Today is September 11th

It's my favorite time of year from late August onwards, until my birthday in the third week of October. The sky is often pristine, the sunlight -though it gets more scarce- is more stunning than ever, and the temperature is neither hot nor cold, humid nor dry. It's the quiet of the year, before we settle in and batton up for the winter. When we consolidate our photographs and memories of the summertime relaxation we hopefully had, and ready ourselves again for work and school and routine.

The weather lately has been reminding me of September 11th, 2001. I venture to say, there hasn't been a day like that, before or since. The most perfect of all qualities came together for a day that would have been ideal for outdoor weddings: warmth in both sun and shade, breezes that felt like a caress, and not a cloud in the sky. If those attacks had had to have come, couldn't they have been in February, or in any other time of year already uglied by harsh weather?

Every September 11th, I like to do something to make myself feel better, or do something better for the world. Last year I volunteered to deliver sandwiches to the homeless at night, seeing a New York from the perspective of the men and women who manage to find the right doorways to sleep in and the places to find food. This year, not knowing where I could volunteer, I decided simply to attend Quaker meeting for worship, where I hoped to find a bit of peace with others, and maybe to hear some messages that would enrich my own grieving.

Any New Yorker who moves to another city will quickly discover that they have long lived without a basic fact of life almost anywhere else in the world: the need to get directions. Tell me you live on 22nd and Lex and I can get there with my eyes closed. Tell me the meetinghouse is on 5 Longfellow Park Road and I need to consult two maps and a man on the street before finding my way over. But then, I saw the clogs and jeans, the grey hair, a beat up car with a bumper sticker that read "Be a buddha behind the wheel" and I knew I was among Friends.

Cambridge Friends is a large, active meeting, which means that the first 15 minutes of silence didn't actually happen; they were filled with the rustlings of the numerous children squirming in the aisles. But then something very unusual also happened, and I was convinced I would not find the peace I had come for. A man stood up and started shouting. For Quakers who worship in silence, there really is never a need to raise your voice. He angrily described a meeting about a year ago in which an elderly friend of his stood up to speak, and had to be "eldered," that is, confronted by another worshipper who cut him off and sat him back down when he had rambled on too long. I felt like performing the same favor to the man presently speaking. He went on to remind us that Quakers are not a war church (had we forgotten, I mean, that's our main schtick??) and that we should take real action against the war in Iraq. He finally sat down.

What followed was the most chatty meeting for worship I've every been to, with barely any silence between messages. Some people posed interesting questions or made observations on peace and Iraq and where to fit in as Americans who oppose the war. Maybe it was because they're in Boston, but hardly anyone mentioned September 11th.

Not being a frequent attender of meeting, I was unable to achieve the yoga nidra zen I once I could. My heart would start pounding every so often, as I contemplated rising and delivering a message. Then I would relax again as I considered just keeping my thoughts to myself. But, after 40 minutes, when no one had discussed the 10,000 pound gorilla in the room, I stood up and talked about it myself.

This time of year, with it's beauties and perfection, is steeped in a weighty sadness. September 11th 2001 is what brought me to Cambridge meeting this morning, and is ultimately what brought me to Boston. Four years ago today. So many words have been spoken and written about that day, what could I possibly have to say about it too? I barely cried that morning. I was scared, but I somehow couldn't grieve, and I felt only numbness in the weeks that followed. I walked home from my downtown office in Manhattan. Barely a week later, I moved to Brooklyn, where I would travel across the bridge at least twice a day for the next four years.

Somehow, all New Yorkers, and I guess everyone in the world who had a touch of that fear, managed to take one step at a time and lead their lives forward. Part of my choice to move to Boston was to feel a little safer; when I expressed this to a friend, he asked if I really thought I would be safer there? I can offer no solutions to this fear, or the fear felt by refugees of the hurricane or refugees in Iraq, or the fear of countless other people in countless other wars and hotspots around the world that aren't reported in the headlines. I want to share with you a few lines of a Schiller poem that came to mind four years ago, and that I think of today.

Even the beautiful must die.
What rules men and gods, does not touch the heart of the god of the underworld...
Just to be a dirge on the lips of the beloved is marvelous, because the common go down to Hades, unsung.