Grief In Pema Chodron's World

I have been tending to some viral invasion today, on this 10th year anniversary of the 9/11 deaths.  I wore my flag T-shirt and thought of many things while I drank tea, took Vitamin C, Grape Seed extract, Golden Seal and drank that awful Echinacea tea.  Feeling sick is not my thing and gets in the way of all the things that I wanted to do this weekend.  My lymph nodes told the story that I had to concede. 

For me, death of those close to me can bring on a very deep darkness that pulls me under and can stop the world from turning.  Wasn't it just that feeling that swept over us 10 years ago today?  I have a sister who was a professional flight attendant that day in 2001 and so I felt even more powerless as the days after 9/11 came to rest in my chest, my throat and my heart as she talked to me and we cried over our phone connection between California and Texas.  For the following months and years, every time my sister got on an airplane, I held my breath.  Many of us did that same thing and, we could never come to resolve any of it.  Never.

I say a prayer, in my own way today, for all of us who lived on that day and dealt with death, with grief, sorrow, terror, betrayl, wretchedness and such anger.  Anger that would never be quenched.  And so, like I have come to do every day for the past seven years or so, I often turn to Pema Chodron for insight.  She is the one who always seems to tell me what I don't want to hear and what I always need to hear to help me keep the pod bay doors open to my heart. 

"....we can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us.  We always have this choice."  -Pema Chodron from The Pocket Pema Chodron.