Overture of Reflections
St. Paul's Churchyard

I'll never forget this ladder fireman came out, exhausted, and consumed with grief. They'd been working for 2 days straight trying their best to find the two brothers of one of the guys. Just to see these huge, strapping men so overwhelmed in grief, it was more powerful than anything you can begin to describe...

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We could see the towers, and the smoke and stuff like that there, and then from that point on I mean the whole day was just total chaos, you know, trying to get in and out of the City, moving around and stuff like that there, and it just, it was just a terrible thing, it hit you really hard, I'm sure it hit everybody really hard.

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All we heard in background were sirens going off, police cars driving around, and you could sense there was something quite large going on...

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There was some guy with a walkie-talkie who was sort of barking at us: "Go faster go faster." -- he was screaming, "Go faster." And I remember I turned to him and I said, "Why do we have to go faster?" and he looked at me and said, "Lady when that second tower goes down you'll know why," and literally seconds later everything started to shake.

There was nothing you could do...

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How could this have happened? How in the world could this happed, how could the pentagon be attacked, how could someone get away with that?

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It was something out of a, almost out of a horror movie, that you know what you've seen, but you kinda don't believe it, you know, sort of like you were in a lost world.

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The cemetery was covered in debris, computer disks, monitors blown apart, metal, window blinds in the trees, sheets, photographs, papers, everywhere, I remember the stench of death...

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I mean my brain was running about a million miles an hour, kinda trying to calculate what is coming at me, what do I do to protect myself, and then within seconds I realized there is nothing you could do. And at that point I turned and I faced it and I just surrendered my life.

It was both an incredibly terrifying moment and an incredibly liberating moment, because I feel like I'll know what that will feel like at the end of my life, and it completely reorients the way I live.

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I use to be very afraid of suffering but I really believe that one of the greatest gifts of this experience for me has been learning the ability to be present to suffering and pain. It was over time that I learned being present to people who are suffering kept my heart open and that's what I really wanted-that open heart.

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I think I'm getting a minor understanding of the concept of grace. Seeing all these hundred and hundreds of random acts of kindness.