Here I lived. Almost. About 40 miles north. In Abiquiu. Where Georgia O’Keeffe visited in the 1920s. Captivated by the rawest of beauty, she never returned to NYC.
In March, I saw a piece in my local paper, The LA Times. Written and photographed by Pulitzer finalists. Why, I thought, is the LA Times writing about Española — a dusty “city” of 10,000, thirty minutes south of Santa Fe? New Mexico?
Then I read it.
Francine Orr, Los Angles Times, 2023, Española Pathways Shelter
I decided to drive south — meet those gritty souls sacrificing to save a city ransacked for decades with generational trauma and infamous for its drug culture.
My heart is there now. I go back and forth. Hop from Orange County to Española.
I work with the shelter. And the schools. The teens. The ones who look into my eyes with disbelief. “Why would you want to come work HERE?”
“It’s a hobo town.”
“Because I want to. You inspire me to be a better person.”
I don’t wear my faith on my sleeve. A couple of times, they’ve asked.
“Are you religious?”
“No, but I follow Jesus.”
Week by week, transformation. I see it— glimmers of hope, recovery, healing.
I shot this photo of Ricardo last week. He lives in a motor home in Española, New Mexico — more about him below.
But first, when asked these days, “Paul, what do you do?” I struggle to answer. Because my work doesn’t fit any specialty (coder, real estate agent, lawyer), and I hold no traditional job title since I stepped down from President and CEO of For The Children last year.
But even as a generalist with no descriptive job title, the focus of my work today is lucid and grounded in the core of my life mission statement: To work to end the order of ignorance and injustice in the world.
So for over a year, I’ve only said “yes” to ventures addressing more dire social needs.
Here they are.
First, I immediately launched the Child Rights Foundation. Having worked across the nation addressing the issue of child maltreatment, there can be no doubt that this is the single greatest problem we face today. Five children die daily in the U.S., but we never hear about it because we can’t see them; their deaths are hidden from the public’s eye. There’s nothing sensational about it, either. It’s not like a hurricane, fire, or mass shooting — just a trickle of five per day, every day, year after year. But five children a day is a Sandy Hook School shooting every four days. And in terms of costs to our nation, $2 trillion annually, triple our national defense budget!
Part of my work with CRF is with children from the most marginalized cities in the nation — currently, Española. I teach and mentor teens in high school (when I am in town). And I am working with community and state leaders to provide…something for them because there’s little if anything.
Second, I’ve launched the Critical Thinking Initiative, bringing together professors of philosophy and education from some of the world’s leading universities. We are using thousands of years old tools — logic — to train K-12 teachers on how to teach students not what to think but how to think. This work has been tested for over a decade in Australia, with outstanding outcomes.
This work — combatting ignorance — is crucial to my personal mission. Masters like Socrates and Jesus deemed ignorance as the core of human suffering. Socrates went as far as to claim that evil is ignorance (i.e., Hitler was ultimately ignorant of the value of all human life). Jesus forgave those torturing him “…because they know not what they do.”
Third, in Española, I’m throwing myself into the battle against fentanyl. You’ve heard the basics on this insidious substance. I won’t add anything other than working at the epidemic’s epicenter with the city’s only shelter and rehab center. Tremendous social workers bring saving lives. And then providing them with the tools they need to flourish.
That’s where the photo of Ricardo comes in. And I’m happy to say he is fentanyl free! (If you don’t know about the plight of this nondescript city, just read this LA Time article).
Lastly, I continue to advise clients with my firm, Telos Consulting. Sometimes on a pro bono basis with smaller organizations without resources. Of the hundreds of thousands of nonprofits, the smaller ones are doing some heavy lifting, working in hundreds of communities nationwide. These are the ones that, too often, require the most help in creating sustainable best practices.
I’m always humbled by the countless men and women I meet who don’t feel called into the nonprofit sector. Yet they nonetheless lead in other ways that bring transformational differences.
To all laboring for justice and equity, bravo. We share one planet. We’re in this together.
Happy Monday!
P.S. I’m always eager to meet like-hearted laborers, so feel free to email me at paul@paulmartin.org.
