Reflecting Absense – 9/11

Preserving woven memories

Honoring the fallen

Nuclear winter embeds

Smouldering…

On sacred ground

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Poem Written by Brenda L. McCartney

9/11 Take Aways

Appended is an excerpt taken from the article ‘A Global Declaration of Interdependence by Mark Goulstron.  Since September 11, 2001 the call for interdependence is even more imperative.

Mark Goulstron highlighted that as September 11th, 2011 approaches that we all must  consider the following factors:

1. As safe and secure as you believe you are is as vulnerable as you can turn out to be.
2. We are more alike than we are different in that:

• none of us like to live in fear;

• a  rush to anger can make all of us act hastily and foolishly;
• feeling dismissed and disdained can bring out the worst in anyone;
• we love our children;

• we should respect our elderly (but don’t take or make the time to do so);
• the measure of a civilization is how we treat those who have hurt us and who are hurting among us.

3. Be it terrorists or “blinded by greed” capitalists or “deaf and dumb and siloed” officials, special interests will always tyrannize the common good.
4. We can’t get much done by ourselves and so we need to find a way to work together.

9/11 Anniversary

photographed by Shaun Best

Recently I was watching a National Geographic Channel special, which featured a replay of the September 11 attacks. My daughter was in the room and my natural instinct was to turn the channel and spare my child such horrific events. As I searched desperately for the remote in a  panic  she said to me Mama leave it, I told her I am going to give her Sprout (a preschool Network) her favorite channel she shake her head no. She watched intensely. At various points in the program she tried to articulate what she saw as she gesticulated with her hands. As a mother today the children who have lost a parent that day taunted me. I wonder how those children are coping with their loss?

As I type I recalled  a conversation I had with a friend whose birthday falls on September 11, I asked him where he was on his birthday in 2001, his response was not one of, “I did this or that”, but he remembered the week prior to the bombings he was at Ground Zero. Today there are so many divided emotions. Someone is celebrating another year of birth, anniversary, maybe the loss of a loved one but etched in their conscious are the painful images of September 11, 2001.

September 11 has changed everyone world’s point of view in terms of what happened before it compared to what happened after it. No matter the geographic location it was a dividing line in time so we reflect on the events of that day.

September 11

Photographed by Susan Koster

This moment, this day, eight years on the date September 11, 2001 still has resonance today in 2009. Listening and watching the events replay the memories still remain vivid.

As we remember those who died that day let us console ourselves with thinking; good-byes and hellos are a part of the same cycle. Let us be thankful for our lives and those moments that have made us stronger and give us lessons that we need to learn.