The Stranger in Me

Wisdom from a Chilean writer, a Palestinian Poet and an Indian Mystic

"I am so tired of waiting. Aren't you, for the world to become good and beautiful and kind?"

Langston Hughes

The last time I posted here was more than a year ago. And this quote, this plea, from Langston Hughes, that I ended with still hovers in my mind, a wounded bird unable to take flight. I have been waiting for the world to become a little more good and beautiful and kind for everyone.

And it has not, not even a little bit.

With well over 50 trips around the sun under my belt, you might think that to clamour for this world to be more good, beautiful, and kind is to be naive. Have I not, riding roughshod in this celestial orbit on a planet that we are rapidly destroying, not realized that yet?

Someone messaged me recently:

"My dog tortured a bird today, and I am upset. I know he is a dog, but..."

That I can understand. What I can’t understand is when the torturers are other human beings, just like you and me, who know that they are not dogs, but yet behave like dogs.

Hope, right now, feels like a thing with feathers, tortured.

I read recently in the New Yorker of queer writer and performer-activist from Chile, Pedro Lemebel, who was only 20 when Pinochet took over. In his commentary on Lemebel, Chilean author, Alejandro Zambra writes:

"Because to write truly, looking head-on at those we love and those we hate, and above all trying, much as it costs or hurts us, to look into our depths, is always a coming out of the closet."

There is so much here. Looking head-on, unblinkingly, especially at those we hate, is an imperative to look into our own depths first, to find the parts of us disowned, to look at the hurt or fear that cleaves apart the heart, and allows hate, sulphurous and polluting to gas the chambers of the heart.

Coming out of the closet means first, to be be rid of self-loathing, to heal our separation from our essence, to tear down the wall that keeps one part of us at odds, a stranger, from the other.

Know thyself, love thyself we are told. Perhaps the two most difficult things for a person to do.

Lemebel referred to himself both as una loca (Queen) and un marica pobre y viejo (a poor and old faggot), terms generally spat out derisively by homophobes. Lemebell instead owns them and throws them back, and in doing so flings open the closet door!

In one of his poems, Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote of reconciliation of the self:

“…you are both my compass and my chasm”

Our desire to return to wholeness is our compass with which we can cross the very chasm created by words that demean and divide. What we hide from or fear, paradoxically, is in fact our guiding star to liberation. Remember that the dreaded human flesh-eating Minotaur of the dark labyrinth, Asterion, bore a star on his forehead.

In the same poem, Darwish writes,

"Delay our tomorrow so our road

may extend and space may widen for us, and we may get rescued

from our story together: you are so much yourself ... and I am

so much other than myself right here before you!"

The multitudes we contain, separated and pitted against each other in a story, perhaps, written before we were even born, the consensus story of the people; a story that we find ourselves written and locked into, not one we wrote.

What is the truth of the story? That these strangers are in fact not! That they are each the other, and in seeing this, the story without the tension of two strangers pitted against each other, collapses and is seen as a lie. Only then can the estrangeiros be rescued from it.

Lemebel, it seems, had no boundary to his full self-expression(growing up poor and marginalized he had little to lose ) and I can see him declaring “This is not my story! This is a lie”, lifting up the tortured bird, breathing new life into it. This is what the power of our word can do when we call out the lie of separation.

Lemebel passed away from cancer, renegade cells turning on their fraternal cells, evading the body’s surveillance system, and ultimately taking over the body destroying it and themselves. This is all cancerous cells know to do.

The chainsaw wielder knows only to wield the chainsaw, to cut down all that is good and beautiful and kind, like the thousand children of Gaza with stumps where legs and hands used to be. Or a forest of stumps where centuries-old olive trees have been hacked down. Whether children or olive trees, none are spared.

As we look upon these killing fields, we see the corpus of our collective humanity held together by the sinews of our shared ancestry, being laid to waste. And in this context, Darwish’s words take on a deeper resonance.

Please, delay our tomorrow so we can see with wiser eyes and the deepest gnosis! Let our cleaved hearts grow soft and be whole again. Let us be able to take in the wider road, let us see that I am you and that you are me, and the only way we get rescued from this story is together, by not betting our lives on that most costly coin with hate on one side and fear on the other.

The Indian mystic Nisargadatta Maharaj wrote:

…the ultimate in selfishness is to care only for the protection,

preservation and multiplication of one's own body. By body I

mean all that is related to your name and shape--- your family,

tribe, country, race, etc…A man who knows that he is neither body

nor mind cannot be selfish, for he has nothing to be selfish for.

Or, you may say, he is equally 'selfish' on behalf of everybody

he meets; everybody's welfare is his own. The feeling 'I am the

world, the world is myself' becomes quite natural; once it is es-

tablished, there is just no way of being selfish. To be selfish

means to covet, to acquire, accumulate on behalf of the part

against the whole.

We misunderstand who we are. We fail to see the whole and so we separate and amputate, believe the lie of separation and make up stories that we mistake for the truth. If we could see as Nisargadatta sees, we might not so willingly saw off our own limbs.

If we look at the ancient myth of Sisyphus through the lenses offered her by a Chilean writer, a Palestinian poet, and an Indian mystic we see that Sisyphus represents the part, straining solely on behalf of his ego, against the boulder, that he seeks to move according to his will. And we can see the boulder as representing the whole, the truth of our universal belonging that does not bend to our will.

Until we begin to first love the other that is in us and that of us which is in the other, we will find ourselves, like, Sisyphus straining to assert our separation from the whole, futilely pushing a boulder up a hill repeatedly, only to watch it roll down again, for eternity.

The bird of paradise fell to earth long ago, its song has been forgotten, it’s feathers turned to dust. Still, I long for its voice that sings one dawn into the next. I long for the slow grace of day that unspools like a golden thread of sunlight weaving its way through the soft leaves where the bird sings.

Don’t worry, the roots will hold us to this land where olive trees can grow again. So we can laugh again, with laughter as light as a feather, so we can learn to love and be whole again.

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Dedicated to the memory of friend and spiritual mentor, George James (1948-2025) who reminded me, always, that I was loved.