Andrew Himes

I tried an experiment yesterday, and successfully turned a large, loud, angry, abusive man into a bunnyrabbit.

The back story is that I am the owner of an old wooden boat, the upkeep of which probably takes more of my time and money than any sensible person should spend on an inanimate object. My boat has called the same slip at the same dock on Lake Union in Seattle home for a decade now. Every once in awhile, I connect my water hose to the spigot next to my boat and use it to fill my water tank or wash down the boat's exterior.

Recently, the two boats that share my water spigot have been occupied by boats whose owners live aboard the boats, and both owners have connected their own hoses to the two taps on the water spigot. Moreover, both of the other owners have asked me not to remove their hoses. This creates something of a problem for me, because I can only connect my hose by temporarily disconnecting someone else's hose. So yesterday, when I needed to fill my water tank, I knocked at the houseboat next door to let them know I would be using the water spigot, in order to avoid any problems for them. A woman came to the door, and I let her know that I would be using the water. Shortly, a large and angry man came out of the houseboat and began hollering at me. He ordered me to stop using "his" spigot, and let me understand that I would be in big trouble if I didn't follow his orders. I tried to explain that I had to get water from somewhere, and that I had been using this spigot for ten years with no problems. But he just hollered at me some more, went back into his houseboat and slammed the door.

I was confronted with a dilemma. I needed water, but I didn't want a war. He wasn't willing to listen to me or negotiate, so I had no partner in a solution. I considered writing a formal letter to the marina owner asking the marina to create a solution that would work for all of us, but the marina owner has a long history of being unresponsive to problems. Somehow, we, the people with the problem, needed to work this out.

Finally, I figured it out. I went to the grocery store and bought a lovely, rainbow-colored bouquet of flowers, then drove back to the marina, walked out the dock to the houseboat, and knocked on the door. My heart was pounding with adrenaline, and I was pretty sure the large man was about to holler at me again or maybe start beating the crap out of me and then throw me in the lake! He answered the door, still frowning and fuming with rage, and he opened his mouth to start yelling at me when he saw the flowers. His mouth remained open, but with amazement.

"I'm here to apologize for getting off on the wrong foot with you, and so I've brought you this peace offering," I said fearfully, and thrust the bouquet into his hand before he knew what I was doing. "I really don't want to cause you a problem, and I wonder if there isn't some solution that works for both of us."

His tone immediately changed. He replied quietly, with a stunned expression on his face, and for the first time he explained the nature of his problem and exactly how I had inconvenienced him and his wife. The woman I had spoken to earlier was a friend and a guest, but she had never relayed my warning that I was turning off their water, so his wife had been caught in the shower with no water pressure -- not a pleasant experience for her. After a few minutes, we were chatting like old friends, and agreed to figure out a solution together.

This experiment was triggered for me by Walter Wink, a philosopher who writes extensively about Christian teachings on nonviolence, notably in his book, Jesus and Nonviolence: A Third Way. Wink proposes that nonviolence need not be submisssion to violence, nor a passive retreat from aggression or abuse, but rather should be an active, bold, initiatory striving for justice based on compassion. By responding to the anger and violence of others with a sharp, clear, bold yet nonviolent compassion, we can lay the basis for others to change their behavior, and we can learn how to change ourselves as well.

-- Andrew Himes's Revival blog.

In the summer of 1964, I sat on the dark blue fabric of the couch in our living room with its knotty pine paneling in Millington, Tennessee watching the Democratic convention and conducting my own personal Republican celebration of what I imagined to be the impending demise of a party in disarray, with a repulsive and criminal leader named Lyndon Johnson, sure to lead his party to defeat by the intrepid and noble Goldwater.

But as I watched our little black-and-white television, right next to where our black maid Mary Smith came every week to set up her ironing board and do the mopping and sweeping and cleaning for our poor white minister’s family, I saw an amazing sight. There in Atlantic City, New Jersey, amidst several thousand white men representing Democratic Party caucuses and precincts from across the country and fifty different states, a lone black woman testified before the Credentials Committee and stared down those white men until they hushed up and turned toward her and quieted down so they and several million more Americans could hear what she had the nerve to say when her speech was broadcast in its entirety on all three networks that night.

The woman’s name was Fannie Lou Hamer. She was a sharecropper from Sunflower County, Mississippi, and that day in New Jersey she told of being beaten, insulted and evicted. She said, “All of this is on account of us wanting to register, to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?”

