I am.

I don't know if anyone has noticed or not, but it's an election year.

Election season for me means annoying social media posts, signs in yards, bumper stickers on cars, interns on street corners, divisive conversations, and higher quality Saturday Night Live skits. 

It also means the celebration of a government by the people.  I'm not sure that's as dependable as high quality Saturday Night Live skits and I'm pretty sure Bernie would agree with me.  Maybe it means the celebration of an idea, which is a government that was originally intended to be for the people. 

I digress. 

The point of this specific blog is to confess some aspects of my character that I have noticed through the overlap of world travel and the current election season. 

Election years make it really easy for me to identify people that I want nothing to do with. Put a sign in your front yard with a certain name on and I'll instantly know that we could never be friends.  

I know, in my head, that the sum of an entire human cannot be contained in the endorsement of a candidate. But damn, it's so easy to do that.  

Especially this year. Every endorsement feels like a proverbial wall giving me permission to actively stay on my side of the partition. Attach yourself to a specific candidate and I've given myself permission to write you off. 

I can rationalize it pretty easily.  

I teach in a community of students that are first generation Spanish speaking immigrants. I've spent years working towards helping my kids get citizenship before their 18th birthdays. I've walked that road with them. I know their stories. I'm part of their stories. 

I'm also a woman. And I have a radical idea that my gender is equal to other humans that have different genitals. 

Additionally, I work really hard to use the privilege I was born with, based on skin color, in order to level the playing field for my brothers and sisters that were born into a world of ignorant racism. 

A few more - I think that wealth and resources are to be shared. I think wisdom rests in the most lowly, most disregarded in a society.  I think leaders are meant to serve.  I'm a pacifist that believes in subversive opposition to systems of oppression. 

See? Easy. 

You stay on your side. I'll stay on mine. 

There's just one problem with the ease at which I segregate people of differing viewpoints from myself - It doesn't align with my own value system. 

I operate under the premise that we all have more in common than not.  I go across the globe and see entire cultures that live in a world with no resemblance to my own. 

Politics, culture, worldview, gender roles, societal norms, agriculture, cuisine, rituals - all different. 

The first thing I see, regardless of where I find myself, is all that we have in common.  

Love of family, desire for community, appreciation for celebration, need for expression, respect for the sacred, disdain for disgust. All the same. 

See?  Easy. 

I can spend a month with a group of people, living and laughing and learning one another, to the point that I feel eternally connected.  I feel really good about the world when I think about that, about how we are all so much more alike than any of us realize. 

That's beautiful to me. I want more of that. 

I can live on the same block as someone that I will intentionally avoid meeting based on the sign they have in their window.  I feel really good about myself when I think about that, about how I can write someone off so easily, dismissing them as humans because I think that they are ignorant.

That's abhorrent to me. I don't even want to admit it. 

But, it's true. 

It's true and I need to admit it. I need to say it. I need to address it. I need to weed it out of the garden of my soul. 

I want to see people.  Whole people.  Entire beings. I want to find all that connects me to them, all that we have in common and let that be my starting point. 

No labels.  No branding. No generalizations.  No categories.  No affiliations. 

Just human. 

I have to work on that. 

If I don't, I'm just adding to the problem. I'm just adding to the "us vs. them" world that I actively work to piece back together. 

The problem, I suppose, is that I don't want to have anything in common with these people.  I want to arrogantly state how ignorant they are and how different I am because of that. 

And I guess, that makes me the problem.  

I am the problem. 

It's an odd revelation to have, especially when I'm walking through Kibera, the largest slum in all of Africa, and actively seeing every commonality between myself and the people living here. 

But if I can't do it at home, what's the point of being here at all?

I have to work on that. 

I suppose if I do, if I work on that, I can be the solution, too.

Giving Birth

I don't have any kids, at least not any that required me to give birth. I have an entire school of kids for 10 months every year and I have a niece and a nephew (see photo) for always. That's good enough for me. I know that there are women that don't get that. I know that not having an intense burning desire to carry, deliver, and mother my very own children isn't something that most people understand. Add it to all of the other reasons that make me a square peg.

