Hello, dear One,
For the past two weeks, I have found myself crying often, mostly stunned into silence, at times brimming words, with questions, prayers, longing, or filled by the words of others, their grief, reflections, analyses, cautions, pleas.
Every time I’ve been with one of my grandchildren, building a marble run with little Elouin, helping Sula Rain with her spelling words, hearing Cypress and Kaze tell me excitedly about pumpkin carving, listening to their laughter, sorrow rises, too, thinking of the families in Israel and Gaza who will not play with their children again, who will not hear their laughter.
Last Sunday, I participated in a global online vigil hosted by a group of bereaved parents, Israeli and Palestinian parents who have lost children over the years to this conflict. I wept, holding my candle, as an Israeli grandmother then a Palestinian father each wholeheartedly asked us to believe in peace. If we can come together believing in the possibility of peace, then surely you can.
A few days ago, I listened to an Israeli mother whose son was killed in the horrific Hamas raids as she spoke through her tears about bombing Gaza: “Not in my name or in the name of my son, my gentle giant.”
In this letter, I won’t address politics, the pros and cons of one position or another. I am here in a comfortable home and life, not living in Israel, Gaza, or the West Bank. There is so much not-knowing to which I’ve been surrendering while I try to inform myself, to listen.
I will however offer some words—not mine, but those of others, at this time when words are both so inadequate and can be a balm.
I start with some words from Anne Frank that moved me when I found them/when they found me.
I was so grateful to come upon this stunning poem.
On earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star.
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons
equals the collective weight of every animal
on earth. Including the insects. Times three.
Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief—
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside of the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.
There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.
~Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
The words above are excerpted from a joint statement issued by Combatants for Peace* and long list of other Israeli and Palestinian organizations committed to working together to bring peace to the region.
*Combatants for Peace is a group of Palestinians and Israelis who have taken an active part in the cycle of violence over the years: Israeli soldiers serving in the IDF and Palestinian combatants who once only “saw each other only through gun sights.” They have come together to establish Combatants for Peace based on non-violence principles. Their mission: to build the social infrastructure necessary for ending the conflict and the occupation, communities of Palestinians and Israelis working together through non-violent means to promote peace.
Many would argue that it was not only impractical and absurd, as Anne Frank wrote, to “believe in spite of everything in people’s goodness,” and by extension, naive and simplistic to believe that peace is possible in a region where new trauma on top of old trauma is being suffered. Accusations of “easy for you to say,” i.e., to throw around words like love, peace and goodness, could be reasonably aimed at me.
But Anne Frank, Combatants for Peace and their allies, and Thich Nhat Hanh have been in the thick of it and chose—and are choosing now—to believe in a world that seemed/seems an impossibility.
I want to add my energy and focus to the vision of the best we humans can be—even and especially when the worst we can be is so painfully clear.
I sign off with sorrow, hope, not-knowing, fear, faith, and what keeps me going: trying to apprehend the call of love.
The following is how I recently concluded a Facebook post—one in a series in which I had been harvesting love and gratitude daily before the tragic events unfolding now. I stopped for awhile post October 7th. Encouraged by someone I have never met, referencing a piece I wrote about my grandmother who died in the Holocaust, I began the harvesting again.
The autumn air. The sky. Safe shelter. My four little grandchildren up the road, tucked into their beds. Their mama and papa safe. Wanting that for all children. (Tears now.) The countless beings born at this time to be lightworkers, to believe in and stand for what some call a new earth. Souls committed to love in action. “God as a verb.”
And gratitude now for you who read this far and whose heart I am imagining also longs for the highest of which we humans are capable.
Yours,
Ani
G'Mar Chatima Tova
I close with this customary greeting whose literal meaning is: "a good final sealing." I will add to that: May you know the love of which you are made. What better than to know this?
With gratitude,
Ani
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