Fellow Traveler

For a few moments, the double doors
of the BART train to Berkeley
remain open to the sunlit San José afternoon.
I’m content to wait,
lulled into a reverie by the railcar’s idle hum.
My gaze wanders the faded foothills to the east
and I drift back to the whisper.

I heard it as a young volunteer on the windswept Altiplano of Bolivia,
watching Aymara women sit together on the dry grass, babies bundled on their backs.
In dialogue spoken and unspoken, they pondered the health of their community,
stirring a critical consciousness, Paulo Freire’s conscientização.

I heard it as a troubled student in Dr. P’s consulting room in Cambridge.
Behind the couch where I lay wrung out and wobbly, solace in a soft Bronx accent:
These things never go away, but they can be transformed. And you can survive them.

The whisper.
The Marianist clergy at my high school might have called it a calling.

I’ve heard it through many seasons of my life,
in marriage and divorce, health and illness, faith and betrayal, birth and death.
I’ve heard it while I wore one coat or another,
as tutor, organizer, actor, communicator, director,
all honorable garments that secured me a living
but none that rounded true to my shoulders.

My fellow traveler:
The whisper is the sacred gift,
if you trust me,
of journeying into the country of You.

What stories are told in Your country?
Are they sung from open windows? Kept muzzled in the cellar?
In the country of You, how is the climate? The waters? The lands?
What might we find if we turn over Your soil with gentle hands?
What veiled forces make Your sun rise and turn the stars in Your night sky?

And I, a strange visitor to Your country, who am I to You?
What do we make of our differences? How are we the same?
How might We be together
to kindle Your healing and Your hope?