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 Dear Friends,
Mindi Kay, a 30-year-old health care professional and acupuncturist specializing in trauma, was recommended to me because I needed more help with symptoms from my accident.
It was love at first sight. Mindi graduated from Naropa University about 10 years ago, studying the ecopsychology courses I created 20 years ago. We had similar interests, and the two-hour treatment was extraordinary—a real healer, I thought.
When I went to make my next appointment, I found out that she was leaving for three months to do volunteer work in India and Nepal. She would be working in a women’s shelter in one of the poorest, largest slums in New Delhi. Hard work. Harder still to go and do alone.
When she returned, I asked her about her experiences.
She had been treating 65 girls and women from ages 4 to 34 in a safe house with three beds. These women had either escaped, or been rescued from, the global trade and emprisonment of women. All were severely injured, sick, and traumatized.
In her scraps of spare time, Mindi held acupuncture clinics in the slum, where dozens of women lined up to see her, far more than she could give full treatments to. In time, Mindi began to feel the hopelessness, the helplessness, that can come to all who work in the poorest parts of the world. The hopelessness lingered.
When Mindi arrived in Nepal, she was urged to see a spiritual teacher for her “spirit sickness.” Now, unable to shake the feeling of hopelessness, she hopped on the back of a motor bike and was delivered to one of the poor areas of Kathmandu, Nepal. She was pointed to a small old woman sitting on the dirt stoop of a mud house painted bright pink.
Mindi saw two other women, also westerners, sitting next to the old woman on the stoop, and she joined them. She discovered that her “teacher” was Aama Bombo, one of the thirteen indigenous grandmothers in the world who belong to the “Council of Grandmothers”— a global organization of elder women selected to be of full-time service to human/earth relations. (At other times Aama Bombo speaks at the UN and teaches at the Center for Sacred Studies in California.)
After Mindi and the two other women asked their personal questions about work and life, one of the other women spoke Mindi’s heart question: “What are we doing here? Is our situation hopeless? There is so much suffering; I feel helpless.”
Aama Bombo, who had been squatting, put her hands on her knees and stood up with anger in her eyes.
“Hopeless! How can you say something like that?” she asked as she glared at the women. “Don’t bring your hopelessness here. This is not about your psyche. We can never be hopeless. Mother Earth is with us and anything we do, she receives.
“If the water is dirty, you must teach people about how to clean the water. If you have information, you must share it. If you have gifts and you know about this suffering, you must give your gifts. The Earth requires this of us. The situation is bad. These are hard times. No one is exempt. You can’t sit on your gifts. You have to do something. That is just how it is.” And then Aama Bombo turned and walked through the small doorway of her mud house.
Hearing Mindi relate Aama Bombo’s fierce stand for service brought sharply to mind an experience I had on my first trip to Selma when I was nineteen. I was speaking with an older black woman, one of the activists working for civil rights. At one point in our conversation I said, “I feel so guilty that my people did this to you.” With anger in her eyes the woman looked at me and said, “This isn’t about you. Get over it or go home.”
The Earth and her people need us now as never before. It is time to learn about the suffering of others, and to not turn away. It is time to recognize the gifts we have to give—and to not sit on them.
This is just how it is.
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