Where were you seven years ago? All last week, we heard this question.
September, for Americans, will always be an anniversary of sorrows. Seven years ago we were brought to the very brink of our imaginations. We saw the World Trade Center towers fall, and after that, everything changed. Our school-age children have grown up in a world where the word “terror” has nothing to do with Halloween stories and everything to do with an enemy that lurks and hides like vapor.
Seven years ago, we were wordless and breathless.
We were a collective hope, a collective prayer, a collective grief as we listened to the radio voices speak the unthinkable. We looked at each other through dark windows and saw our shaken selves looking back.
All across America — and across most of the world — we were at a loss, gathering ourselves back up, finding that after crumbling, the bones of our spines heavy with dismay and horror, we could try to stand again. And we did.
It’s that time of year again, only this year, the anniversary came on the tail of two major political conventions, during which many were asking the question: “What is the state of our nation?”
Today I want to ask different questions: What is the state of our hearts, our guts, our heads?
What voices speak for our country? What do they say? Do they speak to you? Do they settle you and bolster you and inspire you? Do they take hold in a part of you that grows inspiration, and do you trust them? Do you believe them?
Are we grounded? Are we united? Are we healing and growing and taking care as you would have us do?
During those hard nights when the world rumbles and broils and steams with anger and fear — when you wake and wonder about safety, when you wake and wonder about joy and love and human frailties, when you wake and ask yourself how are we handling it this time, this go-round, this cycle in history? What is your answer?
Are we proud of ourselves? Are we strong in spirit, which is, after all, where the sturdiness of a nation, of a people, matters most? And what of integrity?
Perhaps it is time to take a spiritual inventory, an inventory aside from the balderdash of politics and the turn of a tricky slogan. We need an inventory of what we have done and of what we have failed to do, and most expressly, of what we have allowed others to do in our name. And then an inventory of what we hope to do.
As an American, what is the state of your heart?
In the name of 9/11, we declared war on the worst that lies in the hearts of individual men, but we won’t ever win. Not by holding the course, or flying the flag, or toeing the line, or giving our lives, or by repeating a handy phrase of fiddle-faddle until it sounds true. We can’t win a war against each and every individual who may do us harm. Terror is an idea of the mind, and you can’t shoot an idea.
The worst of what humans can imagine, and of what we can’t imagine — caused by people or caused by nature — will always have some opportunity to swoop down torrentially.
It is how we are able to react to the worst that defines us as a people.
We need to ask ourselves, in the harsh light of aftermath, in the clear light of retrospect, “What do we hope to do now? How do we wish to live?”
As we move through our lives, creating our history, much and mountainous good will happen. But ask yourself: When the bad is infuriating, when it is thunderous and huge, in the light of such catastrophes as 9/11 and in the light of whatever else is to come in our lives and in the lives of our children and theirs, what kind of people do we want to be?
And are we moving closer to that — or further away?
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza- Chavez at grace-notes@ . Read more of her essays at .
