To Love a Migrant

This comes to you from Nogales, Mexico.  This comes to you from a small room overlooking a line of division, overlooking las cicatrizes en la Tierra – the scars on the Earth.  I’m not entirely sure how it happened but as the sounds of life floated up from the bustling streets below, my empty page filled itself with words… 

To Love a Migrant


An ever changing, never-ending cycle is the tide

 

So come and go the migrants

In and out in endless quantities

 

To love something you can never hold

 

A moments exchange is all there is


To love the migrant is to love in the moment

 

As quick as it came, so it will go

 

In the day

In the night

Every night

Every day

 

The moments come and the moments go

And so it is to love the migrant

 

So it is to love the tide

Every day, every night I listened to stories.  There was, of course, physical work that I did but in reality I was a listener.  Each day I would look into hundreds of eyes.  Eyes that I would learn to love, eyes that I would learn to let go, eyes that I would never see again but each time, they were eyes that were nothing more than purely human.  These eyes were invitations for the stranger to enter into their reality and into their life. 

 

Staring into the eyes of fellow migrants were moments of true vulnerability.  They were moments in which neither of us could hide or suppress our brokenness, moments in which we could be nothing more than painfully vulnerable with the other, as strangers and as wanderers.  In those moments, I began to understand humanity. 

There was no way to run from our brokenness, much like we were able in the other sectors of life, but not here.  I began to understand humanity because I began to embrace their brokenness as they embraced mine and understand it as part of the human journey but not its definition.  Brokenness and imperfections are part of our human context but they are not what we are defined by, they are neither our start nor our end, they are simply threads woven into the greater scheme of our human life.

 

And that is how I learned to love.  To love in entirety, to love because we are human. To love in the moment because for the migrant, it is all we have. 

 

Kindly,

Kara Luebbering