You can’t truly understand. But I feel so empty today. A mild sadness. I don’t know where the emptiness or mild sadness comes from. Is it age? Is it old trauma? Is it purely physiological? Is it this May Gray and June Gloom digging in late July? Or, dysthymia?
Or is it just life — or my particular state of life?
I really have nothing to complain about. Life’s never perfect, but it’s good right now. It really is.
You can’t actually understand because all feelings, thoughts, and sensations are subjective — that is Wittgenstein’s Beetle in a Box thought experiment. If I tell you I have a headache and you say, “So do I,” there is no possible way to know we feel the same feeling in our respective skulls. I can only assume how your head feels. And the same applies to feeling tired, anxious, hopeful, or sweetness.
The Finality of Her, Again. The June gloom gray sky today tells all.
We parted two years ago today. We sat around her bed, her children and grandchildren. We cried, then laughed. We reminisced. On the bed lay fresh-picked rose petals scattered around.
She really loved roses, Mom. She loved them unlike anyone else. She’d always stop and smell them while walking, even in a hurry. And she would always get mad if you didn’t stop and smell them with her — not angry, more like “mad,” if you know what I mean. She believed stopping to smell the roses was a remedy for being too busy, too occupied with matters of less importance.
To Mom, few things mattered more than beauty: sights, sound, smell, taste.
The sky was gray on that morning of May 29, 2001. For over an hour, her inhales and exhales became weaker and weaker. You could see her frail chest with just a thin layer of skin. Up then down, then up then down. And you knew the last one was imminent. We watched and talked and laughed and cried with a sort of suspense in the back of our minds, knowing these were the final moments.
The reality of a last breath, the finality of it all. By all I refer to life. As I said during her eulogy, she no longer is, she was. The finality of her. The end. You read about these kinds of things — death — but when it’s your mother and when she’s the love of your life.
And when it’s over, it’s over. Not her soul, if you believe in souls. But the other part, the physical part.
The sky is gray today as it was when I grabbed her hand, squeezed it slightly, and took one final look at the saintly woman who was my mother. Then turned my back on her and walked away to tell Dad.
You would think I’d be “over it” by now, but I’m not. Not one bit. Some of you know the feeling too well.
Something about the color gray, and the dim light — there is light for sure — that perfectly captures my internal feelings now.
Light, but muted and lacking.
Bree sent me this today, and it made me cry a bit. Something about when your children mature and start caring for you. The feeling I find surreal.
And I smiled because no way Mom had room in her house for another photo of her children.
“You mean you left LA to be here? In Española? Why in the heck would you do that? There’s nothing out here. It sucks.”
She is about 10 feet away. Black shiny wavy long hair. Maroon sweater and a blue backpack to her left on her desk.
I zero in. Stare into her eyes without even a fluttering of my eyelids.
“Because I want to be here with you.”
I jerk my gaze and look at José, then James then Sylvia as I say, “And for you, and for you, and for you,” pointing with my right index finger in unison with “you.”
Do you know that look – almost like a blush, but nothing romantic? The this-is-so-hopeful-I-almost-don’t-believe-it look?
I was one of them as a teenager. And in my twenties. And into my thirties. You feel alone. You think you’re not one of them. You feel nobody important cares about you.
A boy at the corner of the horseshoe table raises his hand. “So, Paul, you were a horrible student in high school. You didn’t have the best family life, and education wasn’t stressed when you were our age. And you made it.”
“What do you expect we do better?”
Total silence in the class. They await my answer. I relish their attention. What I say will matter.
“You’re in bed. It’s pitch dark. You’re thirsty. You get up. You must search with your hands for the light switch. You all know what I mean?”
Nodding.
“You find the switch. You flip it. You now see. Your vision changes. You’ve all been there?”
More nods.
“That will happen to some of you. You will somehow see that nobody can f-ing determine your future. You will become almost enraged, obsessed, almost demonized. Because it’s your life — you will own it and not let anyone else own it.”
Silence. Fourteen fixed gazes.
On the wall is the mission statement of the school. I point to it. I read this part.
“Look at that. You believe it? You? A globally competitive citizen?”
Stares.
“I do, and I thank each of you for being so respectful and paying attention.”
As founder of theChild Rights Foundation, I am here, we are here, for them. Because children matter. And they are always innocent.
