I See You

I got my hair done today and as I was leaving the salon, freshly coiffed, a man who was walking behind me said, "I see 'dat bounce!" and laughed.

I didn't get mad, in fact, I looked him in the eye and said thank you.

His exclamation wasn't misogynistic or mean-spirited or overtly anything offensive to me. It made me think of a podcast I'd heard.

You, dear reader, know that I'm an avid podcast listener - so I have to specify which one I thought of. It was the On Being podcast episode from Thanksgiving with Richard Blanco, poet and civil engineer AND the first immigrant, the first Latino, the first openly gay person and the youngest person to be the U.S. inaugural poet for the second inauguration of President Obama in 2013.

Blanco is well known, but I must admit, this was the first time I'd heard of him. But oh, how glad I am to know of him now. And how glad I am that poetry has no expiration date. His book, "How to Love a Country" is full of works that dive into issues such as immigration, gun violence, racism, and topics affecting the LGBTQ community.

His poem, "Complaint of the Rio Grande" will make you smile, cry and get angry all in the span of time it takes to read its five paragraphs of beautiful language. But it was what inspired him to write the poem called "Declaration of Interdependence" that connected me to this happy hairdo day interaction with a stranger.

Blanco says that it was the Zulu greeting, "I see you" and traditional response, "I am here to be seen and I see you" that inspired him to write the "Declaration of Interdependence". The poem artfully describes the connection between us all - a fitting spin off from the essence of that Zulu greeting - also known as Sawubona.

Sawubona as described by Orland Bishop in this clip from 2007 says the more accurate translation of the greeting is "we see you" - which calls in the ancestral history of the Zulu people - and the response is "yes, we see you too". The plurality of the exchange - the use of the "we" in the greeting strikes me. It means our seeing goes beyond our own experience. It becomes a conversation, a witnessing of each other. What a lovely way to acknowledge another's presence. So very like the essence of the sanskrit greeting "Namaste" or "the divine in me honors the divine in you".

I invite you to really connect the next time you greet someone along the path of your life. Really look them in the eye and see them together with you - not against you or in opposition to you - but with you.

Isn't that at the heart of most of what we do in the world?  To see and be seen. To acknowledge our shared human experience?

I say yes, and I say I see you too.