Michelle Yasmine Valladares

blessed is the father who sat my brother and I down, warned us of how we might be treated after immigration. to anticipate the names called behind our backs or to our faces, the jokes and slander at our expense. he spoke from experience of growing up Catholic in Bombay. he recalled driving with my mother across the southern states in 1968, remembered motels with vacancies and diners with tables that refused them. he jabbed his cigarette into the air like a weapon—“whatever they say, they are wrong. remember they are ignorant and idiots.” blessed is the mother who fought for another table in her loud, Indian, accented voice, each time we entered a restaurant. at thirteen, I cringed and wished for invisibility. wasn’t this the local tradition in Scottsdale when you were new in town—to seat a family of four by the toilets. racism, discrimination, injustice were words I learned at home, not at school, not in mixed company, never in public. blessed are the parents who drove us out of Marblehead the night the cousin who shouted at me to get my “black arse out of his father’s car,” decided to beat up my uncle. we stopped first in church so my mother could stop crying and then in a bookstore so she could buy the Best Public Schools on the East Coast. blessed is the teacher in Cold Spring Harbor, who intervenes when the white boy asks if our school is segregated, as if my brother and I are invisible.

blessed is my best friend’s mother who takes me to my first march at ten for disabled children in Kuwait and my second march at nineteen for racial justice on Martin Luther King’s Day in Washington DC. blessed are African Americans whose time for real justice arrives, arrives, and arrives. blessed are the activists, the essential workers sacrificing themselves on the front lines for BLACK LIVES MATTER.

blessed are the Buddhist teachers who emphasize lovingkindness as the one-word solution to our anger and hate. our minds of delusions are the real enemy. living beings are our mothers. these are koans to meditate on day and night. blessed are the friends and family who connect in a strange summer of quarantine. all of us know someone dead of Covid-19. all of us hunkered down, isolated in our epicenters. we share stories to reinvent ourselves, transform like acorns and wildflower seeds into trees and fields of golden poppies. blessed is the inexpensive and colorful one hundred percent cotton bandanna that workers have used throughout the ages. blessed are the brown, Latinx, Black, white, Muslim, mixed race and bodies of every gender on Rockaway Beach, when the thresher shark is rescued off the jetty’s rocks. one man lifts its tail and the other its bleeding belly. and we all clap as the shark swims out to sea … though it will die hours later on the sand. still hope for the first time in weeks is resurrected because strangers collectively cheer for the life of the living being that scares us.