Aligning with Grace

I took this picture in Dachau last year. It was such a haunting experience and I have thought of my time there over and over again. It was profoundly moving. And while the focus of that trip was something totally different - this is what I think of the most and it is what haunts me. A friend of mine told me her father had been held there. I cannot imagine what that must have been like. Since then, I have read many books on the need for ancestral healing and how the wounds of one generation are passed on to the next and the next... I felt compelled to thank the guide I had for teaching countless others about what happened in that camp, so that we would never forget. I asked myself then, how could this have happened? But the truth is, I knew. And we all know. And yet it continues to happen. Like many, I am profoundly affected by what is going on in Israel and Gaza. I am also very concerned about all of this escalating into something much bigger. I have many friends who are Jewish. And I ...

This month is just about over, and I can't for the life of me, tell you where it went! I had a lot of goals and projects, and while I took care of some minor ones, it seems I hardly made a dent on my list. Perhaps it is the heaviness that seems to permeate so much on the planet right now - war in several places, including the conflict between Israel and Gaza, which I visited, just over 7 months ago. Even then, I was very much struck by how two people co-existed in the same, very small area - and were literally invisible to one another. The tension was palpable. I wanted to take them both by hand - the Jew and the Muslim - and say to them: "Here, look at each other! You share the same land and ancestry! You are children descended from the same man - Abraham!" There is also the matter of the planes recently shot down from the sky, particularly the one over the Ukraine, so many innocent lives needlessly taken. It just does not seem to be to me the kind of summer I had ...