Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash
This week we pause.
25 years ago, September 11 was a sunny Tuesday with a brilliant blue sky. It seemed a day like many others: a return to school, a return to work after the Labor Day weekend, a certainty to the air, the schedule, the path to the season of Autumn. But on that day certainty broke, publicly and completely — the ground everyone stood on, the buildings people worked in, gone in real time. But what came after is where our theme gets its proof: the certainty that did show up that day wasn’t about answers to the questions, and it surely wasn’t shelter from the storm. It was people.
Strangers walked each other across bridges. Restaurants cooked for their whole block. Ordinary people demonstrated the spark of humanity and the innate kindness and compassion of caring for one another. That is the kind of certainty Nature herself has always modeled for us, and now shown to be true of us as well. The certainty of knowing that the saying “nothing bad will happen,” is not really true, but instead “when it does, we know how to turn toward each other.”
Trees still stand after the blazing fires that decimate the forest. Cities rebuild, even when no one asked them to be brave about it. Grief moves through us on its own timeline, whether we manage it or not — and it moves through a city the same way it moves through a body.
Words
When the pain of the world finds words
they sound like joy
and often we follow them
with our feet of earth
and learn them by heart
but when the joy of the world finds words
they are painful
and often we turn away
with our hands of water
— W.S. Merwin, from Writing to an Unfinished Accompaniment (Atheneum, 1973)
That paradox is exactly what I remember most about that kind of day — that catastrophe seems to pull us toward each other far more readily than comfort ever does. I know this certainty firsthand, from a different ground that broke.
In 1989, I was working in a hotel in San Francisco — a sold-out week, the World Series in town, a legal convention filling every room. This was before the internet existed. Before everyone carried a cell phone. The first thing we knew wasn’t information, it was instinct — pigeons lifting off all at once, animals scattering, some old wisdom in them reading the air before we could. Then the ground itself moved, and across the city, buildings shifted and collapsed, fires spread in the Marina, shattered glass rained down in Union Square.
And then — with no power, no landlines working to call anyone, a hotel full of frightened guests, — ordinary people just stepped into the gap. We emptied the walk-ins and started cooking everything before it spoiled. We went door to door, floor to floor. Who was stuck in an elevator? Where would people sleep tonight? Across the street, the shops and restaurants were doing the same thing we were, without anyone coordinating it. It was, in the middle of something frightening, as the city descended into the darkness of night, kind of awesome — that particular electricity of a whole city deciding, all at once and without being asked, to take care of each other.
That is exactly what happened on September 11, 2001, and in the weeks that followed. It is what Fred Rogers’ mother told him to look for, long before either of us needed the reminder: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.'”
That’s the certainty we like to imagine would return, if the ground ever broke again. And every time it has, that spark of humanity rises, and once again, we meet the storm, we bear the burdens, we take care of and live within the shelter of each other.
A ritual for the pause, this week:
In Chinese Medicine, we are now moving from the Earth of late summer into the true Metal element of Autumn — the season of the Lung and Large Intestine, the organs of breath and of release. Metal’s emotion is grief, and its gift, when we let it move through us instead of around us, is the ability to let go of what we no longer need to carry — while keeping what still nourishes us close.
A breath practice for the pause: Sit somewhere quiet. Inhale for a count of four, feeling the breath fill not just your chest but your back ribs, your whole cage of bone around the heart. Hold for two. Exhale slowly for six — longer than the inhale, on purpose, because Metal season asks us to release more than we take in. As you exhale, silently name one thing — a person, a fear, a version of safety — that you are ready to let move through you rather than hold onto.
Oils for grief and breath: Frankincense, for the way it opens the chest and steadies the spirit. Cypress, which in both TCM and folk tradition has long been tied to mourning and resilience — the tree that bends in storms and does not break. A drop of either, on the sternum or in a diffuser, held with the breath practice above.
A small Celtic thread: this week, light one candle at the same hour each year — make it a yearly appointment with memory rather than a single act. If you want to call on her, this is a Cailleach week — the old woman of Celtic tradition who holds the coming dark, who keeps what has been lost without needing it fixed. You don’t have to explain your grief to her. She already knows its shape.
And the small, deliberate act:
Write down one name you remember — it doesn’t have to be a name from that day. And beside it, write one thing you are doing this year, because of them. That’s the whole ritual. Not a grand gesture. A consistent, quiet one — the same kind that fed a hotel full of strangers in the dark, and fed a grieving city in September of 2001, and will feed whatever comes next, because that is simply what we do for each other, without being asked.
We cannot know what the next ground-shift will bring. But we know, with real certainty, who we will become when it comes: the helpers. The ones who show up. Let us endeavor to be part of that group – the ones who show up – in our everyday lives, without fanfare, without applause. Just with the certainty that we are needed and will do what we can, while we are able.