Half a decade later, in the summer of 1969, Fannie Lou was fifty-one years old, and she came to visit Madison on a sweltering day that in its heat and heaviness reminded me of my old home town in Tennessee, 140 miles due north from Fannie Lou’s home in Ruleville, Mississippi, a day when the trees and the people wilted in an unrelenting downpour of sunshine and the grass on the library lawn sat brown and lifeless and the surface of Lake Mendota lay mirrorlike and undisturbed by any errant breeze from the surrounding farmlands where cows and corn and soybeans lazed in shimmering fields.

I put up scores of leaflets and posters on bulletin boards all around campus, focusing in on the humanities classroom buildings and the student union and various leftwing delis and beer halls, bratwurst parlors and underground poetry venues where I might be able to snare students of history, English, political science, and creative writing, while avoiding the engineering hall and the business school, considering them a lost cause from the point of view of recruitment as it was well known that most engineers lacked a certain gene required for a highly developed consciousness of social justice. A bare handful of students and teachers showed up to hear her in a small room in the Student Union that had perhaps fifty stackable chairs, ten of which were occupied by summer school students along with a few townsfolk. Fannie Lou arrived a few minutes before her talk was to begin, which made me a little nervous because as a member of the organizing committee I was assigned to introduce her.

Fannie Lou was a heavyset woman in a flower print polyester dress, with her thick black hair pulled back behind her head in a scarf. She was 51 years old at the time, which meant she was more than twice as old as I was and possessed a great deal more gravity than I had.  She had a serious expression on her face and leaned forward to take my hand as we were introduced.  She looked right at me with her black eyes, and held my hand for a moment, squeezing it between hers, and she said, “Yes, Mr. Himes, I’m proud to know you.” Remembering Mary, our household maid in Tennessee, one of the few black adults I had met previously, I felt an obscure sense of shame that emanated from somewhere behind my ears.  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, lapsing back into a Tennessee drawl that I had spent the previous few years trying to leave behind me.  “I’m honored to meet you.”

I had read up a bit on Fannie Lou. I introduced her as a woman who had grown up as a sharecropper, illiterate and unskilled, with no way to earn a living other than by endless hours of picking cotton. She was famous as a co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964, I said. She was first introduced to the civil rights movement in 1962 when organizers for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee called a voter registration meeting. 

“That’s right,” said Fannie Lou when she stood up to speak.  “That’s when I was surprised to learn for the first time that black people had a constitutional right to vote. That sounded interesting enough to me that I wanted to try it. When those organizers asked for volunteers to go down to the courthouse and register to vote, I was the first person with my hand up.” She told how her landlord immediately evicted her from her home and her husband refused to take the same stand she took. She then devoted herself to changing the conditions of life for black people in Mississippi and across the South.

Fannie Lou talked about being arrested in 1962 by a Mississippi state highway patrolman, and dragged into a jail cell. “That man pulled down the back of my dress and he had two Negro prisoners beat me with a blackjack until I was black and blue and I was screaming. He said, ‘Fannie Lou, you better get the hell out of Mississippi, because we don’t cotton to upstart niggers that don’t know their place and get big ideas.’ And I said, ‘I will leave Sunflower County, Mississippi when God tells me to and not before.’”

Fannie Lou looked at me and looked at the few others in the room with me. She said, “You know, every single morning of every single day, I wake up in the morning and I look at the ceiling and I repeat these words, ‘I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.’ And I will tell you that I will spend every second of every minute of every day of my life to bring justice to Mississippi. I will have my freedom, or I will have my grave.”

In Fannie Lou Hamer’s words I heard a nobility and selflessness I had been looking for, and a cause much greater than myself. I resolved I would find a way to go back down South and join in the struggle that Fannie Lou had articulated. I wanted to devote my life to something as big and important as the dream she had been drawn to.

I spent my high school years during the 1960s growing more and more outraged by the war in Vietnam. Every day I came home from school and watched Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News reporting on yet another cycle of death and horror, destruction and dismemberment. Every day I heard about dozens or hundreds of new US casualties and hundreds or thousands of new Vietnamese casualties. I heard about atrocities like the killing of Vietnamese civilians in My Lai, and the carpet-bombing of the jungles by endless flights of B-52s, and pointless slaughter at places with names like Khe Sanh and Hue and Ia Drang. I was saddened by the killing. I was angered by the lies told about why we went to war and the fraudulent speeches by politicians like Lyndon Johnson who spoke dignified phrases about democracy and freedom while launching the most horrific bombardments and assaults against human life and dignity.  By the time I was a junior in high school, I was sickened and horrified by the war and deeply opposed to its continuation.