 It's fine. I embrace it.

For me, spending a month in a foreign country every year is my very own version of giving birth. 

I suppose that that thought was originally planted in my head after my first trip abroad in the summer of 2012. I remember being in Colombia after 6 weeks away from everything that I had ever known and desperately wanting to go home. I was deep in the Andes debriefing my experience and I thought, “This is probably going to be a once in a lifetime experience. I'll probably never do this again.”

Then the next summer after I came back from Israel (round 1) I swore I would never go back. In fact, I remember walking the streets of Jerusalem for two straight days and thinking, “Soak all of this in. You'll never be back.”

I spent the summer of 2015 walking those same streets.

Today, I leave for Kenya for the second time in three years. And yes, the pattern is the same for my Kenyan experience. I thought I would never go back.  Yet, I'm 45 minutes from putting my backpack in a car and heading to the airport.

When I think back to all of my summers for the past 4 years I keep replaying my sister's voice in my head after she gave birth to my niece. I remember sitting in her living room with her first tiny offspring in her hands, just a few days old, and listening to her tell me that she was glad that she didn't have to make any decisions on future children in that moment. She said that if women had to decide about getting pregnant again just after they just had a child, that no one would have more than one kid in their family. The pain is too great to conceive of willingly giving birth a second time. But then, time passes, the memory of the pain dissipates, and the beauty of the life that was birthed is so great that it makes you want another one.

That's why I have a nephew, I guess.

I feel like that after every trip. I feel like I'll never do it again. There are so many parts that are too difficult to conceive of wanting to do a second time. Specifically, the thought of returning to the same country is unthinkable, especially at the tail end of a trip. And yet, here I am, going back to Kenya in a matter of hours.

It's giving birth.

The product of traveling to a new country for a month creates a different version of myself, one that is born from this new experience. I have to strip myself of all of the comforts and amenities of my daily life, lose the routine that the hold so sacred, and figure out who I am all over again.

It's painful. It's hard.

It changes me. It makes me new.

It breaks me. It rebuilds me.

Every year I think that i'll never go back, at least not to the same country that I just left. But enough time passes, enough space elapses between the old me and the new me for me to see the value in repeating the experience.

So I go. Again and again - to the point that I don't know who I would be without the losing and the finding of myself over the past 4, going to be 5 summers.

I guess that makes me about 8 months pregnant right now. Late in the last trimester, ready for a month of labor.

Ready to break the old me and reform the new one.

I won't know what she looks like for a couple of months, because it takes some time for her to grow. But I know she'll be a better version of anything I've known so far. A better version for the world, for my friends, for my neighborhood, for my students, for my family, and for myself.

So I go.

Planting seeds

Change takes time.

Communities take time to change.  People take time to change.  I take time to change.

I know that the change that I want to be a part of is a far more intensive investment than a 30 day experience.

But with that goal in mind, every July I keep packing as much as I can carry into my backpack and traipsing around the world for a new adventure.  

The dreams that I have for the places that I go are longterm.  Nothing that will ever be attained in a 30 day timeframe.

But I still go.

I know that my work in a community may be as quickly forgotten as my name to the woman that served me my coffee this morning.  

True and lasting change takes time.  Like, it takes generations. It doesn’t come in a thirty day span.  And I am well aware of that.  Even so,

I don’t think that my thirty days are wasted days.  I don’t think that I would be of better use to humanity if I traded my world travels for time at the beach.  

I think that it matters, even if it is short-lived.

It’s like planting seeds. Sometimes they grow.  Sometimes they don’t.  Sometimes you see them break through the soil.  Sometimes you don’t.

Sometimes you see the plants of someone else’s seeds.

Sometimes you plant seeds, sometimes you water the seeds, sometimes you cultivate the soil.  But you always garden.

