In a Time of Woe

I want to thank my students and friends for their deep care and honesty in asking, again and again, “What are we to do now?” Out of these conversations, I was able to gather this in-depth set of reflections.

I must start with this. I believe that the wisdom of generations, the care we are born with, and the very roots of humanity drawing life-force from the irrepressible veins and arteries of Spirit since the beginning of time—all this is always more durable than the surface power of the day trying to break them. This does not minimize or excuse the callousness and cruelty we are experiencing and witnessing. Moreover, this lasting truth emphasizes that there are lessons from the past to draw strength from. For it is our turn to preserve the roots of humanity and to be the last gesture of goodness standing.

This is not an optimistic face lift on where we find ourselves today. More, a chance to better understand the life-force that always returns, to better understand what enables animals and birds to sense a tsunami and seek higher ground, to better understand what enables every flower to break ground after a storm, to better understand how a cut worm becomes two worms. To better understand where this impetus of life-force lives in us and how we might access it now. For working alongside Darwin’s survival of the fittest is the muscular legacy of the survival of the kindest.

Perhaps this is best described by the third century Confucian teacher Mencius who described human goodness as the impulse in us that would drop everything to try to save a child about to fall into a well.

Mencius also offered this compelling metaphor about human nature. He noted that water allowed its true nature will always flow downhill and join other water. It can be manipulated to go sideways or even uphill, but allowed its true nature, water will always flow to other water. So, too, we. For human beings allowed their true nature will always be kind. We can be manipulated away from our true nature. We can even manipulate ourselves away from our kindness. But returning to our true nature, we will always flow to join with each other and be caring and kind.

In a time of woe, our primary work is to help restore each other to our basic human nature, to restore our basic human kindness that wants us to join with each other. This perspective and the actions that come from it will go a long way to healing us and our society. Exploring this, I want to share some stories, metaphors, and practices that I hope are helpful.

The Global Body

In an enduring way, if I have one more healthy cell in my body than toxic, I am, for the moment, well. I’d like a lot more. But as long as there are more healthy cells than toxic in our body, we are leaning toward health. Now, consider that every soul is a cell in the global body. And so, every effort toward inner health we can make in our individual lives—to be authentic, true, generous, and kind, every effort toward wholeness and integrity—will make us a healthy cell in the global body. This speaks to the inextricable link between inner work and service. In addition to the care we put into meeting the problems of the day, how we live our lives contributes to the ongoing health of humanity. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “I believe what the self-centered have torn down, the other-centered will build up.”

So, the world at large depends on how many of us can find our way past being self-centered, past being driven by fear, past seeking thrill and intensity as a substitute for legitimate purpose and meaning. The health of the soul and the health of the world is always running, like an underground stream, beneath our confusion and trouble. As the poet Nick LeForce says, “The power and gift of life-force keeps flowing through us regardless of our judgments.

From the long view of history, we can see that every so often, across the expanses of time, a mountain remakes itself, a forest clears itself, and the ocean reshapes its shore. And once in a generation of two, humanity remakes itself, such as we are right now. And such a remaking is both profound and painful.

And here we are, being asked to put aside our old hypocrisies and all the ways we have pushed each other away. Here we are, being asked to be fierce and tender in our call to love each other until justice and healing are the same thing. Yet how do we participate in this remaking of humanity? I think one heart at a time, one truth at a time, one kindness at a time. And we can begin by remaking ourselves.

It's helpful to note that in the dark, middle ages of Europe, only ten percent of the European population was literate. That means that ten percent of Europe kept literacy alive for more than three hundred years. And it is true that, in every time of woe, in every time that grows dark and unfeeling, it is incumbent on those of us blessed to be awake are to keep the literacy of the heart alive. Our time is such a time.

• In your journal, describe what it means to you to keep the literacy of the heart alive?

• In conversation with a friend or trusted loved one, describe your own struggle between being self-centered and other-centered. How do you move between the two?

The Wisdom-Ash of Nalanda

Nalanda University was an ancient center of learning for six centuries (5^th century—1193 A.D.), located in Bihar, India. Considered an architectural masterpiece, the university accommodated more than 10,000 students and 2000 teachers in eight compounds and ten temples. Its several meditation halls and classrooms were placed among lakes and parks.

