Sitting here in Richmond, B.C. at a friend’s place, looking over the garden, where white and yellow butterflies are flirting with the fountain, I was thinking about this day and the meaning of this day to so many people.
I keep seeing posts on Facebook saying ‘never forget’ and besides wanting to correct that to something along the lines of ‘ … remember’ for linguistic reasons, I was wondering about what it is that they want to remember, want us to remember.
What is it that I remember?
I remember living in a small flat in London at the time. I wasn’t working and I didn’t have a television (by choice, not related). It was late afternoon / early evening and I saw online that something had happened. I went to the gym to watch it on the telly. I remember the shock, mine and on other people’s faces. I remember how surreal it all looked and felt, like watching a doomsday movie. Later, hearing people’s personal accounts made it real.
The next 24 hours I hid at home. I couldn’t bear feeling everyone else’s emotions. I had enough dealing with my own. Just a few days prior, I was considering moving to New York. Another friend of mine who also works with energy, was dreaming about New York. It was as if we knew something massive was about to happen and many souls would need help crossing over, and many souls here on earth would need healing and love.
All I could do in the following days and weeks was to watch the news online and focus on sending love.
Two years later, I moved to New York. I met people who shared their own personal stories with me from that day, and their impressions of New York and New Yorkers before and after September 11: more raw, more vulnerable, more real and more helpful. There was a sense of community they hadn’t felt before and it expressed itself during the big northeast blackout in the summer of 2003. At the same time, every large bang or incident like a big hole opening in the middle of Third Avenue was freaking people out.
I’ll be honest: The notion of memorial days doesn’t sit well with me, as well as monuments to the fallen.
In my high school there’s a wall for the fallen, all the graduates who got killed protecting the country. The list kept getting longer, and longer and when I visited years later after graduating, I recognized some of the names.
In the religion I was born to, the groom breaks a glass during the wedding to remember the destruction of the second temple. In the country I was born to in this lifetime, there’s a memorial day to the Holocaust and a memorial day for the fallen in battle, adjacent to Independence Day.
The Commonwealth has Poppy Day, the UK Remembrance Sunday. Many countries have memorial days and victory celebrations that, let’s face it, were earned with blood.
If we are to focus on what we love, in order to create more of that in our lives – how are we, as a collective, to create love and peace on this planet if we, in each of our respective countries, keep remembering the wars, the fallen, where we were wronged by others and where we were victorious over them?
Maybe the question is not ‘to remember or not?’ Maybe the question is ‘what have we learned?’ from tragedy, from adversity? Did we close our hearts and fortify our defences, or did we open our hearts and learn compassion? And do we extend this compassion to all beings? Not just our tribe, our clan?
Love Yourself; Keep an Open Heart; Change the World;
~Leor
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