There are days when my heart weeps for the world, and today is one of them.
It began with my thoughts about 9/11 this morning, remembering the feelings of that day. The grey skies and drizzling rain, while welcome, added to my somber mood. A misunderstood post on Facebook left me feeling defensive as I tried to explain my position on moving forward from this shared loss with more understanding and less fear. It’s far too easy to sound cavalier and dismissive when posting brief social media sound bites, and I know I can come across as hopelessly naïve and idealistic.
I feel the pain of those who lost loved ones on that day. And I feel the pain of those who perpetrated the attack. And I feel the pain of all the mothers who have lost their children in one way or another, as expressed in this video clip.
Not having suffered a personal loss of a loved one that day, my grief wells up around man’s inhumanity to man, that day and in all the days prior and since. If, one day, we could all see that there is no “us and them”, but only us, events like those of 9/11 would never happen to begin with. If we connected to each other heart to heart, in the spirit of Namaste, one divine spark to another, what a different world this could be.
On my more Pollyanna days, I believe we can get there – to that place of understanding and living our Oneness. On my darker days I fear we’ll never get there – that instead we will continue, little by little, to destroy ourselves, each other, and this planet.
Yesterday, I lit a candle to the memory of a friend’s son lost to suicide. Today I learned a colleague just lost her son to an overdose. Later this afternoon I heard a first-hand account of atrocities witnessed and experienced in a childhood hell the likes of which most of us in this country cannot even imagine. My heart feels too small to hold all this grief.
And I wonder what kind of systemic pain festers beneath the surface of this planet that can drive people to these desperate and depraved acts. But more than that, I wonder how we can heal it.
