“When the eyes and the ears are open, even the leaves on the trees teach like pages from the scriptures.” Kabir
The newspaper has gotten old and rumpled and yellow. Written entirely in Chinese; I have no idea what it says. It has traveled with me around the world. Decades later, it rests on my altar at home, a sacred object that continues to teach a most treasured lesson. I’ll try to explain with words…
My husband was one of the first to visit China decades ago when the country first opened its borders to western businessmen. I traveled with him sometimes, often to very rural areas.
That trip was an awkward and difficult and lonely one for me. 
We traveled in the middle of winter, a time of freezing cold and fierce Siberian winds that did little to disperse the leaden coal-fired smog. There were tensions around a new business that was still finding its legs and mistakes on all sides as two foreign cultures bumped against each other. Nevertheless, I loved the dusty dirt paths that wound around the towns, the pristine gardens, the wandering geese, the friendly bicyclers emerging endlessly out of the gray air. The ancient Buddhist temples spaces were just then coming back to public life after decades of cultural persecution. We often stopped to visit. An ancient rural temple: that is where I met him, and where he gave me the gift.
The Chinese man appeared to also be a visitor. As we wandered about together, he looked up, startled, it seemed, to see a white western woman in that out of the way place. His face lit up in surprise and curiosity, his smile widened. He came to me and, in vain, attempted conversation. We had no common language.
As he stood before me, beaming and open hearted, he thrust into my hands the only gift that he could offer: that day’s rumpled local newspaper, pulled quickly from his back pocket. It was such a touching gift of his heart, needing no translation. ” I am here,” it said, “I see and welcome you; I am glad.” My own heart broke. Open. I can still feel the holy goodness of receiving such care and presence and grace.
It was such a small thing, that moment, that newspaper. And yet the nourishment of his
open heart remains today, so many years later. There is something about the purity of it: a well-used newspaper, one that I couldn’t read: it obviously made no conceptual sense. But his gift landed firmly in my own heart and nourished a tired traveler in a way that no words or logic could have.
Today, I contemplate the ways that virtue and the goodness of simple presence can pierce the clouds of a heart that is burdened by habit or fatigue or disconnection. I contemplate the challenge of allowing my own heart to remain open and receptive when I am surprised or shy or impatient or uncertain. I contemplate the goodness of receiving as well as giving. I think about Sujata, who, centuries ago, saw a hungry, dying ascetic in a public square and offered him that tiny bowl of rice milk. I think about how Siddhartha opened to receive, softening his insistence that his life, his spiritual practice, must unfold according to mental concept and heroic effort. I contemplate how the two of them, together in their simple openness to one another, changed the course of history.
Siddhartha lived.
In that long ago moment in China, that man’s gift reminded me to look, to open my mind and heart to small things, to release concept, to give and receive nourishment in the everyday temples of the sacred. His gift reverberates, still. So I tell you about it.