An Open Letter to Mahendra Pandey and the Global Migrant Workers Network

i.

Mahendra-jee,

Early in 2025 I sent you a handheld sculpture, a wood stick that for most of the prior year I had been slowly carving.

On this day of international celebration for the migrant worker, I want to share a few quick notes about the story of this piece and to dedicate it to you and the Global Migrant Workers Network you helped to found. This branch comes from Silverthorne, Colorado. I found it on a hike through a small aspen grove on the hillside behind our home.

Aspens are unusual trees. They propagate from seeds and from their underground root system. Where a grove appears and expands from a single seed, that family of trees is called a Pando. When expansive, a Pando is considered among the largest of all living organisms on earth. The Pando lifeline runs underground via a vast root-network of connections, communication, and nutrition. Here is a photo from Colorado, though the largest Pando is found in our neighboring state of Utah.

 

ii.

I love to hike through aspen groves. As I walk, I watch for smaller dead trees and fallen branches, the ones that seem damaged.

I prefer to carve wood that carry these marks of a hard life — branches broken, hit by the wind or the lightening, or just living through the harsh conditions of our high altitude in the mountains.

The places where the harm happened hold the memory of the wound. Remarkably, the aspen tree often finds a way to grow around it, to hold and carry this lived harm with new bark and growth.

For an aspen tree, healing rarely takes the form of cure. It never invisibilizes the memory of the harm. It never forgets. Yet, the aspen tree is never limited nor bound by the memory of what was lost.

Aspens hold their wounds gracefully.

At first glance, this wounded part of the tree may not look beautiful. It often appears crusted, hardened, almost cancerous. If you look closely at their white tree trunks where an eye-like scar appears — the dark color in the photo above — these are places where an aspen branch once started life, grew into the world, but then was broken off.

Though hidden from the outside, the deepest part of the wood-wound always holds the most unexpected inner splendor — which the carver seeks to release.

 

iii.

I carried this branch with me for almost four years. You may recall that when I first wrote a chapter titled Knots in the book the centuries wrap round us, I sent you a small photo where I had sanded the top of an exterior knot to show you what a knot looks like when first encountered.

As I carved and sanded, this branch held many surprises. It was as if a living person were emerging. My thoughts kept going to your story, your journeys, your network-pando of migrant workers.

In the end I decided to name this piece The Spirit of the Migrant Worker.

I first noticed and worked around the inner core. In the photo above you can see a smaller first branch that runs through the whole piece. Covered by years of bark, the outer protective cover, adaptive and supple in early years, hardened over time as it shielded the inner growth.

With sanding and time, those outer layers appeared almost like Nepali women’s saris and scarves. I thought often of your mother, and the many mothers of migrant workers, who surround and hold their children.

The wood grains sometimes felt like wind, reminding me of the flow of migrant workers moving across our seas and continents.

A third surprise came as I continued to sand down the knots, three in the front and one in the back.

Knots start as new branches, life birthed from that inner core and born to reach out into the world. Knots are the places where the branches broke. They soon become the hardest part of the tree. Knots seem to replicate lived experience. The places where we feel broken, we pull back, protect and become hard. Yet here, too, the deepest colors of who we are reside, if we can find our way back to unleashing our fullest colors.

If you look closely, you can count the rings as years on these knots. They seem to reach to a decade. The fuller branch lived closer to 30 years and came from a tree that might have lived 75 years or more. The Pando where these trees grew dates to time immemorial.

 

iv.

This photo captures the midpoint of my preparation and listening into this branch.

The origin traditions of what are sometimes called talking sticks come from indigenous cultures. Their sticks, often adorned with beads, shells, and feathers, were crafted and carried by an elder or a chief. Passed down through generations, depending on the tradition, a stick might have been used to gather a community, to start or to hold a conversation, most commonly in a circle. Sometimes a talking piece, or the tribal stick, might be passed around to be held by those seated — whoever had the stick had the right to speak while others listened.

Rather than talking maybe the deeper sense of all this was to find better ways for the community to listen. Together. Into deep experience. For wisdom. In many ways these are listening sticks.

 

v.

The simple act of finding, carving, sanding, and oiling a stick has often served my own journeys of listening and healing.

Over many years of carving, I have only kept one or two of my final pieces of work. On completion I mostly gift the piece to friends. I think of them often: A small piece of the forest, a small piece of me, handed over to another person. In this case to you, and through you to others who will be invited to hold and speak, listen and bear witness.

When you hold this piece, it will feel soft even though the wood is hard. While art is often protected in museums and galleries, this art is meant to be held, to be shared.

While a piece of art like this may help people speak of difficult experiences and listen into others’ long journeys, when the stick is held in their hands, their stories also become part of the art. The old branch carries forward their hands, hearts, and spirit.

 

vi.

I have added a few things to this artwork: Silver, red coral, and turquoise. A few explanations, though far more important is not what I thought or intended but what you and others may see and feel.

The shorter piece of silver emerges from the place where the migrant tears flow. I have thought often of how many tears have flowed from migrants and their families over the decades. The longer stretch of silver runs from head to toe, from skies to ground, visible then hidden then visible again. I imagined this as a silver lining.

Silver lining is a phrase we use in English to say that even in the darkest of times, during the worst of challenges, there will always be something good that can be found. Long and hard as your journey was, it carries the silver lining that is Shramik Sanjal and now the Global Migrant Workers Network

The red coral flows like blood from the knot that seems placed at the very heart of the spirit. The blood reappears again toward the bottom. I know the veins of the migrant workers have poured their souls and left their blood across our lands.

Deep on the backside of The Spirit is a small round of turquoise. The spirit stone represents our globe.

I feel as if you and the migrant world of travelers and workers carry our world on your backs. Yet, so rarely do we express the profound appreciation your gift and contribution offer to our planetary health.

 

vii.

These are proving to be very difficult times for migrant workers. The wealth of your experiences, your collective wisdom, is needed now more than ever.

Never doubt the spirit of the migrant worker.

Never doubt the power of coming together.Never doubt the healing that comes from deep listening, encouragement, and mutual accompaniment.

Never doubt that we are eternally grateful for what you and the Global Migrant Workers Network give to our world.

Above all else, never doubt that you are exemplars of the human spirit.

 

viii.

I hope your family, friends, and colleagues can hold this piece, add their spirit to it, and that the winds of time and solidarity will help this listening stick find ways to travel the world.

I am blessed to be your friend.

I send this small gift to bless your journey.

Namaste: The divine in me greets the divine in you.

 

john paul lederach
December 18, 2025

Special thanks to Anita Schriver for help with the photos.

Click here to download a PDF of this dispatch.