October day, cat, Andrea Bocelli on the stereo

And re-reading essays I wrote about the meeting place of opposites in the universe--the meeting of conscious and unconscious, Self and Other, nature and man.... that writing
gave me the opportunity to read so many wonderful things written by artists, Jungian psychologists, and even quantum physicists. All of it for me boiled down to the realization that we are so far from being alone. The voices of all these Others can be heard - in dreams, in listening to nature, in meditation. They are heard, paradoxically, in silence. In the middle of the night, awakened by a dream in which I asked, "how can we better hear them?" I had written:

"The silence doesn't require goodness/morality. But it does require--truth? Truth to it, being true to it, to the silence--what it asks is our renewed truth. Whatever it asks we must give."

for the mothers of our soldiers

and the children in Iraq

in Afghanistan

in our inner cities

they all hope and pray

their children will thrive

will be joyful

and healthy

and most of all, come home to them.

may you find peace

Scenes from the January 27 march in D.C.

It was so crowded it was literally hard to walk. We inched along shoulder to shoulder. Parents with children in strollers, baby boomers, teens with body piercings, and the majority just mainstream Americans. It was an enormous relief to see that, despite the size of the crowd (possibly 500,000), the police presence was low-key. Unlike a march I participated in a few years ago, when the sidewalks were lined with a black-helmeted force that looked straight out of any totalitarian nation's playbook.

It was a powerful experience--entirely peaceful but passionate. At the very end, as I was leaving the Mall, I saw Jesse Jackson walking ahead of me. A young man caught up with him to shake his hand. Then, across the road, I saw a woman walking alone with a large poster. The side facing me said "President Bush, you killed my son." As she turned slightly, I saw an image of a young, fresh-faced man on the other side of the poster. I hoped she had been surrounded by friends as she made the long walk. But there's no way to be anything but alone with that pain. That's what this war means, but the human heart is rarely, if ever, mentioned in all the arguments. As if love were not an essential part of the human condition.