In essentially every moment, I arrive in a foreign land. This is rooted by wandering through numerous countries, talking with fellow travelers, interacting with local people from dynamic backgrounds, eating food never imagined as humanly digestible, attempting to learn and communicate in local languages- often with embarrassment- witnessing magnificent landscapes... travel opens your eyes far wider than any National Geographic or Discovery Channel special ever can.
To extinguish stigmas is to learn empathy; such enlightenment is only gleaned through experience.
The progression of life seems to be growth, in a conventional sense. The more we experience, the more we understand ourselves—how diminutive we really are—and the world around us. This evolution naturally leads us to newer ideas, exposing personal strengths and weaknesses, for which, if our eyes and hearts remain diligently open, will bloom into an ecological understanding; a separation from the notion of I, me, mine, towards a sagacious emphasis on otherness trumping selfishness.
At this point, I understand few things:
“1. that suffering comes from how I interpret the world, not the world itself; 2. that we suffer because we attach inappropriately to our false and foolish notions of how things should be; 3. that we can change all that; 4. with right thinking, acting, and meditation we will become peaceful, including those around us.”
I continue to utilize these Four Noble Truths to learn a new language, new cultural identities and way of life. My job is integrating into new communities to listen, to observe, to question, to prod understanding, and to be needed, though not necessary, to those I am assigned to serve.
Please take this journey with me because your support, in all its connotations, strengthens my capacity to engage in meaningful work. We—you, me and the communities we serve—will learn more about ourselves and each other through building theoretical, and possibly material, bridges to commonality; and opening doors to creative applications to enhance our lives, all the while demolishing barriers that stymie equality, understanding and growth.
“People want change, they just don’t want to change.”
Now is a wonderful moment to refocus our perspective from viewing the world through our own stories to experiencing the world through a common, unbiased focal point.
Each moment is an illusion of nonsense. As our consciousness shifts from this boondoggle to understanding the importance of every action, we begin to live meaningfully, signifying supremacy of each passing instant as a means to achieving future hopes opposed to expectations of the future dictating present attention.
Mission
To mediate compassion and kinship across cultures.
“We teach when we are also learning. And the teaching we do can return to us.”
goals will be achieved through:
Integration into local communities
Entrenched trust of community members
Being a mediator of change
Understanding local customs to brainstorm appropriate, if needed, solutions
Working with partners to maximize impact
Inspiring you to act selflessly