That’s what motivates me to give my July in a new world without ever knowing what may come from it.  That’s what motivates me to give my life to education and plant roots so deeply that i have seen my first students graduating college.

So I will keep giving my Julys for as long as I can.

I will keep going, keep planting.

I go because going makes a new me.  Every year i become a new version of myself.  

I see the world with fresh eyes.  And I come home to my own world with fresh eyes.  

Gardening is good for the world, good for my soul.   Even if I'm not around to see the flowers.

Learning rhythm

You know when you see a group of people participating in some sort of rhythmic activity and one person is swaying the wrong way?  Or one person is clapping on the off beat?  Or one person is singing off key?

Usually they are overly enthusiastic, clueless as to the fact that they aren't acting in unison with the group, and white. 

I spent a good portion of my life being this person.  It took years of social conditioning for me to realize that I am functionally tone deaf.  

It's ok.  I've accepted my reality. 

I thrive on other forms of self expression, while appreciating dance and music and rhythm from a safe distance. 

I really consider it a service to all of humanity. 

It feels like watching a bird fly.  I cannot fathom how it lifts from the ground and soars through the air.  I cannot flap my arms fast enough to join it.  I can merely look up in awe.

This is my relationship with music, rhythm, and dance.

Once I started my graduate program I began to understand how this relationship developed to its current state. 

I took courses in multiple intelligences, brain development, and social/emotional intelligence that gave me the proper framework to understand my connection and my disconnection to rhythm.  I was learning a language to give words to feelings that I could never express. 

After studying the human brain and how it develops through childhood, I realize that I missed the window of development that would have connected the neuropaths in my brain to help me learn rhythmically.  

One of the most important lessons that I learned in this realm was that I have an internal desire, even a need, for rhythm.  It is scientifically proven that rhythm helps to create internal order in human beings. 

So now, at 32, I can't keep a beat.  But the innate need to identify with rhythm has still been written in my soul, just as it is written in yours. 

It's a universal language that every human shares, even if some of us dysfunctionally express it.

I think that I've always understood this truth about people and about myself on some level.  I have a deep respect for the traditional music of other cultures. I am fascinated by the art of dance, specifically if it is tribal and there are stories being told. 

None of this head knowledge helped me keep a beat or sing in tune, but it helped me understand a language without words.  

It helped me understand why I connect with rhythm, even if I cannot connect my hands to make an acceptable form for myself.

Even more valuable than the cognitive understanding of these concepts was the way that they translated in my life. 

As a part of a drumming circle in 2012, I was taught how to listen and identify the "spine" in the music.  I learned how to find the beat that was supporting the song and how to return to it when I get lost. 

I learned how to cope with my whiteness in public musical engagements, but more importantly, I remembered how to find my spine when I get lost in life.

I can't tell you how many times since then that I have been in the midst of chaotic situations, felt myself stray from the rhythm of my heart, and then reminded myself to find my "spine" and return to my beat. 

When I'm surrounded by the comforts of my daily life, I find my spine more readily.  I listen for my family, my friends, my vocation, and the rituals of my life and I realign myself accordingly.  

When I'm half way around the world, when my life is drastically different, it can be really difficult to hear, to align.  

I have to seek it out.  I have to, in a sense, fight for it. 

I have to quiet my soul and sit in the silence.  I have to listen intently.

I have to.

Because I know I need it.  And because I know that I can. 

I can because I know that it has been written on my soul, just as it has on yours.  

Normal, Richard, and Cymbals.

I read books by Anne Lamott, Donald Miller, Malcolm Gladwell, Rachel Held Evans, Shane Claiborne, and Rob Bell.  

I get my news from NPR, John Stewart, John Oliver, and Vice.

Documentaries are my primary form of entertainment.  

I am a conscience consumer that buys fair trade and locally as much as is within my power.

This is my world.

You can piece together my politics and worldview for yourself.

Most of my life reinforces this normalcy for me.  Unconsciously, I surround myself with people that share these ideals.  