Over the centuries, the university assembled one of the most extensive libraries in history, accumulating hundreds of thousands of volumes housed in a nine-story building where ancient texts were carefully copied and preserved. At the time, the library of Nalanda, known as Dharma Gunj (the Mountain of Truth), held the most diverse, complete, and renowned collection of Hindu and Buddhist knowledge in the world.

Tragically, in 1193, Nalanda University was brutally sacked by the fanatic Turk general, Bakhtiyar Khilji. Thousands of monks were beheaded and burned alive. The library was vandalized and burned, and the smoke of all those books lingered over the hills for six months.

How do we hold such noble effort and such travesty? Imagine all that wisdom gathered, page by page through the centuries, one monk at a time: preparing the ink, scribing the sutras, pressing them dry, stacking them on the shelves. Imagine the various texts rolled and unrolled, generation after generation, by teachers eager to discuss the quandaries of living carried in all those stories.

Now imagine the raging Turks fevered to stop this invisible power that they couldn’t find or slay. Imagine the first handful of agitated warriors trampling through the library, their horses stumbling over the tumbled piles of scrolls as they set them aflame, and the cries of those gentle monks helpless to stop them.

In the horrible wake of the slaughter, picture the stories on those scrolls smoldering for days, distilling to their essence, dispersing and hanging in the air. Imagine the smoke of all that wisdom rising for months from the mounds of ash, to be inhaled by the land and those farming the land. Day after day, the resin of what took centuries to record swirled into a fine dust that settled in the nostrils of cows leading small carts and on the spokes of their wheels carrying the rubble.

Imagine the resin of all that wisdom settling on the skin of those just born. Imagine the essence of all that learning filling their pores and lungs. Imagine the essence of that granular wisdom forming the kindness of one soul who, years later, would stop to help repair another’s storm-broken hut. Perhaps the lasting purpose of all wisdom is to slip its container so it might imbue the living with a generous mind and a strong heart.

This magnificent harvest of wisdom over six hundred years and its brutal destruction and release through the vile burning of it all in one day reveals a strident paradox: that the inexhaustible essence, regardless of how it’s mistreated, will survive all inexcusable violence. As a soul leaves the body that has carried it to rejoin the reservoir of all Spirit, perhaps wisdom leaves the book or vessel that has carried it when the container is destroyed, only to rejoin the reservoir of all wisdom.

These examples of the best and worst of humanity challenge us today to work with the reality that kindness and cruelty exist near each other. And yet, while the things that crack us open are often cruel and unjust, what they open within us matters more.

The enlightened community of Nalanda University and its barbaric slaughter prove that we’re always lighting the truth and burning the truth. The history of learning, whether formal or informal, whether in great universities and monasteries or in small cafes, is the lineage of lighting the truth. And every time we give of ourselves to listen and reflect, to feel and so deepen our compassion, we counter the burning of truth.

However we gather—in circle like Native American elders, or in rigorous dialogue like a minyan of rabbis, or in the silence of a Quaker meeting, or in a cancer support group in the basement of a hospital—we do so to better understand the seeds of our own nature, and to understand how we’re capable of all things. All so we can participate in the lighting of the truth.

Again and again, we gather to quiet our rage and cynicism and to stir our responsibility. We gather to engage all aspects of our nature. We gather to inhabit the gift of our humanity through which we can come alive together, in the lighted pocket of the time we have.

• In your journal, describe a time when, though something was broken or lost, the essence of it remained available to you. How do you understand such a paradox?

• In conversation with a friend or trusted loved one, have each of you describe a time when you built something and a time when you broke something. What led you to be creative and what led you to be destructive?

The Kindertransport

It’s hard to comprehend, but in the dark landscape of Europe on the brink of war, children were urgently gathered from their homes in Germany in an effort to avoid the dark clouds of fascism. That such a sweep of desperate kindness was necessary seemed unthinkable. But as the violent months of 1938 unfolded, 10,000 Jewish children were given up by their parents who sensed the Holocaust brewing like a storm they couldn’t outrun. Secretly and with great sacrifice, they sent their children to England where British families took them in. This inspiring emergence of kindness is known as the Kindertransport.

Imagine the courage on all sides. Mothers and fathers sending their little ones away, telling them they would soon follow, but knowing deep down that they’d probably never see them again. Imagine the wholeheartedness that opened so many British families, many struggling themselves, to say: My God, we must take in one of these broken birds. Imagine the children themselves—nine, ten, eleven—bumping along the European rail and crossing the English Channel, completely on their own, with no understanding of English or where they were going.

