Being with my own “off-the-continuum” sense about the whole 9/11 tragedy.

Such strange, troubled and troubling times these are, with as many ways of responding to the awful realities of these past weeks as there are people responding to them. My own earliest responses were kind of surprising and atypical for me.

After the first three days of voraciously reading alternative media on-line (a major departure from my usual unplugged-from-ordinary-reality ways) I felt too overloaded to continue exposing my psyche even to that selectively filtered information/opinion barrage.

In a softer, more gentle way, I slowly continued gathering a collection of heartening, seeing-the-larger-picture writings by reading only the carefully chosen pieces sent by close friends. (This, too, a significant departure from my usual way of life: the only emailing I’ve done till now being short replies to the people who respond to my website, weekly notes with one dear, grieving friend and occasional short alerts to and from my sister.)

After a brief flurry of letters/emails to legislators and media people (another major departure from my usual non-engaged ways), I found myself drawn to sharing the collection I was gathering with friends, family and clients via email. As with the letters, I seemed urged from my deeps to keep adding to the volume (in the collective) of what one of my clients has called the “counter-voice.”

It didn’t matter that, for the most part, this was “preaching to the choir.” It felt important to keep amplifying the energy of the saner voices in any ways that were organic and authentic for me. While I continued moving in and out of my more usual ways of being (in stillness and time-out-of-time) I was spending a lot more of my time than usual in-connection.

Over the next weeks, we all were echoing back and forth what words we could find that spoke to the interrelationship of all beings. To the need for looking deeper to the sources that birthed this horror. To the wisdom of going very slowly in complex times. To the recognition that we were at a place where old ways and “quick answers” were both useless and dangerous.

Then I collapsed in psychic exhaustion. There had been so much more energy, stimulation, contact with the outside world, contact with others and with others’ distress/agitation than my being is accustomed to. I needed to withdraw. Just napping, reading fiction, sleeping long hours, wandering over to the creeks at night, being more fully adrift in timelessness. Barely any emailing. 

As I curled back into my parallel universe, disconnecting from all that was going on in the so-called real world, I moved more completely into the middle of my own emotional reality. In this just-with-myself space, I realized that I had been experiencing most of what had been unfolding since the 11th from the place of witness or observer rather than that of participant.  Except for the first moments when I felt–inside my body–the terror I imagined felt by the people in the crashing planes and collapsing buildings, I had not been swept with any great waves of grief, fear, rage or pain.   

I could “feel with” and embrace what friends and family and clients were sharing. I could feel great sadness and empathy for the grief and terror of those involved directly. Worry for the psyches of all those who were digging in that charnel ground. Uneasiness with all the flag-waving whipping up of nationalism at a time when world-consciousness seems so critical, great distress at the racism and violence directed at Muslim-Americans…and much head-shaking incredulity at the short-sightedness of our so-called leaders.

Yet, it was clear that I was very much at a distance from the intense feelings others around me were experiencing. For a while, I felt uneasy with this distance/difference, questioning myself: Was I cut-off from my own more intense feelings or was I truly not having any?

The knowing place inside reminded me that it really didn’t matter which was the source of what was so for me. What was so in the moment was that I wasn’t feeling grief or terror or rage. That I wasn’t feeling overwhelmed.  Instead, I was feeling some deep sense of the inevitability of such a tragedy. More surprise that it had taken this long for something like this to happen here than surprise that it was happening here.

My sense of what’s happening seems skewed, off the continuum.  At moments I continue to wonder if it’s a way my psyche has to stay “out of the trenches,” a way that I “avoid” grappling with the immediate challenges to our safety, our civil rights, a sane international policy. And then the knowing place reminds me, yet again, that it doesn’t matter where it comes from. That what’s important for me is to acknowledge that it is just how I feel–right now–about all that’s unfolding. 

And the truth is that what I’m feeling in the deepest heart of me is an abiding hope. Even as, this weekend, our “leaders” have taken us into the next ghastly steps in this dance of death, the bombing in Afghanistan. Still, I feel the Mother’s presence in the middle of these horrors: Mother Kali, she who dances death and rebirth, the mother of the destruction that precedes the new creation that generates only from the ashes of what is leveled.

I have some deep trust in Spirit/Great Mother; a sense that this tragic devastation is part of a larger unfolding that will ultimately lead us “home.” It feels, in me, that we have entered the spiral, the vortex of transformation, the final days of the old “old boys” paradigm, the coming to an end of “business-as-usual.” I have no sense of whether the shift will come in my lifetime. I have no sense of how much more terrorism, counter-terrorism and bloodshed will come before “critical mass” is reached. Yet, I feel, deeply, that this time marks the beginning of the end of the world as we’ve known it, a world gone so profoundly out of balance and out of touch with the sacredness of all life. And, perhaps, as one of my clients suggests, those who died in the devastation were angels who had come to give their lives to move us into this transforming time. 

This is a time filled with contradictions and extremes. The “old ways,” ineffective as they may be in this world as it’s become, are being played out in their most extreme versions. These are the frightening paroxysms of a dying beast. They cannot fix what is broken. 

We are all having to learn to live with extraordinary vulnerability and uncertainty.  We are learning, in the middle of so much upheaval and dislocation, that we must create community and space for sharing, heart fully and with wisdom.  The underbelly of our country’s history–the atrocities we have committed against innocent civilians in many countries–is being exposed for us to acknowledge.  We are having to see that that which we hate is also us, that what has been done to us is not different from what we have done to others, albeit with different “stories,” different justifications.  We are having to face the contradictions we have ignored, to make a larger container to hold more of what is so.

Though I cannot see the baby steps of how we will come to do it, I believe and trust that our direction is inevitably toward planetary community, toward planetary accountability, toward reverence for all life and reverence for the planet itself. It is this belief, this trust, this vision that opens me to feeling the opportunity in this catastrophe that fills me with hope.

Perhaps the women of the Jerusalem Link (Israeli Feminists for Peace from Bat Shalom and Palestinian Women for Change from The Jerusalem Center for Women) are, in the agenda of their coalition offering us a vision that speaks to some first steps. In addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they propose to “Let the Women Talk. Let the Women Act:”

“Let the women talk! Let the women try to make sense where men did not.  We are launching an international initiative to stop the violence immediately.  We are insisting that all negotiating teams include at least 50% women–in the Palestinian and Israeli leadership, in the UN teams, among representatives of all the governments involved in attempts to resolve this conflict.

The women will talk–they will not shoot. Let the international community form a group of women from all around the world to become the Women’s Peace Corps–an international mediating body of women who will listen, facilitate, help us save ourselves.

Bring in the women.  Without forgetting the wrongs of the past, or the unequal distribution of power, we will focus on how to LIVE here in peace.  Our children deserve to know self-determination and dignity without having to fight for them.

Let the women talk! Let the women act. We feel the pain, we are outraged, we are scared.  Before it is too late–let the women talk. Let us act.”

Holding this vision and hope, I move, more awake than even before, into the gentleness and beauty and simplicity of my everyday life. In my heart, I continue to spin prayers for the planet, for all who are suffering, for all who are in danger. For all who are “in charge”–that they may be led to better choices. And, for every one of us and all our relations: may we know “enough ness,” safety and peace.

Originally published October 2001