A year ago at this time I was experiencing the last day of my too-short live-in affair with Berlin. Spring was finally gaining ground over winter’s tight hold, the light was accumulating subtly more each day, impetuous buds were breaking forth on the trees, people were beginning to flock to the parks to laze about and absorb the increasing warmth and the rising sap in blood and bone was beginning to awaken and shake off winter’s sleep.

Today is calling me back to my time in Berlin very specifically. Today that ridiculous puppet that is currently named President made the deplorable decision to rain more suffering down upon the people of Syria, who have had twenty times more than enough of it for any lifetime. Today I am remembering the German class I took during my time in Berlin in an arduous attempt to reawaken the buried and slumbering bits of language in my brain, and today I am specifically remembering the Syrian man who was part of my class.
It was a month-long course and at the end of it we all had to give a 5-minute presentation in German about a topic of our choosing. Mahmoud and I were the two quietest people in the class and, at least in my experience, we seemed to be the two who struggled the most, though, to be fair, everyone else in class had a huge lead on me because they all knew English in addition to their mother tongue whereas I pretty much only knew American and a random smattering of bits from a few other languages.

I don’t remember all of the presentations, but I will never forget Mahmoud’s. This gentle, reserved man put together an unexpectedly beautiful slideshow and presentation about his home of Damascus. I sat through his halting words and growing emotion and thought how beautiful a place it was and felt a bit sad that I would most likely never get to visit it….and then quickly upon that thought dawned the realization that he might never get to see it again either.
And here he was, exiled from his home that he loved so much, living in a strange foreign country trying to learn the language to be able to get a job and build a life there, probably with family members still living in war-torn Damascus and possibly not knowing how they were or if they were all still alive, to be separated from them in such a time of need and not be able to help, to battle the knowledge that such earth-shattering events in your life and the lives of others were happening in the world and were also being blindly ignored by so many other people, people who had the power to help and possibly stop such things happening. And there I was, about to return home to America and what would it be like if war suddenly broke out and I was stranded in this foreign country, unable to return home, unable to account for my family and friends’ well-beings, to not know if they were safe or suffering, to not be able to help from such a vast distance away, to contemplate the possibility of not ever being able to return home to the place that I loved, to have such devastation hang on my heart and wonder how other people could not care that it was happening. To try and imagine, just for a minute, what the reality of that experience would be like.

By the end of his presentation Mahmoud was practically vibrating with a deep welling of emotion for his home and had run out of things easy to express. The intensity of it filled the room and I could see the effect on everyone else’s faces and how none of us quite knew what to say to honor it without being too heavy or too light.
Still, to this day, I remember that, the intensity of emotion that gripped him as he talked of his home.
Still, I think of that day, I think of Mahmoud, every one of the too few times I see some news about Syria.

I do not know how we are to do it, but we need to bring the fire of humanity back to our leaders, to open their hearts to compassion for their fellows and to all the suffering that they are perpetuating in this world. This is madness to not care. This is pure madness to know of terrible things being done and do nothing but make them worse.
My crying is nothing compared to theirs.

May our leaders all wake up to their mortality, to their humanity and connection with every other living being on this planet. May our leaders wake up with hearts overflowing with love and compassion for all others and with minds sharply focused and motivated to use their power to move mountains to end the suffering of so many peoples on this earth.
May we all wake up. May we all be free from suffering. May we all share peace in this lifetime.