Back in Germany, imagine the poor father who couldn’t bear to send his little girl away, pulling her from the train window at the last possible moment, only to have her join him in Auschwitz. Imagine the ten-year-old whose parents in their fear charged her with getting them out of Germany. Imagine her little heart churning in the chill of England. Imagine the old gardener who took her in, giving her a flower every day, and saying, “There. There. It will all be over soon.”

In our day, in our part of the world, I imagine the same love and sacrifice surfacing among the thousands of Latin American parents desperate to save their children. I imagine there’s a twelve-year-old boy in Columbia who saw his father killed as his mother yelled through her tears for him to run, to never stop running. We can and must learn from each of their sufferings and each of their kindnesses. We can and must learn how to let go of who we love, if necessary, so they might survive.

Under the weight of history, we can and must learn from those braver than us how to lift our heads from the hardships at hand to somehow set another place at the table for a new life that doesn’t even speak our language.

And the moments of courage that send them to a new life—the moment of each loving parent putting their child in a cold seat on that train, the moment of the child, days later, stepping off that train, and the moment of the coal miner wiping his hands on a towel before picking up the new one stepping into his home—these are moments that have always held the world together.

In the Hebrew Bible, it’s famously known that God asked Abraham to kill his only son to prove his faith. But throughout the harsh and sudden storms of history, it’s often been the other way around, where mothers and fathers have been asked to kill a piece of themselves so that their children might live. I cannot fathom such loss. I only know that since the forces that bluntly break loose in the world will never end, the courage to let others in will always be needed.

• In your journal, tell the story of a time you witnessed someone helping a stranger. How did witnessing such kindness make you feel? Can you feel it now? Follow that feeling and be in conversation with that source of kindness in you. Ask it to be your teacher.

• In conversation with a friend or trusted loved one, describe a time when you turned from being a caregiver to a gatekeeper. How did this happen? What did you learn from this experience?

The Bell of Nagasaki

Located on the southern tip of Japan, Nagasaki was a small fishing village until the Portuguese landed there in 1543, after which it quickly grew into a diverse port city. By the start of World War II, Nagasaki was the largest city on the southern island of Kyushu.. A week before the atomic bomb was dropped, Nagasaki was home to 263,000 people, including 9000 Japanese soldiers and 400 Allied prisoners of war.

Just before dawn on August 9, 1945, Major Charles Sweeney lifted off in a B-29 from Tinian’s North Field with the A-bomb on board. He headed for Kokura, but the city was too clouded to make a clear sighting. And so, because of a shelf of clouds, Nagasaki became the target. Twenty minutes later, Major Sweeney was flying over Nagasaki, waiting for the clouds to clear there. Growing short of fuel, Sweeney circled one more time, when the clouds opened. The A-bomb was dropped from about 1650 feet. Fifty-three seconds later, at 11:02 a.m., the bomb exploded over the city’s Urakami Valley. Within a second, the north of the city was annihilated. More than 70,000 people were killed instantly, while others suffered long, incendiary deaths.

So devastating was the blast that people were instantly cremated. In the memorial today, there’s a slab of stone with a shadow on it, except there is no light casting this shadow. It’s a human shadow; that is, the permanent shadow on the stone is the stain of human lives incinerated by the bomb—their remains fixed in the stone. Others would die later of radiation poisoning.

It took days for the heat to dissipate, but the radiation lingered. One survivor would later declare, “With all my might, as I once cried out for water while crawling among the charred bodies on that fateful day, I cry now for peace.”

In the rubble, only one column of Urakami Cathedral remained standing. The story is that in the terrible aftermath, someone crawled his way to strike a broken piece of the cathedral bell. And the ringing of a broken bell in the midst of all that devastation was a signal to begin again. Hearing that bell, those who survived somehow inched their way back into what were their streets. And dazed by their pain, a few cleared small pieces of rubble. Then others did the same. The sound of stones and debris being pushed aside became a dark and muffled music. The human story was beginning again.

Each day, for months, the Bell of Nagasaki was rung in the morning and the survivors knew it was safe to come out and continue rebuilding. Is this crazy or noble? It seems that no matter the devastation, there’s a resilience within us to rebuild whatever has been destroyed. Whether this story is true or not, we need to have such a story, so we can believe there is a way out.

