The Backbone of Everything

As Aleppo falls, I think of an old Tibetan man who kept refilling my glass with buttery yak tea at a café in downtown Lasa. I think of so many of the people I met while traveling last year: the construction worker in Myanmar, who transported a stack of bricks on her head; the swimmer near Havana, who said, “I’m not a communist. I’m Cuban;” the driver in Swaziland, who, despite not wanting to become ‘just another taxi driver,’ did so in order to lift his whole family out of poverty; the hotel employee in Ho Chi Minh City who fixed Susan’s cane in an hour, so that her shoulder no longer ached every time she leaned into it.

The modest and generous people I met while traveling were the rule and not the exception. Meanwhile, their governments varied. Some were repressive, others neglectful. It was the rare one that seemed to listen and respond to its people’s needs. But I can only guess at this as an outsider. What I don’t have to guess at is where each country’s true wealth lay. That was easy: its people. Every day people were the ones who ran things and grew things and fixed things.

And so, as the Syrian government and its allies bomb those who grow things and fix things and paint things and heal things, I send a prayer for assistance. It is a prayer of love and survival too, and of this truth: You can never be bombed away or felled because you are the core of the world, the beauty of it, the backbone of everything.