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Maybe Adell sent her.

Her last message to the world was this: Radically, ridiculously, and without condition, love yourself. That’s it. Everything else will take care of itself. 

I have been crying for the last two hours while listening to people talk about how Adell Shay opened their hearts, about the importance of meditation. I consider how she made me feel special and loved every time I spoke to her. She told me what was good about me. She told me why she loved me.

Five years ago I took a job far away on the West Bank of New Orleans. I would wake in the mornings sometimes and hold tight to my dog and say, “You’re the only one who really loves me.” I dreaded driving those twenty minutes to stand before thirty-five eleven year olds. I had no idea what I had gotten myself into.

All I could hear at the time that I took the job was the answer to my question for the principal about whether I could build a garden right outside the classroom door. It was all I could see. And it was what would connect me to a boy who could not write his name correctly. It was what brought me closer to this boy from whose plastic seat I wiped pee without letting any of the other students know.

He arrived before everybody else. Always the first into the classroom. I let him fill a water pot in the bathroom and go outside to sprinkle this around Thai red roselle. I always made sure to check the sink before he came back inside and often had to turn off the running water. 

This morning with him–I think his name was Steven–before all the students came was a reprieve, a short break before chaos. This would be the first place I heard an adult scream at a child to watch his tone. I would snap a clipboard on the desk of a boy with fat fingers. I would get in an argument with a ten year old about how tennis shoes do not make you cool. I would teach children to infer. 

And when they asked, “Mr. George, you got those shoes at the Dollar Store?” I would reply with, “Yes, two for one. My shoes and your haircut.”

Steven’s cousin was usually the second to arrive. I let her water too. 

I think about these moments now and realize how peaceful the world is before a storm, the same as the way the sky breaks and sometimes turns half black and half white and slides across heaven in the middle of the day.

During those times I woke at five, wrote for twenty minutes, meditated, wrote for another twenty. I would listen to chapter fifteen of Ram Dass Be Here Now and record the sunrise over the Crescent City Connection while chanting aloud Shri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram. 

One morning, in the middle of the bridge, recording the sunrise through the iron, I started crying. I never cry. I thought of my dad, gone not even a year at that time. I felt him. I heard him. No words or touch. I knew there was something. 

I felt the same at the memorial for Adell Shay today. She left her body on the exact same date, August 15, six years after my dad.

I called her during these trying times when my sense of self remained in the hands of eleven year olds. 

I heard many people today say how she changed their lives.

This is how she changed mine. A simple question.

“What if your only real job is to see the divine inside each child?”