What will it take?

Today, I feel the claustrophobic feeling I had when 9/11 occurred, when Katrina hit, when the tsunami swallowed people up, when I first toured Auschwitz as a teenager. It is the weight of knowing, the knowing we must all hold. Once we know, we can’t not-know.

If my town were in Myanmar, given the new estimates of 78,000 dead, we would all of us be dead–the nice man at the Piggly Wiggly, the morally indignant dentist, the sisters who own a cupcake shop, and everyone else here. Not to mention the 56,000 still missing.

And if my town were in Sichuan province, most of us–dead.

And so, we look for what we can do. Perhaps the most significant thing we can do from where we are is  to write "Myanmar" on a slip of paper and write "Sichuan" on a slip of paper, drop them in our god box, and send an outpouring of love to all those who have lost their families, who have lost the nice man at the corner market, the morally indignant dentist, the sisters who own a noodle shop, their whole incredibly meaningful, special, fragile, beautifully mundane, human worlds.

If Prayer Would Do It

If prayer would do it
I’d pray.

If reading esteemed thinkers would do it
I’d be halfway through the Patriarchs.

If discourse would do it
I’d be sitting with His Holiness
every moment he has free.

If contemplation would do it
I’d have translated the Periodic Table
to hermit poems, converting
matter to spirit.

If even fighting would do it
I’d already be a blackbelt.

If anything other than love could do it
I’ve done it already
and left the hardest for last.

– Stephen Levine

Thanks, Lee, for sending the perfect poem for this day.