We are also refugees
In my dream I am a refugee
I am in a city in old Europe. I have absolutely nothing – no home, no family, no visible means of support. There's a sense of quiet desperation in my actions. I go into a printer’s shop with two handfuls of sand that I scatter on the green tile. Then I take a blunted stick and calligraph some words in the sand on the floor to show my skill.
The person in charge of the guild looks down on me and sees that my letters are beautifully formed. I am offered a lowly position in the shop and given a place to sleep in the barn with the other apprentices.
This small gesture of acceptance surges through me like electricity: I can survive! I can belong!
In an instant I have an identity: I am now a calligrapher… but nothing else. My entire world now circles around this single attribute which has allowed me to live another day.
In the dream state I am aware that I am looking down at myself as I create my small bed in the straw in the barn amongst the other apprentices. I am a peasant among peasants and jealously guarding my few square feet of selfhood.
What surprises me is how close I am to being invisible without some acknowledgment from my community. I would have thought that by now I would have a more established sense of self, but the dream has shown me how thin the veneer of personhood really is.
We humans are so incredibly fragile, and so in need of one another to be mirrors of our very essence.
I think of the 65 million displaced persons, the refugees of war, of terror, of hunger, of conflict, of ideology, and wonder if they also feel this fragile and invisible in a hostile world.
When I awake I muse that this dream is a corollary to some arrogance that I expressed a day earlier: I was working on a design for my son and remarked to him that probably only 1% of the population would notice that the font I had used was not exactly the same font as the one found on the backdrop to the actual presidential debates, but that it would probably suffice. I felt pride in knowing that I was one of the 1% who would notice subtle variations in typography.
There are not a lot of 1% groups that I can be a part of . . . I guess that there is some ambition around that still!
This dream seemed to throw that arrogance back in my face like a handful of sand. As if to say, “And could you survive if that was all that you had to your name?”
It makes me wonder what extraordinary skills and talents the world might miss because of cultural ignorance: what the immigrants bring that we cannot see because in our American culture we have not the eyes nor the heart for such subtleties.
I also reflect that 40 years ago I found myself in the old world city of Paris with no discernible way to earn a living for a year and managed to find some part-time work using my skills as a calligrapher. How curious that 40 years later I am reflecting on that sense of elation but in such a different context.
Today I accept the refugee that is me, and send a blessing out to all the others.
