Where is home?

Where is home?

This seems like such a simple question. Yet, for many within the world today, the answer is much different than each one of them probably ever expected it would be.
With a growing number of refugees internationally, globalization and changes in borders and boundaries drawn by men, the answers to this question are both metaphysical and tied to people and place.

If you're wondering how could this be, I'll ask you to contemplate a situation. Imagine that you could not return to the place you loved most, the place where you knew the traditions, how to act, the language, the foods, a place where you were loved and somehow just fit right in. Indeed, you would carry it in your heart like a precious jewel.

So, too, in the age of globalization, a growing number of citizens seek the place that beckons them, the place where they can live to the fullest, offer the most to the world for whatever reason. Some admittedly have lived within their native lands as foreigners, strangers and/or slaves with no ties to the land or its customs, merely experiences to build upon.

For humanitarians, the answer is so very often both metaphysical and tied to people and place. After all, we are all ONE. In that oneness, everywhere is one place and each place is a reflection of every other place. Lands are all at once distant and right here right now within one's minds eye. Yet, the place humanitarians and world citizens often call home is either within the land where they become a more engaged citizen or within the land or place that empowered them to do so.

Interesting, isn't it?

During my time in Huai hua, Hunan Province China, I met persons from more than 60 countries. Some had travelled to many lands seeking health and restoration. Others had travelled and lived abroad for business, educational reasons or for personal reasons, including fleeing persecution due to governmental changes. Yet, the place that each of them called home was as individual as each of them.

One man I met was Saudi Arabian by birth but raised in Italy. He fought the Italian government as a young man for many years, when the government seized his family's lands and cheated them. For years, he lived in Ethiopia and rather paradoxically found himself applying for a visa to live with his family in Saudi Arabia. Because his parents were born there and his brother, as well, they could claim the Saudi nationality. My friend could NOT! Yet, Saudi Arabia was the place he called home.

He was an incredibly gracious and appreciative man who shared his adventures in Italy and his love of the culture, and his love of Ethiopian music. He could talk about the vast and varied changes in many lands and articulate the facts with personal stories. Yet, no matter, where his business led him, he always returned to Saudi Arabia before his visa expired. Despite or inspite of every circumstance, it was home.

May I be a boat, a bridge, a passage for those desiring the further shore.


It is with a saddened and disheartened heart that I look upon the state of affairs within America and the world that the official government and the private somewhat hidden economic sectors touch throughout the world....

Yet, I have hope!
Hearts and minds come together without seeing or realizing borders and people collaborate for the greater good. Albeit, these are often the grassroots groups and some of the nonprofit organizations, but as long as they exist there is hope that someone will listen and understand, shed light into the darkness and effect change!

I never set out to bridge humanity or awaken the West to the realities of its inadequacies globally. However, dialogue and targeted actions through the WHO and various other channels must bridge the US and the health care sector it engages to invoke the tools of neocolonialism and not only dispel them but also integrate indigenous and cultural knowledge and together heal the world as the 1978 Alma Ata dictates. This has never been more crucial!

According to Dr. Benson in 1987, modern medicine only effectively addresses less than 25% of all illness and currently that percentage has fallen dramatically with the rise of drug resistant Malaria and TB and the pandemic of chronic diseases. additionally, we must view the fact that the US health care occupies the lowest level of all developed countries and approximately the fortieth best position in the world.

People suffer needlessly as the need for transplants rise daily. Not only could these be avoided through "Alternative" methods and preventative methods of health care but the sheer number of them indicates much larger problems within modern society. By looking at the integrated whole of the human body and of course the world, the answers become clear.

Resources need to be focused on forgotten diseases and those methods of healing often misunderstood and often overlooked or debased because of lack of cultural knowledge.
By doing so, we realize that racial disparities are created by the system of medical care within the west, which reinforces them through its cultural lens. By engaging and integrating other ways in which to view health and healing, we merely bridge humanity and free ourselves.

Like the ancestors before me who signed the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, I am striving to create a more equal, more harmonious society where not only bodies and minds heal but also the divides constructed by men that separate them. Like them, I must leave the land of my youth and set out for distant shores and strive to bring about new or renewed understanding and effect change.

We have no time to waste. I am merely a bridge, a boat, a passage for those desiring the distant shores. Like my ancestors and so many healers before me, I realize that through compassion, dedication and harnessing the 80% of the world that realizes healing on multiple levels, we can build upon humanity, heal the spirits and bodies and restore a balance we now lack.
Namaste,
湘君