The Center of the World

An excerpt from Love and Democracy, which is now in independent bookstores and on Amazon. 

Toyah is a tiny town near Pecos. I went to its town hall and explained that an 89-year-old woman was walking across the nation for better government, and did they please know anyone who might put her up for the night?

They pointed down the road to the home of Berta Begay. Berta said she had a second little house, a yellow cottage by the rail tracks, that she kept for her visiting children. It was ours for as long as we needed it, she said. Doris would stay there a few days as I ferried her back and forth from her daily walk. I slept in the van.

All her effort so far had been “West of the Pecos,” an old marker between the frontier West and civilization. As usual, there was an event in the town of Pecos already planned, just when we needed one. It was an all-night walkathon for cancer in the town’s rodeo arena. We worked on the speech on an oilcloth-covered kitchen table in Berta’s little yellow house. She delivered it by flashlight. The speech has been copied countless times. It was taught in a rhetoric class at Penn State and several other schools. Here it is:

“Thank you. I am honored to be here in Pecos. On January 1st, I began my walk to Washington D.C. from Los Angeles, some 1,200 miles ago. All those miles so far have been walked in a place that is best described as the land west of the Pecos. On Sunday, I will wade across the Pecos and enter the other half of creation. But tonight, I am here at the center of the world and am proud to meet all of you who live here.

“I thank you for having me here on such a beautiful evening. Life is a beautiful experience, and here we all are together, alive at this moment, breathing the same cool air. The issue that brings us here tonight is a terrible disease, of course, and we fight it because we naturally rise to the fight against any evil that threatens those we love.

“Deep inside we can be joyful to remember that nobody really dies in this great drama of the soul we live in eternally. Some of us move on faster than others, and we so deeply miss those who have left this stage before us. Tonight, we see that there is something we can do with that loneliness and pain.

“When my husband died and then my best friend, Elizabeth, I looked at my life and my lifelong beliefs and said to myself, what shall I do now? What can I do to honor the memory of the people I have loved? How can I turn my pain into something beautiful in the world? Something beautiful? Let me tell you that great Art and great Writing often are the transformation of suffering into beauty. Life is full of suffering, and what we must do when we have more of it than we can bear is to trick it into beauty, through a medium of exchange such as art, or handiwork, or a written story or poem, or good parenting, or good friendship, or the creation of good work in the community, or the pursuit of some unfinished work we may find among our lifelong interests and concerns, some of which we put away in the attic for too long. What work can I do that may be done now as a memorial to those I miss? What can I do to amaze them and fill their angel eyes with tears and laughter as they watch me lovingly from the other side?

“And so, if you’re here tonight because you are remembering someone lost, you are turning that loss into the Art of this special evening we share together. And if you are here to pursue your own battle with a dangerous disease, or to give emotional support to someone you love who is doing that or who has lost someone, then you are a part of that creative transformation of pain to beauty. What is more beautiful than people warmly sharing an evening together in the glow of candles? What is more healing?

“The issue that I decided to do something about as a memorial to the people I loved and still love is political reform of our elections. It is, of course, a fool's errand. It is just an old woman walking across the land, wearing Elizabeth's gardening hat, talking to whomever will listen about the kind of political reforms most people don't believe can really happen. But there is something I would like you to understand about impossible missions: Sometimes, all you can do is put your body in front of a problem and stand there as a witness to it. That is part of healing because it is not denial of the problem, and our individual conscious mind is part of the larger conscious mind of society. What you think and how you think does affect the world, and your actions do matter.

“Never be discouraged from being an activist because people tell you that you'll not succeed. You have already succeeded if you're out there representing truth or justice or compassion or fairness or love. You already have your victory because you have changed the world; you have changed the status quo by you; you have changed the chemistry of things, and changes will spread from you, will be easier to happen again in others because of you, because believe it or not, you are the center of the world.

“There is a second thing you need to know about impossible causes, and it is this: there are no impossible causes on this earth if they are good causes. We can do anything together, and we really do, in fact, achieve remarkable things together. We will cure cancer most certainly because people like you walk through the night to make it so. We have nearly eradicated polio worldwide, we have cured smallpox, we are curing many of the diseases --the cures for which were thought were impossible dreams a short time ago.

“My dream of political reform will come true. I may live to see it from this side of life, or I will smile to see it from the other side. But it will happen. It will happen because people love this country and this democracy and because they have given their sons and daughters and the best years of their own lives to defend it. They will not let it be destroyed before their eyes. I know we will end that outrage, and we will be able to operate our communities and our nation in ways that look after the interests of the common people––for that is what a democracy is all about.

“I walk this road for my late dear friend Elizabeth and for my dear, dear, late husband Jim, so that they will be surprised and proud of me and we will have something new to talk about when next we meet. And I do it for myself and for the thousands of people I have met along my path who love this country and who are deeply worried about it. I do it for you.

“I wish all of you good health. I wish all of you the courage to live out your emotions and your beliefs in your daily lives, just as you are doing tonight. I admire you all tremendously, and I will always remember this evening at the great center of our beautiful world.”

The next morning, she did wade across the Pecos. Yes, there is a bridge, but the river looked refreshing on that hot morning, and she had said she would. Also, I wanted the photo to send along to her growing list of supporters and to our lobbyists, Matt and Claudia, to remind Congress that she was unstoppable and they might as well pass the bill, which they would.