Together, with all Our Histories

Here, so far away from the streets of the Carolinas, from yet again another American tragedy, murders committed by one already lost to his American life, lost to the joys of life but keen to feel the gun in his hand, the destroyer of all feeling, I walk my little Cello, and look up into the cold night sky of this southern hemisphere night--if you could be here with me--looking up up into a vastness that offers its distant glories-the moon, a curved sliver shining as brightly as a sun and just a little to its right, the low hanging planet stunning in its conversation with blackness. How clear they look, and the near by stars, made even brighter by the cold and clear depth of distance--there, in that other worlds' field of light, I lift my sorrow, my despair at what the women and the men of that prayer group were made to pay for their taking in of a lost white boy--the vast clarity of celestial bodies shine above me, take my breath away, a hymn to another kind of time and place. And yet,it all comes back, the African-American White family welcoming  two New York Jewish girls into their Selma home for that march over the George Petty Bridge, giving us their marital bed so we would be able to get a good night's sleep--the vastness of the goodness, the shining stars of hope. And marching into Montgomery, Alabama, marching toward the state capital building with its confederate flag flying high above the jeering mobs, their coat of arms. Oh what you shine down upon, moons, planets, stars.

Photo by Dianne Otto

                                               Earth's Geographies: The Day Leaves Sarajevo



''Hate Won't Win" but oh how it hurts, how it builds the meanest of walls against generosity of spirit, of goodness and offered touch. A sick young man with little hope, lost, who murders those who offered him sanctuary. A sick nation where a Trump bellows his wealth and flags that celebrate the institution of slavery fly as they did over the Montgomery State Capital so many years ago. Guns, guns, guns, and lost minds, private rhetoric of hate made public on every device and daily on right wing propaganda machines masquerading as news. And as in so many, too many, times before, the families, the people who have lost the most, refuse the emptiness visited upon them.

From here to there, all of us who refuse the dead ends of killing economics, of killing ethnic aggrandizement, of killing national purities, of soul destroying uncomforted despairs, we stand together under the skies of vast possibilities.