The occasional Facebook newsfeed reminds me that there are, in fact, other types of people in the world.  Sometimes my social media outlets jolt me into the realty that my insulated world isn't the reality for everyone.  

Typically, when I travel I find people that share my foundational beliefs about how the world works and how we are meant to operate within it.  It's safe to say that volunteers traveling to destitute villages, mountains, and deserts are there for the same reason.  Whether for the arts, for agriculture, for education, or for politics, we have common connecting points. Conversations are filled with language of empowerment, justice, ethics, and education. 

It's my normal all over the world. 

Then I met Richard. 

Richard is, well, a confusing character for me. 

(Photo credit - Summer Anderson)

I knew before meeting him that he would be one of the most interesting students in the camp.  I mean, he's 73 years old and no one else is much beyond thirty.  So I knew he would add a different perspective from before day one.

I had no idea just how different we would be.

It didn't take long. He made it clear from the first session that he wasn't a part of my normal.  I would give specific details on what exactly he said that day, and every day since, but I don't feel comfortable typing it.  It's bad.  It's really bad.  It's worse than Fox News bad. 

There are moments that my jaw drops, my face lands in my palm, and I can do nothing but shake my head. 

Richard is not my normal.  And I can't scroll past him to a more palatable opinion.  He is a part of my daily life and is unavoidable. 

But let me tell you something,  I don't want to avoid him. Richard has become a kind of a hero to me.  He is teaching me as much, if not more, than my like-minded friends.  

The man is the epitome of love. It overflows from his spirit.

He he gentle and compassionate and authentic and humble. He cares about every living thing around him. He listens to everyone's perspective and engages in thoughtful dialogue. He is willing to change his stance in the middle of a heated conversation. 

There are times, sometimes on a daily basis, that he is surrounded by young left-winged feminist that are angrily attacking him and his position.  He listens with attentive ears, taking it all in, never reacting to the emotion.  Just listening. 

He responds in gentleness.  Always. 

Sometimes he says, "I think you're wrong."

Sometimes he says, "I don't know what I think about that."

Sometimes he says, "I had never looked at it from that perspective before."

Sometimes he says, "I need to research that before I come to an opinion."

Meanwhile, my blood level is rising at an unhealthy rate, my face is bright red, and I'm nearly yelling.  

I don't get like this often, if ever.  It takes a certain type of right-winged conservative to bring it out of me.  It takes a reminder of the politics of my childhood to strike a certain chord within me.  

It's why I live in New York City and not the Midwest. 

It's easier to live in a cultural center where I am surrounded by my normal. 

I don't get this mad in my normal. 

But Richard is shattering my normal. 

I can't put him in a box. I can't fit him into my stereotype. 

I actually want to be around him. 

I want him to sit with me while I brew coffee on the fire. I want him to fill buckets of dirt with me while we work on the herb spiral in the garden. I want him to do dishes next to me after dinner every night. 

I want to be around him because I want to be like him.

He is the model of a loving servant. The very definition of how I want to be defined. 

He tells us stories about growing up in New Zealand and Australia.  He tells us about his mistakes and successes, he is open and unashamed about his life.  

He is the first one to offer his services, give of his time, open a door, give up his seat, listen to a story about your life, ask about your family, show interest in who you are, and relate to you on a purely human level.

He is the only one in this camp that stands on his side of the line and he is the first one to love everyone on the opposing side.

I want to be like that. 

I want to handle opposing viewpoints with grace.  I want to be the first to serve those that disagree with all that I stand for. 

I want to be someone that other people, especially people that are diametrically opposed to my core values, would choose to spend time with.

I want to be like Richard.

He is teaching me what I have always known - Love Wins.

It doesn't matter what I think about anything in this world.  If I don't love the way Richard loves, all of my acts of service will be no more than a clanging symbol.

I want loving like Richard to be my normal. 

Nothing to be afraid of

Let's talk about motivation for a minute. 

