Yesterday I opened a drawer and found this bracelet. I don’t remember seeing it in decades. Yet I was instantly transported back to Jesus Maria. It is a Cora village in the mountains of Mexico. We had just flown in for Easter ceremonies. When we arrived shortly after dawn we were met with armed soldiers. As we came off the plane we were searched and our cameras were confiscated. I went off to the edge of the field and began to cry.
A soldier walked up to me and asked why I was crying. My boyfriend explained to him that I wasn’t used to being met by armed soldiers or having my things confiscated. He seemed genuinely sad to experience my fear and sorrow. He untied the bracelet he was wearing and tied it on my wrist. Immediately my nervous system began to calm down and the fear began to leave my body. This memory is etched in my being.
In the last days I began to read again the book “see no strangers.“ In it she talks about all the hate crimes that arose after 911. A beloved friend of theirs was murdered. Murdered simply for being a Sikh. The author traveled around the country after 9/11 interviewing people who were impacted by hate crimes. Ultimately she flew to India and met the widow of their friend who had been murdered. She asked the widow how she was coping and how she felt about America.
The woman said she had been so touched by the outpouring of support. Several people had humanized the story of her grief and of this tragedy so that her husband was presented as someone familiar, someone known rather than a stranger. For her that changed everything. Having her grief shared by thousands of people who showed up for the funeral soothed her grief.
Part of the reason the dawn arrival greeted by armed soldiers was so difficult was we had just left a village that I had no desire to leave. It was a Huichol village also up in the mountains. When we arrived no one spoke or looked at us. It took days until we were accepted and many of the foreigners were not ever accepted because they were rude or impatient. That Huichol’s have a tradition of very pagan Easter ceremonies mixed with Christian religious tones. So a cow was slaughtered and the blood sprinkled everywhere along with a crucifixion/ cross being paraded through the town. We were camping in the village and overtime came to be, for me, significantly welcomed. So even though everything was bizarre at some level and so foreign to my every day experience, the kindness of the villagers made me feel at home.
The contrast of how I felt the sense of belonging in the Huichol village after our initial trial period of being observed before we were accepted was in stark contrast to the armed soldiers. In the Huicol village many of the tourist were there for the peyote that was an Integral part of the ceremonies. They often tried to buy it in rude and aggressive ways and were then shunned by the village. The sense of belonging I felt in this village was in sharp contrast to later being met the next day by armed soldiers in the next village. Yet once one soldier gave me his own friendship bracelet and tied it on my wrist with such compassion, I immediately began to change how I felt about this new experience.
I am bringing all of this to ask myself and perhaps anybody else who has read this far, who is the stranger? How does seeing someone as a stranger impact how we relate to them? How can one act of kindness have such huge impact? To me these are important questions. And I just want to add that I messaged this bracelet to my wasband and was not surprised that he recognized it immediately even though all of this happened over 30 years ago.
The first 3 images (excluding bracelet) are Huichol, the last two are Cora during Easter ceremonies
