September 11, 2001
I had just returned from my first healing Touch Conference in Atlanta. I felt wide open, changed and ready to be a healer when the next morning, sitting in front of the TV, I saw a plane fly into a building, and then another. Two hours later the Pentagon was hit. We are at war, I surmised and with that I headed to Kroger and flew through the aisles buying $300 worth of doomsdays supplies - yeast, cans of juice concentrate, candles; anything that might carry us through dark times. The store was empty. No one else seemed to realize the end of the world was imminent.
That night I went outside and visualized a grid of lights covering the earth while praying to be a bearer of light and peace. I did this ritual each night for several evenings.
The next few days I cried often and practiced the healing work I had just learned. I felt vulnerable, holy, sad and terrified. I looked at the sky in wonder and thought how the atmosphere must be sighing in relief as no planes ripped thru the air.
I was subscribed to a pagemaker list-serve that had participants from all over the world. Talk was suspended about page layout for awhile and all wrote about the horrific events in New York City and asked why. As I listened to world citizens discuss this it began to occur to me that US policies had brought misfortune to others throughout the world.
Six years has passed. Several days ago I prepared a full page newspaper ad signed by local businesses that was in remembrance of 9/11. This advertisement seems as ridiculous as young republicans who say they are supporting the troops by staying home making and spending money. People actually believe they are being patriotic by shopping and spitting out propaganda.
How do we support the troops? In my humble opinion, it is by being conservative. Conservative with our gas consumption, water usage and electricity. We support the troops when we do not support politicians full of bullshit whose objective is to serve the military industrial corporations. We support our troops by standing on a corner with signs asking our nation to bring them home.
Business as usual creates more of the same. Poverty, pollution and economic destruction worldwide and this gives birth to ever more terrorism. Bombing and shooting others, taking charge of other countries’ resources and politics are the activities of our government that makes us the enemies of others. The “Islamfascists” hate us because we think we should be in charge of their oil and their politics and because we go over to their countries and kill them for their own good. We are arrogant Americans who have little thought of our large carbon footprint in the world.
9/11 changed me by making me aware of these issues, by ripping of my blinders of the impact my lifestyle has on the rest of the planet. 9/11 changed me, got inside of me, unnerved and stirred me. Six years later, I am weary of politicians waving flags invoking September 1th as they attempt to flay us into a nationalistic fervor.
I still see myself as a light bearer in a grid of light encircling the earth, as a beam of intentional peace which spreads over the planet in a tenuous network. But I also have come to believe that peace on this planet has been greatly disrupted and the majority of the peace we will see from now on will be piecemeal. I believe my job is to do what I can to help anyone, especially the poor and the broken, find some measure of peace - piece by piece.
Broken
Monday, September 10, 2007
Piece by Piece