Everything we do is motivated by something else, whether intrinsic or extrinsic, whether pure or adultered, whether altruistic or selfish, whether obvious or subtle. 

In all of my collective mental deliberations in daily life and worldwide travel, I have yet to see a more powerful motivator than fear. 

From the top down, fear is disseminated within the masses and weaves itself into the fabric of society.  It is unseen, effective, and toxic.  

It becomes so much a part of our society that we don't even recognize its presence.

I don't know if it's a natural human instinct or if we've learned it over the course of our existence, but I know I see it in every culture I've ever had the privilege of interacting with. 

I see it when I walk down Broadway, when I sit in my classroom, and when I roam the world in July. 

It's the idea that there is an "us" and a "them" and that we are more different than alike. 

I have the perfect example. 

There were these two boys that kept circling the edge of the area where we live.  I don't think they were more than eight years old, but I'm not the best judge of age across cultures. 

We were working on our clay stove and they were trying to see as much as they could from thirty yards away.  At first they just watched us, but as they grew more comfortable they started getting our attention with Arabic greetings and salutations.  When we looked up to respond it was easy to see that they had a different agenda than a simple greeting. Neither of them knew a single word of English, but they both knew how to gesture with one finger that they weren't there to be our friends. 

We all looked at each other, then at them, and then shrugged it off.  They had obviously been exposed to American culture at some point and giving more attention to the situation wasn't going to benefit either party.  

We returned to building our stove, but they only grew louder and more offensive.  We continued ignoring and they continued bantering. 

While our presence in the village is welcomed by the majority, you can imagine that westernized women without their heads covered can be seen as a threat by some.  Obviously, the parents of these children didn't hold us in the highest regard and these were the tiny little outlets of that sentiment. 

Here is where it gets interesting - If you read this blog the last time I was in Israel then you will remember my friend, Yasser.  This local Bedouin man is deaf, but reads lips if you speak Arabic, and uses hand gestures. He has no idea that none of us understand exactly what he is saying, but he refuses to not communicate and forces interaction until he's certain that we've connected on a human level.  He's is a constant presence in the our camp, always outdoing us in anything and everything we do.  He's one of my favorite humans in the planet. 

So he's in our circle and watching the entire interaction between the boys of his village and the group of outsiders. 

The situation escalates to the point that the boys feel like they are brave enough to enter the fenced area.  We decide, as a group, to entertain ourselves by simultaneously sprinting towards them on the count of three.  Their bare feet carry them out of sight until all we can see is the dust between us and them. Their laughter combines with ours in the space between our cultures, connecting us ever so slightly. 

We go back to our stoves.  They come back for more, this time with more enthusiasm. 

Yasser actively spectates the entire interaction.  Eventually, he stands up, walks to the edge of the fence, and calls my name, "Kelty!  Kelty!"  

I look up to see him with an arm around each boy.  He looks at the tops of their heads and then at me, an unspoken/international/language defying gesture to let me know that they were with him, and that that, in and of itself, made them part of us.

I responded without hesitation by walking towards him with my hand extended.  

He was the middle man. He was the overlap.  He was the safety.

If they could see they he loved them and that he loved us, then maybe they didn't have to be afraid. 

He walked directly towards me and modeled a proper male-to-female greeting with an extended handshake. We both looked back with exaggeration to make sure they were watching.

I stayed where I was with my hand extended towards the boys.  We engaged in several rounds of inching closer to one another before they sprinted back to the fence.

We made contact the third round.  

We shook hands.

Minutes later the boys were sitting next to me as I boiled lentils and grilled eggplant on the fire pit.  They laughed and ran around the inside of the fence as though it was their own backyard.  

Yasser had gone to take a nap.  He was nowhere in sight. 

But the boys remained. 

Unafraid and uninhibited. 

I've been replaying the entire situation in my head for the past two days. From the moment they circled the outside of the fence to the moment they circled the fire pit.

I can't get over it. 

