Ashes for beauty

The first week of classes is barely halfway over and my fingers are already cracked and bleeding. A dim mirror of the state of my heart.

Miss Kelly, I have other news for you. Dawatashi is dead. Self died. From a tree. No one was at home and we only know yesterday.

Ashes.

A thousand torments from such news. Like being hit by a train, having the breath ripped from every corner of your body, and drowning all at once. On his name card, in order to help me learn names, a hastily scribbled reminder of who he was: Crazy boy always smiling

Ashes.

The students are expressionless. Their culture refuses to accept public displays of grief. But through my own tear marbled eyes pain is obvious. The boys from his dorm room are silent at night there are eight beds Miss Kelly, but one is empty. All they can mutter is the, now increasingly meaningless, Om mane padme hum chant as they ponder the sure fate of their classmate in Tibet when someone self dies it will take 500 lives to be human again. And the only thing in my mind is: He didn't know the Truth... and neither do they.

Ashes. Pile up and are swept away ingraining themselves into your skin.

In the teacher's office polite chatter and news years greetings, sick and bland, get caught in my throat. Do they know? As I share the news with a fellow teacher my heart finds a voice in her bewildered visage and we spend the break between classes in the school cafeteria eating meat pies and consoling each other. Faces to the floor, other teacher's acknowledge the event with only silence.

Ashes.

Ashes shift through my fingers and blow in my face as I raise them up before the One who has promised beauty in exchange for them.

He has sent me... to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and freedom to the prisoners... to comfort all who mourn... to give them a crown of beauty instead of ashes...

And it is with a renewed urgency and desperation, in the face of or because of a broken bleeding heart, for the 79 remaining students, for the 34 new ones, for the 80 returned from their practice teaching, for the thousands of others on this campus and in this city...that I do just that.

Ashes...
Ashes...

Beauty?