the agora

Global citizens.
The term sounds too business-oriented
but the idea is powerful.
All human beings—
female, male; adult, adolescent and child,
just by virtue of living on God’s Green Earth,
are members of but one community.

You experienced a part of this first in your youth,
collecting cans for a food shelter;
explored it as a teenager,
debating the outcomes of local politics.
You devoured books, music, TV, sports, media,
you attended school, began to work, and maybe even
traveled to a new part of the world

but then you began to notice things.

Nothing too deep.
Just some weird differences in food, others in
music and dance, even more in customs and beliefs
and especially some in the way they dressed.
Once curiosity took root, you had three choices:
1. dwell on the difference,
2. forget about it, or,
3. learn to speak their language.

You chose the last. Boy, was it a process.
It was an embarrassing, grueling,
(and honestly, sometimes a migraine-inducing) process.
You had to sit in discomfort, uncertainty, and newness.
You had to persevere in countless conversations—
conversations where you were neither sure
that you understood the content, nor
that you had the vocabulary to speak your mind.

Despite the novice structure of
words hastily pasted together,
you created some semblance of communication
and found greater compassion within yourself.
You learned empathy.

And it was simply by
speaking, by speaking true language,
that you converted your curiosity into
questions
and your anxieties into
admiration.
 
The more you listened, the more you saw.
With your own eyes, you beheld that two people,
three peoples, and every kind of people are but
one.
(An accurate perception, and not an illusion as you once thought.)

Where you had first sought to build a bridge of understanding,
it was through language,
true language—
after everything was quite literally said and done—
that you found your link in the human chain and instead
swept away the millennia-old dust, dirt, and decay.
You restored the agora.