May First

Tomorrow, actually today almost by now since it is long past my bedtime this Wednesday night, is May First. In 1999, nine years ago, I met someone on this day who would change me forever although I was too busy chopping wood to know it at the time. That person, while no longer a part of my life, still influences my thoughts and actions daily and I wish I had a way to be more articulate about the gratitude I feel towards them both now and likely always.

So May First is already a big day in my life, you see.

This year May First has yet another layer of meaning laid over it as well, one I did not realize until I was interviewing someone for work today and, just after introducing myself and just before asking them intimate questions about one of their most triumphant experiences, was typing the date in my fly new FileMaker Pro database: 04.30.08, the last day of April--the day before the first of May. Earlier this spring, not long ago at all, I had an airline ticket for May First from Accra, Ghana to San Francisco via Heathrow because tomorrow is the day I was scheduled to return from Africa, from three months of building a new school in a refugee camp there. It is a trip on which I did not go as part of this year of traveling, for a wide range of complex reasons, but that decision to stay home did not erase the ache I've felt for the righteous work I would have done there and all the ways I would have grown in the process.

Who would I have been on May First this year if I had gone to Ghana? Not having ever left on that journey I have no way to know for sure; I can only guess. I assume my hair would have been longer by now, and my skin darker, and my waist slimmer. I predict I would have eaten new foods and met amazing people and probably have gotten sick somehow, somewhere along the way--likely from the snails that carry worms that carry death--have you heard about them?! And, I know that while I would have learned a million other incredible things both personally and professionally I would not have learned the lessons I did by staying home. I'd have used the trip, and the work it would have necessarily entailed, to learn and grow and try new things but also to distract myself from another kind of work, the kind done not with hammer and nails, paper and pencils that is necessary when building a school but the work of one's own heart. That is what I have been doing while I was supposed to have been in Africa, and that is how I have ended up where I find myself this May First, right where I am meant to be.

So in honor of May 1, 1999, I am going to put on some Beastie Boys and maybe eat some popcorn and remember the days spent living and learning on Fell Street and I will express my gratitude in the silent way I know how. Maybe if I'm really brave I'll try to tell that person how much they have meant to me all along, even in the confusing times that came later and despite how mean I was in the end because I didn't know any other way to live with such a deep, hot anger at myself for not being able to try harder and with such a huge heartache. Or maybe I will just iron my clothes for tomorrow and go to sleep--that would be a tribute to May First too, in its own way. I guess May First, like any day in this life, can be honored and celebrated by abandoning every should and supposed to about observing the passage of time and instead just by living the time in this very moment. Very uncharacteristically Buddhist of me, I know. I guess that's what all this traveling can do to a person...