I watched these two little angels, motivated by fear of the other, cross over cultures and worlds and fences in a matter of minutes - all because of one tiny little deaf villager.  

I can't get over it. 

He saw them.  He saw us.  He saw himself as the bridge and he made the connection.

There was no longer "us" and "them" because one person wasn't afraid to be "both" at one time. 

I'll never get over it. 

I'll remember it for always. 

I'll remember it when I feel misunderstood by an opposing force.  I'll remember it when I feel different.  I'll remember it when I see someone that is different.  I'll remember it when I use classifieds that draw lines in the sand. 

I'll remember it to the point that I recognize it, call it by name, and disarm it.

Fear.

I will recognize aggression and accusatory statements and defensiveness as what it is. 

Fear.  

I will disarm it by looking for ways to be "both" and by extending my arm towards the other. 

I think that, at our heart, we all want to connect with one another, but we are really afraid of one another.  

It makes sense.  We've spent the entirety of humanity trying to kill the other. Evolution alone would teach us to preserve ourselves and see diffeernces as a threat.

But I saw the entire framework unravel within a single hour of my life.

I pulled the thread of fear from the tapestry of my life. 

I'll never get over it.  And in remembering it, I will refuse to be motivated by it. 

There are far too many motivators to choose to live in fear.  

It's true. I watched it happen. 

I'll live in that forever.  

where I am, who I am

I am a different me every place I go.  

I am a different me in this Israeli desert than I was in the sugar cane fields of the Dominican Republic, the mud huts of Kenya, the mountains in Colombia, the old precinct on the corner of 182nd and Wadsworth, my own apartment, my sister's house, or any other place I find myself.  

I adapt to my environment, to the people and the culture and the social norms surrounding me. 

I sponge information on a consistent basis, learning my role in the midst of it. 

I learn how I fit into the world around me, when I should speak or be silent, when I should move or stay still, when I should object or concede.

I know which battles to engage in.  I know which conversations to let dissolve in the abyss. I know what is worth my energy and what to disengage from.  

It's a skill that has taken me a lifetime to achieve and it's a skill that I will never fully possess.  

I know who I am based on where I am.

I appreciate this chameleonic trait about myself.  It's one of the qualities within myself that I most value. And yet, even more than I value social, physical, and emotional adaptation, I value my ability to be who I truly am, regardless of where I find myself in this world. 

I value knowing where I will bend or break. I value knowing the lines that I won't cross and the ones I'll easily skip over.  I value that I value my value system enough remain true to my center. 

I know that I will always align myself with love.  I know that I will consciously seek out the oppressed and join them in solidarity. I know that will actively use my creativity to be a problem solver. I know that I will never be forced to resort to violence.  I know that I will object to anything or anyone that looks to objectify people. I know that I look to be an agent of peace and reconciliation in physical and emotional and spiritual places. I know that I will spend my life looking to join in the renewal of all things. 

I know who I am independent of where I am.

This is the journey of my life.

It's been a journey filled with equal parts opportunity, tears, joy, brokenness, persistence, failure, success, and resiliency.  

I can look back, at the different stages of me, and easily see how I've grown into the current version that sits in this desert tent. 

I can see the young girl that wanted to please everyone. I can see the kid that used sarcasm as a weapon and a shield. I can see the teenager that had an answer before anyone asked a question.  I can see the rebel that rejected all that she had been spoon fed.  I can see the wanderer, fueled by wonder in the minute. I can see the prodigal that returned to a different home than the one that she had left. 

I can see me, the whole of who I am, and the journey that has led me here.  

The journey has led me to be deeply connected to the ever so gentle voice in my core.  It's the guide for my every step, the whisper that rushes over me in the roar of the moment.  It's my most reliable companion and my most trusted resource. 

It lets me give up part of myself in order to connect to every single soul that I've ever encountered. It lets me hold on to exactly who I am in the midst of any circumstance. 

It's the center of my existence anywhere and everywhere I go.