9-11.9 At the End of the Day
Thoughts on Catastrophes and Wobbles - Both Grand and Personal
This morning I sat at my desk and was about to write my Morning Pages. Before I began I decided to read some previous entries from that day. I came upon the following entry from 2003.
11 September 2003 - ThursdayIt was on a Tuesday two years ago today. When it happened, when the towers came down. It was on a Tuesday. I don't know why that is so important to me at this moment, but it is. It's as if each detail is important.
Exactly two years ago within a few minutes from this moment as I write this, I was sitting on Alison's porch writing my Morning Pages when she called me into the house and turned on the television. That event may have changed my life more than I realize.
Thinking back now, I wonder if in that moment she began to see herself and Tamar as other. As not belonging somehow. Or maybe it was her maternal instincts taking over. I cannot know this for sure because we never spoke of it - one of the many aspects of that day that triggers enormous sadness. And of course this feeling of being "Other" is one that I know well, so it all may just be projection on my part.
Oddly though, that feeling of being an outsider was one I was just beginning to let go of, as I allowed myself to fall deeper in love with Alison, and made room for Tamar in a heart that I thought was too closed to be touched again by a child's laugh.
Strange how the two events - the dramatic falling of the two towers and the gradual erosion of that relationship(s) - seem so intertwined. Maybe it is all about endings. All about letting go of the illusion of control, letting go of knowing with any degree of certainty that I truly know what is real. It is also about the letting go of the illusion of permanence.
And maybe that is what sustains me these days. Just as those months of joy came to a close, so too will these months of sadness. This, too, will end. A time will come when I am happy again. A time will come again when I feel there is abundance, rather than scarcity in the world.
Letting go used to be easier. I wonder why it is harder now. I would have thought, with so much practice, I would be better at it, or at least somehow more comfortable.
What makes cataclysmic events like 9-11 easier to take in over time is the very definiteness of it all. There is no doubt when you see the catastrophe before your eyes. Most other catastrophes in life seem more subtle in the gradual erosion of intimacy until it becomes distance; like the small imperceptible changes in a "healthy" person until "suddenly" an illness appears.
And on the other side of the catastrophe there is no more hurt, no more anger. Just moments of sadness now and again about what could have been - and even those "could have beens" are as illusory as those eerie ghost images of the towers, as if they still soared into the sky - like two great exclamation points writ large on pale blue paper.
Soon it will be three years ago since Nick died. Just now I decided to look back at the entry from around that time. I wrote about the illusion of permanence, but I also wrote of myself as a kind of pilgrim.
I must own the truth of my own pilgrimage, of my own pilgrim-ness. I'm also on my way to somewhere else. Or nowhere else. A new Here. A new Now.I wonder if deep in my psyche I knew that this pilgrimage was on the horizon. I wonder now what new pilgrimage awaits me. The fact that I can see the possibility of a new journey heartens me.
It's all tied into memory for me. Remembering where I was. Who I was with. Who I was not with. So many details are still clear to me. For me now I know that the experience had a global quality to it as well as an intensely personal quality. When I revisit moments like that day, I have the odd sense of experiencing a kind of wobble.
All is moving nicely. Predictable. The rotation of the planets. The steady orbits. A symphony of precision. I have had periods in my life like that. Brief ones to be sure, but there nonetheless. Everything is moving along nicely - just as it is supposed to.
And then comes the wobble.
The wobble can be a slight one, where it is so subtle that I hardly notice. Or the wobble can be so great that I feel that I'll be tossed off into the abyss of space with no chance of survival. When I looked up this word "wobble", I found it curious that it is related to music. Seems that it originally had to do with moving from and to the Upper, Middle and Low G note. Someone once called it "a low, barbarous note."
This origin from the acoustical world does resonate for me. The wobble begins so low, so close to the ground, so deep in the soul, that it cannot be heard all the way up into the spirit realm.
I think now of the low hum from the plane engines as they roared toward their targets. How all of a sudden the sound was deafening. The wobble began much deeper in the ground, deep in a toxic soil that was watered with hatred, and then carefully nourished with poisonous dogma.
Even when the first plane hit the tower, there was a wobble. The base of the building standing firm as the upper floors wobbled absorbing so much energy in such a short time. But this wobble was harbinger of things to come. Though not known in that moment, this wobble was an indication that a catastrophe was looming. A catastrophe - literally a great overturning - is a churning of the very ground of the soul.
So, what is true for me today and how do I feel about that truth?
What I notice is that in the intervening years since I wrote that entry so much has happened that now I can see how what I thought was a catastrophe for me personally was actually a wobble, a harbinger of catastrophes to come.
Yet, what is also true for me now is how value-laden I have held this word "catastrophe". It need not lead to suffering. Indeed suffering is just one choice among many that I can make in the face of "great overturning".
A wobble is a gift that I sometimes leave unopened. Were I to open it, though, I might find a love note from my soul telling me to pay attention, another message less subtle is coming - probably sooner than later.
After the buildings wobbled and then finally fell, we were faced with a great opening. There was a hole in the city and in our hearts. There was also an opening for reconciliation, and an opportunity to release old hurts, and longings. There was a moment as we stared - riveted to the screen slowly making sense of the images - when we could have re-created ourselves and our world all over again for the first time.
Catastrophes - be they personal, national or global - do one thing. They open up the ground we walk on, and invite us to drop in.