In the fall of 1968 I went off to college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison bearing an extraordinary burden of self-righteousness.  I lived in a permanent sense of outrage combined with an extraordinary feeling of freedom. I had escaped from the narrow confines of my family and church and high school, and the context of my escape was the ongoing war in Vietnam.  By the end of my first year in college I had become a fulltime political activist. I gave up attending all but a few of my classes, and devoted myself to passing out leaflets, helping to organize rallies, attending antiwar demonstrations, and running the mimeograph machine in the Student Union to help organize yet more demonstrations.

Not only was I against the war, I was also against any soldier who had become part of the machinery of the war, whether by volunteering or consenting to being drafted, and then had gone off to take part in the war. I was sure such an act was the result of a moral choice made by an individual who was morally accountable. I believed soldiers knew what they were getting themselves into, that they were fighting an immoral war against civilians on behalf of an invading and occupying force. They were available for my sanctified disapproval, and I condemned soldiers along with their actions.

By the fall of 1969, these frequent demonstrations had become a source of irritation to the Regents of the University of Wisconsin, and they passed a law forbidding the use of loud speaking equipment on the public college campuses of Wisconsin for any political purpose. Antiwar activists on my campus at Madison held a quick planning meeting and concluded this was an egregious violation of our right to free speech as enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Far from being outraged, we were actually quite pleased, having been granted a perfect excuse for a demonstration and a gift of the moral high ground in our dispute with the Regents. We had the ideal occasion in mind. October, 1969 would see a national demonstration in Washington DC, supported by student strikes and other demonstrations on hundreds of campuses across the country.  It was called the Vietnam Moratorium, and over two million American would march against the war in the largest political demonstrations in US history.

In Madison, several thousand students gathered in the square between the University Library and the Wisconsin State Historical Association. We had prepared for a dramatic yet peaceful demonstration. We selected four volunteers to be speakers at the rally and targets for arrest that day. Marge Tabankin was a vice president of the student body, a woman of large presence and strong ideas who had taught me much about how to negotiate the difficult political waters on campus and build coalitions with people who were each other’s opponents. Elrie Crite, a slim black man with a large round Afro, was the first director of the brand new Black Studies Center, which had been created in response to a campus wide strike called by the black student union the previous year. Billy Kaplan was an aggressive, eloquent, and fearless speaker and chairman of Students for a Democratic Society, the potpourri assemblage of radicals on campus. And I was the fourth person selected for arrest.

The other three speakers were set up on the steps of the library surrounded by the largest physical display of loud-speaking equipment we could muster, assembled from rental equipment stores up to a hundred miles away. We had gigantic amplifiers and massive microphones and ten foot tall speakers designed for use in rock concerts and political rallies.

Three of our designated arrestees were surrounded by a phalanx of the campus police, led by Chief Ralph Hansen, a genial, balding, and somewhat portly gentleman with a liberal disposition and a desire to keep the peace in a civilized sort of way. Ralph knew me well enough as a burgeoning troublemaker on campus, and I had acquired the permit for the demonstration in his office the day before. A large round fountain occupied the middle of the yard in front of the Library where we held the rally. During the summertime the fountain was uncovered and active, but in October it was covered by a metal sheathe that protected the fountain from the ice and snow of the coming winter. By 10 AM that morning, I was perched high above the rest of the crowd atop the metal sheath, which made a perfect speaker’s platform.

As the rally began, Marge, Billy, and Elrie each stepped up to the microphone in turn and began to speak. As they did so, each was arrested and carted off to the Madison City Jail, leaving no one on the platform except for the police. The crowd then began to stir, with no immediate focus for their attention except for the cops, who were doubtless worried about what might come next, given the history of violent protests in Madison. At that point, I opened the cardboard box I had brought with me to the top of the fountain cover and pulled out my portable bullhorn to carry on with the rally. As soon as I started speaking, the crowd recognized what was happening. They turned their backs on the police and began chanting and shouting. Several cops led by Ralph Hansen started shoving their way through the crowd in my direction.  And the crowd, while offering no active resistance, also provided no assistance to Ralph and his cohorts. When Ralph reached the bottom of the fountain, he looked up at me, waggled his finger in my direction, and shouted, “Andy, you come down from there right this minute!” To the delighted cheers and catcalls of thousands, I hollered back, “Ralph, come up and get me!”

That moment was one of the supremely glorious moments of my life. