Please do go visit the World Trade Center Memorial Gardens.  Although I have to say that when my husband and I shared with our good friend, Adam, who has lived in NYC/NJ his whole life his response to us was that he still couldn’t bring himself to go there. And he works a few blocks over.  I understand and I live way far away in Texas.

Still, when we walked into the Memorial park (you can go on-line and make reservations for a pass), I became mute, grabbed the info brochure and sat down to see what was there and what was in process.  Where the Twin Towers had been are now pools (North and South pools), but it’s much more than that.

I think the pools are very classy and perfectly capture so many of our deep feelings.  All around the lip of the pool are the engraved names of all who perished on 9-11-01.  The water flows down the walls and then into a pool the size of the base of the towers and then into a smaller hole that no matter where you stand you cannot see the bottom.  Anyone who has ever felt deep grief or pain, understands the powerful imagery of that pool.

The other touching living being on the site is the Callery Pear Tree.   I don’t think they allowed camera’s or cell phone use on the site, but even if they had…it wouldn’t have felt right to take a photo.  Still. I did ask one of the people giving information about her and if I could touch her and was told that many people wanted to touch her and that she probably needed that.  I could feel all kinds of life pouring through her and also deep grief.  A lot of times we humans are ignorant of the animals, plants and trees that also feel the energy and trauma of what happens to them as well as what goes on around them.  Important to consider.

Anyway, if you are a New Yorker or from the surrounding communities and have felt that going to the site would be too much for you…of course I understand. We all do. And….going may be a very healing process for you.  There is absolutely nothing expected of you.  Just go and sit and be and know that you are loved and that you are taken care of and remember that we are all connected.

I want to live in America!   Who even says that nowadays?  Surely not someone who was born in the United States and has traveled around the world?  But, yes, there are still many reasons that I want to live in America. By the way, I’d be happy to live in Canada, Mexico and other locales in North and South America as well because they are also part of America.

The America I’m talking about in this article, though, is the United States.

And you could probably throw all kinds of descriptors at my name that would label me with who you think I am in some form or fashion so as to really piss you off and enable you to crawl inside the jury that lives in each of our heads with an under-the-breath-retort of “well, sure, THAT kind of person would want to live in the U.S.  I know I do that kind of snap judging all the time. It’s so easy now with mass media…I’ve thus far resisted the urge to listen to what Rush Limbaugh said; however, information is so pervasive out there that I’ve pretty much gotten the gist of it.  I can just snap, snap away until I become this little sniveling creature holed away in my little world of beliefs with no entry for other perspectives to ease their way in and shift my paradigm.  Hope you’re not suffering from that as well! It’s lonely in here.

We need to remember that the media is here for us to use and not for it to use us (pun intended).

What’s helped me to remember the good things about living in the U.S. A. is listening to people who have become citizens here after leaving their home country behind.  We (Americans) are very insulated from what it is really like to live as a citizen in so many places around our Earth.

So, yeah, I can just almost not stand to listen to the news or read a paper that has anything to say about the primaries going on right now because of the double and triple talk spitting back and forth, but at least I know that it is going on. I have the freedom to educate myself on how to listen better and get to a place where I can find my own understanding of what is happening around me so that then I can then make the best informed choices that I can.

Plug for Dylan Ratigan and his book “Greedy Bastards”….the talking mouths like to say that the media is overrun by the liberals, but actually statistics back up the fact that the media is coming from a place that is more to the center and leaning towards the right than left.  With that said, though, I’m glad to see a talking head like Dylan, out there with a successful show on MSNBC getting is thoughts and opinions out there.  After watching the taping of his interview on “Overheard with Evan Smith” I was impressed with the breadth and depth of his knowledge.

We do have choices out there people of what we listen to, read and where we focus our attention.

Do you want to live in America? If so, why? If not, why not? Back it up.