I was in the middle of writing a letter to him when I found out Guru Nitya had died.  My letter sounded very much like what a confused and angsty 17-year-old might write, since that is exactly what I was. “What actually happens when we die? Is there any meaning in the universe?”  That morning, I sobbed as I walked to class, disconsolate that I would never learn the truth. Thirteen years later, the absolute silence that answered my letter has turned out to be the best reply I could have hoped for.

For most of the “Gurukula kids,” Guru Nitya’s presence loomed large in our lives as we grew up. School vacations were planned around him. His philosophical musings informed our dinner conversations. He was clearly the reason that I was one of the only vegetarians in my grade, and certainly the only student who could chant in Sanskrit.  In spite of this, like many of us second-generation American members of the Gurukula family, I don’t consider myself a disciple of any guru in particular.

Nitya died before I had a chance to approach him as a Guru, and in the years since, I have come to be thankful for that. In allowing me to love him as a grandchild does a grandparent, Guru Nitya taught me that philosophy should be the spark that ignites action, rather than its own all-consuming fire. I witnessed Guru Nitya’s kindness and his mischievous sense of humor. I also saw him complain and act imperious.  And each day I spent at the Gurukulam, I observed him counseling the desperate, resolving disputes, and inspiring brilliance in others. I understood him as profoundly human, but his actions embodied what I now think of as a life of service.

In college, I was a philosophy major, and even considered getting a Ph.D. I loved all of our discussions in class but I found myself frustrated that the philosophy department was among the least engaged on campus, ignoring the complex issues facing both our college and the town we lived in. Soon after graduating, I decided to leave academics behind completely and work as a wrangler on a ranch in Arizona. I was surprised by how fulfilling it was to feed the horses at 5:30 in the morning, and then work until dark herding cattle and teaching riding lessons.

The south fence of the ranch, nothing but barbed wire and slim metal posts, was also the border with Mexico. Every day, up to fifty migrant workers made their way across our desert pastures. I would greet them as they passed, and then wonder at what had brought them here and where they were going. One day, when I was out on a training ride, my horse spooked at some papers stuck in a cactus, snapping in the wind. I got down to investigate and soon realized I was holding four Mexican birth certificates in my hand.

As I read over the documents, I was struck with a feeling of dread. What horrible circumstance had caused someone to abandon the only proof of their identity in the middle of an inhospitable desert? Had they run from border patrol agents? Were they murdered by the drug smugglers who used our land as a staging ground? Did they die of thirst? They were painfully young, younger than I was, born between 1984 and 1992. Over the next few months of work, I never stopped imagining the lives represented by those birth certificates.  I knew enough to realize that regardless of what had happened to these people, they had been driven into my country by poverty and desperation, and I bore a responsibility for that fact that I could not quite articulate.

I didn’t suddenly become enlightened or decide that I could somehow fix things for these young men who I had never met, but the recognition of the essential humanity I shared with them pushed me into action. When we confront the fact that we are deeply responsible for each other’s suffering and joy, we allow ourselves to engage with the principle of “tat tvam asi” or “That I Am.” As Guru Nitya writes in his commentary on Verse 16 of Atmopadesa Sattakam, “when I see everyone here as my own self, I become many times more responsible. My responsibility is an unlimited liability: I owe everything to everyone.”  I had engaged in armchair philosophy, and I tried physical labor with no thought behind it. Finding those birth certificates helped germinate the seed that Guru Nitya had first planted: I realized that that I needed to act with the urgency that comes from understanding that we are all responsible for one another.

I quit my job on the ranch, and moved to Boston, where I spent my days working with migrant laborers and their families, attempting to help them attend school and learn English. Since then, I’ve committed myself to my own definition of a life of service. I run a non-profit called Project Aruna which helps minority high school students in the US and indigenous youth in Guatemala to address the problems facing our global community.  On a trip to Guatemala this spring, I felt deep satisfaction as I watched a young man from Oakland learning the Mayan Mam language from a Guatemalan girl, and then teaching her a few words in English. They couldn’t stop laughing, but neither of them forgot the words they memorized that day.  They were hungry to communicate authentically with each other, in spite of the differences in gender, race, culture, and language that attempted to pull them apart.

Guru Nitya has been dead for over a decade, and the barbed wire fence at the border was replaced by a nine-foot-tall concrete and razor wire wall. In the intervening years, I have slowly shed the need to glean objective meaning from this vast universe we all share. Both Guru Nitya’s influence while he was alive and his silence in death have pushed me to create my own answers to the many urgent questions that ask us to merge reflection and action in defense of our common humanity. I consider the example of how Nitya lived, and the challenge of that artificial line in the desert sand to be the essential lessons that forced me to engage with the demands placed on all of us by one simple phrase: That I Am. 

Originally published in Gurukulam Magazine 2013.