Out of Many, One

It was beautiful in Colorado that day, too. We awoke to uncommon quiet and birdsong. I turned on the radio in the car on the way to school just in time to hear Bob Edwards of NPR fall to silence. He was witnessing the North Tower’s collapse. I turned off the radio after he started talking again. Outside the classrooms on the playground where the parents gathered for drop-off, adults huddled in small groups, trying to make sense of the news. Was it an intentional attack? It had to be. Two planes. Three, actually, maybe more. Who was responsible? Domestic or foreign terrorists? This kindergarten class—our kids—had been born shortly after the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing, until that day the most deadly terrorism attack in our nation’s history. Like the Unabomber, the attackers were fully homegrown. We couldn’t assume anything, could we? The teachers asked us to take these conversations elsewhere, out of earshot. They assured us it was safe to leave our children with them, that we could pick them up early if we wanted.

I copy-cataloged like an automaton all morning with the radio on in my cubicle at the Allen Ginsberg Library. I kept flashing back to the Columbine shootings, which I handled in exactly the same way: one ear on the news, the rest of me clinging to a raft of impersonal bibliographic data. The university invited the community to gather on the lawn at noon for meditation. My husband called to say he would meet me there. And then we would go get our kiddo.

The oldest sycamores in the state stand between Naropa University’s library and the main building. Their leaves, large as dinner plates, have sheltered high lamas, renegade priests, radical rabbis, monks, nuns, African drummers, Balinese dancers, jazz musicians, and Beat poets. That day a hundred or more students, staff, and faculty gathered in silence. We formed a circle in the ancestral shade. We breathed in the burn, the pain, the confusion, the fear. We breathed out what might relieve it— coolness, comfort, clarity. Many of us cried—and continued breathing. This is sending and taking, Tonglen in Tibetan. It turns us toward putting others’ happiness at the same level of urgency as our own, an intentional reversal of the human tendency for self-preservation. Yet, it is not a call to martyrdom. The first step, always, is to take in your own pain, to send out relief to yourself. Only then do you extend this compassionate action to others. Do not mistake this for a manifestation exercise; there is no sense that your imagined exchange will transform the painful circumstances. The meditation is meant to transform you.

After a half an hour of sending and taking we were invited to speak in turn, if we wished. We were asked to withhold our responses and simply hold the space for each other. I used to have to explain what I mean by “hold the space,” but no longer. The practice of holding space for difficult emotions has escaped from under the holy sycamores into the greater collective. It is one of the things that gives me hope.

One by one, people spoke. Someone sang Amazing Grace. Everyone was linked to New York in some way—even me, I realized, although I had never been there, then. Each person who spoke shared their felt sense of the moment, their sorrow, their rage, their love. Points of hitherto unknown connection glowed between us, a web extending across the United States, across the world.

A friend came to visit me a few months later. He stopped to call me from a gas station to get directions. He had the right address and had driven by a couple of times; he didn’t think it was possible that the Stars and Stripes would be flying at my door. We rarely talked about the war that had made him a refugee from the land he always referred to as “the former Yugoslavia.” That day he asked me how I could raise a flag that represented so much bloodshed. I had first hung it up, I explained, when we and all of our neighbors sat vigil on our front lawns the evening of 9/11. Up and down the block and all over the country we sat in perfect silence, mourning together over lit candles. I felt the shared light of each star on the flag that day, I told him. I had never before felt so linked to my fellow Americans, each state shining in the same field of blue. The flag represents our interdependence to me, I said. E Pluribus Unum: Out of many, one. I fly the American flag to hold us to its highest values: freedom from oppression and of expression, the inseparability of our fortunes, our shared commitment to making America work for each other. It doesn’t have to be about nationalism, hatred, and war, I said. Surely he could see that. “Jennifer,” he responded, his eyes heavy with the pain, “you see the flag that way, but nobody else does.”

I did not and do not agree with my friend, although I still feel his pain. 23 years on, I continue to fly the flag in celebration of our interconnectedness and in defiance of those who would make it a symbol of hatred. I recently found myself on a touring ferry far out on the New York Bay with a bunch of Staten Islanders. A double rainbow appeared across the sky and remained for the entire sunset. The Stars and Stripes at the bow flapped furiously beneath it as we all stood in awe. Everyone on deck made sure anyone inside came out to see the spectrum in the sky. Everyone shared in the wonder. Everyone took the same boat home.