"Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive."
Kabir, "To Be a Slave of Intensity"
Can enter your life
Just like that: a knock
Out of nowhere
And you've slipped away
To a rendezvous with destiny
That always awaited you.
- EJC, "The Birth and Death of Trauma"
Myths and popular tales, like life, are replete with accounts of those not answering the call, of locking the door to their hearts and shutting themselves up in sterile and safe lives where the rest of the world is not even an afterthought, where others suffer and die because of one's indifference. Answering can be very dangerous, for it can take you on a journey from which you may never return, surely, at least, as the same person. Only the courageous heed the call.
When Carolyn Forche', a twenty-seven year old naà ¯ve academic poet living in the San Diego area, miraculously answered the call of a Salvadorian stranger named Leonel Gà ³mez Vides, who showed up at her door out of the blue, to go to El Salvador, a country she knew very little about but to which he said war was coming and her poet's eye was needed, she acted intuitively and bravely from her deep soul's murmurings and said yes, not knowing why or where she was heading except into the unknown.
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