feet.
Now I am in central Florida. Today I will speak to the students and faculty of Stetson University. There is no telling where I will begin and where that will lead me. I may talk about the Sufi poet Rabia Balkhi and her promise one day to “light a fire in Paradise and pour water onto Hell so both veils may completely disappear.” My southern swing has thus far been mesmerizing, each exchange feeding the discourse of the next. From a gathering of educators in Winston-Salem to a retirement community in Greensboro, from a basement room in the piney Carolina woods to the marbled opulent dream of a Railroad magnet named Flagler I have been met with love and intelligence and a generosity of spirit that defies any divisive cultural war we keep reading about in the news. I am in the fourth of this five-month speaking tour. I think back to July of last year, when first the thought entered my head that yes, my stay in the orphanage will indeed come to an end. A tiny bead of anxiety builds up in my chest, and sorrow. The only way I can finish this communion with my fellow Americans gracefully and without utter sadness is to begin preparations for my return to Kabul in March.
One woman I met in Hillsboro took it upon herself to arrange an event at their library, assuring me the people of Durham/Chapel Hill were ripe to hear the story I tell. Another woman, ninety years old, gave me five unopened packages of yellow number two pencils to give to the orphans. In St. Augustine, standing out amongst a sea of white faces one African-American with almost a tear in his eye told me about his Afghanistan, the one he lived in for several months in the early seventies, when it was the Paris of Asia, when Kabul was awash with locust trees and roses and the people were vibrant, hopeful, and trusting. An eight-year old girl from Summit School tugged at my sleeve and asked what she could do to help the children of Mehan. “Because,” she said, “I was an orphan, too, in China.” We are all inextricably linked. We must strive as best we can to do this right.
People I meet seem to come out of some sort of paralysis. I feel it as I go on about this wounded Byronic poet teaching Afghan girls how to spit watermelon seeds. The amazing thing is how easily it happens. True, there are difficult moments. For example many people, usually men, have a hard time believing my story. They shake their heads, rub their eyes as if they have somehow misshaped what they just saw. “What we have heard, what they say on all the news stations, what we’ve been told… is it all a lie?” I change the discourse immediately from the discussion of “us” and “them”, truth and falsities to a comparison of static and dynamic thinking. What we need is not to fear imagination simply because we might fail. Imagination is under siege in this world, but it is precisely the antidote to the stagnant, festering roundabout that now threatens to destroy hope altogether. Expand your thinking, and it is not necessary to choose.
Another difficulty arises from the conditioned empathy fatigue that overwhelms so many of us. “What do we do,” one lady lamented, “now there is this disaster in Haiti?” It was as if she wanted me to instruct her as to which world problem to put on her shoulders. I never frame my discussion in terms of the need for help. Only in the end, and sometimes not at all I proffer an invitation to join something special, to invigorate the lives of others, certainly, but perhaps most importantly their own lives and the lives of fellow Americans.
Regardless of these and other difficulties, the paralysis melts. It brings me the greatest joy to watch people go out of the room smiling, lighter on their feet, conversing with friends and strangers alike not so much about me or even my words, but as confidants sharing a secret they cannot wait to divulge to the circles they keep. I look at the closing photograph in the video I share, the Mehan girls waving, and always in deference to their power, I wave back.