To inaugurate the heterogeneous series of musings and ponderings that some might call a blog, I thought it fitting to post the “This I believe” statement I drafted several years ago. It expresses my most cherished beliefs; about how, as Ram Dass said, “We’re all just walking each other home,” and storytelling at its best can add grace to how we do that.

So here it is. This I still believe:

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I believe that all we can be sure of is a short span of time between darknesses. We come into the world out of an unfathomable oneness, and we return to it when we’re done. In the meantime, we have each other, and our challenge is to rediscover that oneness amid all this earthly confusion, and be true to it, by fully accompanying one another.

There’s an image that’s always stuck with me from War and Peace: Prince Andrei had a dream one night. When he awoke, he remembered that he had been looking at a golden ball. As he looked closer, he had seen that it was made up of countless drops of gold that were fading in and out of one another… and he intuitively knew that those drops of gold were all of us, somehow all one but at the same time unique expressions of that unity.

So, how do we remember this dream in the light of day? There’s an expression the Irish use that I love: to “shorten the road.” The idea is that we shorten the road by passing the time with story or song, bringing a smile to the lips and lifting the heart. I believe that the best way to occupy our short time between darknesses is to lighten the loads of those traveling through with us, and shorten the road.

I’m still living into lessons I learned 20 years ago while working in Guatemala during the civil war there. I was with an organization called Witness for Peace, and a big part of our work was “accompaniment,” living with communities that had suffered organized violence to make it less likely that death squads and military would come at them again.

At times we managed to offer something concrete: we educated groups of US people and sent them home to help make a better US policy towards Latin America, we turned ordinary citizens into activists, we wrote reports and analysis, we built lasting relationships between communities.

But living shoulder to shoulder was the main thing. There was a certain discomfort at being the privileged US white people helping the less fortunate brown people, but when Guatemalan friends thanked me, I told them that we never know what the future may bring, and we might need their solidarity in the future. The connection we had was one of mutual aid, of equal humans taking responsibility for each other.

Some of my favorite memories of that time are of evenings sitting around some family’s stick shack in a refugee camp, crowded against the walls, perched on the plank beds and crouching on the floor, faces of women, children and men lit only by the flame of burning ocote, the air filled with the wood’s resinous piney scent, telling tales of our lives, filling the night air with an occasional song, or rattling the walls with laughter after a joke. Each of us drops of gold, blending in and out of one another in the light of a wood fire.

Shortening the road. Accompanying one another between darknesses.

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This I Believe, Inc. is an organization built around the goal of getting adults and youth from a wide range of backgrounds together to discuss their core, guiding beliefs. It all starts with getting people to write a 500-600 word essay. If this sounds intriguing to you, the check out the essay guidelines.