The story of Nagasaki tells us that while it’s incredibly hard, it’s possible to make peace with the truth of almost anything—to accept the unalterable fact of reality. This is not resignation but the courage to see what is there. In order to proceed, we must feel the injustice where it burns; feel the loss and what it’s taken; grieve so as not to unknowingly perpetrate the same injustice on others; and unlace the cruelty in order to keep it from happening again.

Though forgiveness is possible, some cruelties are unforgivable. If I had been one to survive Nagasaki, I don’t know if I could ever forgive the Americans for dropping the bomb or Emperor Hirohito for being so ruthlessly stubborn in provoking the Allies to drop it. Recently, I stood before the ovens at Terezin, an hour north of Prague, stared into the bed of ash where 30,000 Jews were burned, and walked by the Ohre River in which the Nazis threw tons of body ash to eliminate the evidence. I stood there and felt every emotion burn till I was left with a somber and stark acceptance.

These sites are unspeakably dark, the human ash of the Holocaust and the incinerated lives of Nagasaki. Yet though heinous acts happen when we eclipse our humanity, the world is not a dark place. Nor is the human heart. In our response to adversity, there is always one more hand that gives than takes, one more voice than all those silenced, and one more slip of moonlight that we can feed to those broken of hope.

My time at Terezin helped me understand that reconciliation is not about reparation or compensation or resolution. It is the difficult journey of meeting the truth of what-is in a way that allows those who are hurt to be whole again. It is the inner task of coming to terms with the truth of what has happened and what is still possible between the violated and the violator. But more importantly, between the violated and life. And accepting the truth does not minimize the need for justice. But whether justice is possible or not, reconciliation is necessary. This call to meet truth is how we reconcile what has happened to us with our larger understanding of life. All so we can preserve the roots of humanity and go on.

There’s always a bell to be rung that tells us it is safe to come out and try again. Often, it’s the bell of understanding that rings through our being when the nerve of life is struck. Even when everything is taken, there’s something in us that will twitch its way back into the light.

• In your journal, describe someone you admire who is a bell ringer through adversity. What is it that you admire about them? Where does this quality live in you? How can you nurture it?

• In conversation with a friend or trusted loved one, discuss your own journey of meeting the truth of what-is. How is such acceptance serving you?

Serving Rice

Sometimes, it is the smallest gesture that speaks more than all the sermons in the world. In 2004, I was at the Parliament of World Religions in Barcelona, where the Sikh sages gave up their chance to speak in front of thousands in favor of making lunch for everyone in a plaza near the sea. Every day, as the ministers and priests spoke fervently, the Sikh elders served rice in silence.

I was deeply moved the quiet certainty of their kindness. It has stayed with me all these years as a living symbol of the tension between all that waits to come alive within us and between us and all that is thickly human that keeps blocking us from our true nature. So, tell me that all things are possible, if you want, but hold me when I can’t get out of the way. Insist that there’s no limit to what we can accomplish but sit with me when I can’t get off the couch. And imagine that we are born for greatness, if you must, but outwait this loneliness with me as long as you can.

In this thorough and endless struggle between how our being soars and how our humanness plods lies the nobility of our time on Earth. Perhaps there is no greater example of this struggle than Abraham Lincoln, who somehow found the strength and determination to lead a country through a devastating civil war while constantly trudging through the weight of own depression. Though the details change, we each live out our own version of this.

So, I remain committed to discovering what form of rice I can serve that can contribute to the hunger in our age. And even though the problems of our age, like every age, seem insurmountable, we can begin by filling the crack before us, by feeding the hunger of the person we come upon, and by repairing the bridge the storm has broken in the midst of our journey. Perhaps the most difficult things to attend, in any age, are the invisible cracks that separate us, the inner hungers that pain us, and the intangible bridges that wait to be repaired.

I ask you, then, what form of rice are you called to serve, with a quiet certainty, that will make good use of your gifts? To inhabit such a call, I think we need to personalize certain practices, which small as they are will help repair the world. Here are a few:

• How to discern what we need to listen to in order to enliven our gifts?

• How to break our screen mentality and restore our direct connection with life?

• How to listen before speaking?

• How to give more than we take?

• How to stay open to views and experiences other than our own?

I’m reminded of the legendary basketball icon and human rights advocate, Bill Russell, who said, “Is it possible to do things for each other and not to each other?” I think we have to turn his core question into another essential practice and vow: I will, every day, commit to doing things for each other and not to each other. Detail what this might look like for you.

• In your journal, describe, how given your gifts, you can be of good use to those around you. What, if anything, is standing in the way of you living this out?

• In conversation with a friend or trusted loved one, discuss what form of serving rice befits you best. How are you called to help?

A Small Boy in Rome

I came across a photograph taken at the end of World War II. It’s both a heartbreaking and inspiring image of our capacity to respond to adversity, captured by American photojournalist David Seymour, widely known as Chim. UNESCO commissioned Chim to photograph the orphans and children who survived World War II. His travels in Europe during 1947-48 resulted in a sixty-two-page classic called Children of Europe, published by UNESCO in 1949.

This photo was taken in 1948 in Rome. I came across it while wandering in the International Center for Photography in New York City. It centers on a blind boy, eight or nine, who lost his arms in World War II. At an outdoor table in the sun, his small head is pressed against the pages of a large book of Braille. In the rubble, he’s learning to read by rubbing his lips across the raised dots on the page.

A Blind, Armless Boy Reading with His Lips, Italy, 1948, Chim

This is more than a sad photo. It’s more than poignant. It’s emblematic of all that is human. What happened to this little boy is tragic, but his want to learn how to read is a testament to how the human spirit continues to glow after the life that carries it is broken. Unable to see or turn the pages, the boy is immersed in feeling the raised words against his lips. He’s becoming the words. It’s a moment of unmitigated living.

I couldn’t move from the wall on which this photo hung. Like a brilliant sunset, made more beautiful and compelling because of the dark silhouette of trees it bursts through, the resilience of the human spirit alive in this little boy, bursting through the dark losses of war, remains brilliant, beautiful, and compelling.

From the lips of a war-torn child comes the irrepressible impulse to keep going. Beyond all principle and philosophy, beyond all religious codes, this is the human seed which only knows to wait and sprout. This is the indestructible life-force we are born with. The moment seems to say, if we could just kiss what we’re given, our difficulties would show us how to read the signs of life.

But there’s more in this telling moment. Starkly, we are responsible for everything in this photograph. Deeply, we are everything in this photograph and capable of everything in this photograph. We are the dark ones who create the war. We are the strong ones who clean up the ruins. We are the exhausted who keep rebuilding the world after we destroy it. And we are the bewildered boy born into a world beyond his control. And we are the violent ones who cause him to lose his arms. And the determined ones who create the Braille. And the kind ones who set up the worn table in the ruins that he comes to. And we are the compassionate who turn the pages. And we are the relentless witness traveling vast distances to photograph all that is human.

We contain and grow these destinies: to be creative, to be destructive, to be resilient, and to bear witness. Over and over, we create and destroy and resurrect against all odds. In each generation, everything depends on what we choose while here. The trial of every generation, the trial we face now, about the necessity of choosing love over fear, of choosing the big raft over the little raft, of accepting that we are interdependent creatures who, given the chance, will make honey of our suffering. I keep saying it like a prayer I don’t quite understand: we are more together than alone.

In the heart of it all, we are both irrepressible and uncontainable, compelled to find our way into the sun, even when we’ve lost the ability to see, and compelled to help each other through. Perhaps, the best of community comes down to this: taking turns being blind and sighted as we tumble through all life has to offer, surviving the ruins, clearing the rubble, and learning to read the signs of life as we help each other up, again and again.

And once raising our heads from the ruins, one more time, we are called to discern how we got here and what keeps us going. It brings to mind and heart this invocation to kindness by the ever-brave and tender seer of our time Ram Dass, who said, “Whether it’s the first day of the Apocalypse or the first day of the Golden Age, the work remains the same… to love each other and ease as much suffering as we can.”

• In your journal, describe an experience that has taught you that we are more together than alone. How does this effect how you move in the world?

• In conversation with a friend or trusted loved one, discuss how you understand the ever-torquing creative and destructive forces as they appear in the world and in ourselves?

The Gift and the Saddle

One of my favorite images comes from the Japanese poet Basho. In 1689, he is walking around the Island of Japan and doesn’t know the way. He asks a farmer who says, “It’s easier if you just take my horse. He knows the way. When you get to the next town, just let him go and he’ll come home.” So Basho is led by this majestic creature and at edge of the next town, he ties a gift to the empty saddle and sends the horse home. That image of the riderless horse with a gift tied to its empty saddle touches me. Perhaps because I’ve been lost so many times over the years. Perhaps because I’ve been quietly saved by the kindness of strangers. Perhaps because some of my most satisfying moments as a human being have risen from the anonymous giving that we are sometimes called to offer. Perhaps because being a spirit in the world is so much like following a riderless horse that we lose and share and return to each other.

I do know that the more centered I become, the more I realize that I am not the Center, and that love is not arrived at but lived. And so, I believe that birth—in all its forms—is not a gate left open behind us, but an ongoing awakening—in which the sincere and honest moment is a temple with no doors.

We have time for one more story, which comes from the vast mythology of Gabriel Marcia Marquez. It goes like this. Somewhere, in a time like our own, a father is pensively trying to solve the world’s problems when his little boy comes in and says, “Father, I want to help.” The weary man appreciates the gesture but only feels the child’s presence as a hindrance. But the boy persists. So the father takes a map of the world and rips it into little pieces, gives them to the boy, and says, “I know you like puzzles. You can help by piecing the world back together. The boy protests, “But father, I don’t even know what the world looks like!” His father laughs, “Nonetheless, this is how you can help,” and he sends him off, expecting that this will occupy his son for days.

And so, the pensive man returns to his weary reflections. Two days later, his son comes bounding in, shouting, “Father! Father! I’ve put the world back together!” And sure enough, all the torn pieces are taped into a beautiful whole. His father is stunned, “But how did you do this?”

The boy is eager to show him and turns the map of the world over, saying, “On the back was a picture of a person, Father. I put the person back together and then turned it over and the world was back together!”

This simple story carries the profound wisdom that when we put ourselves back together, we put the world back together. That each of our unfathomable journeys is a torn piece in the living puzzle that is the world. That each time we take the exquisite risk toward being whole, toward living in the open, toward recognizing and affirming that we are, at heart, each other, we put the world back together. The truth is that each of our struggles matters, and we need each other to turn the story of our lives over to see how they so beautifully go together. Isn’t all our work about the picture of the person and the picture of the world and how the thousand torn pieces wait to be joined?

In a time of woe, we must reanimate our basic human nature. We must drop everything to save whatever is near us from falling in the well. We must inch our way out of the rubble and ring the bell of humanity, one more time. And every time you find your way, please, tie a gift to the empty saddle. For every time we put a piece of ourselves together, the world, in all its possibility, begins again.

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¹“Nalanda University was brutally sacked by the fanatic Turk general, Bakhtiyar Khilji…” From Buddhist Monks And Monasteries of India: Their History And Contribution To Indian Culture, Dutt, Sukumar. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1962, pp. 352–353.

²“Thousands of monks were beheaded…” From “The Buddha and the Sahibs” by William Dalrymple.

³“The library was vandalized and burned...” From The Story of Early Indian Civilization, Gertrude Emerson Sen. Orient Longmans, 1964.

⁴“A week before the atomic bomb was dropped...” Details about Nagasaki and the atomic bomb are from Final Months of the Pacific War, Tom Skylark, Georgetown University Press, 2002, p. 178; “World War II: Second Atomic Bomb That Ended the War,” C.V. Glines, in Aviation History, January 1997, http://www.historynet.com/world-war-ii-second-atomic-bomb-that-ended-the-war.htm; Record Group 457, Records of the National Security Agency, Central Security Service, Diplomatic Summaries 1942-1945, box 18, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/index.htm; and “Nuclear Power: The End of the War Against Japan,” Duncan Anderson, BBC History, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/nuclear_01.shtml.

⁵“One survivor...” From “When Atom Bomb Struck—Uncensored.” Life Magazine, Issue 33, No. 13 (September 29, 1952), pp. 19-24.

⁶“Chim…” The American photojournalist David Seymour was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1911 as David Szymin. With heart and determination, he chronicled the rawness of the human spirit meeting the rawness of the world. He died while on assignment in Suez in 1956. The photo mentioned appeared in the exhibit Chim at the International Center for Photography in New York City, August 28, 2007. His photo-essay, Children of Europe, was published by UNESCO in 1949.

⁷“A Blind, Armless Boy Reading with His Lips, Italy, 1948, Chim” Photograph from Children of Europe, UNESCO, 1949, http://blindflaneur.com/2008/02/19/curiosity-the-blind-photographer-2-david-seymour/.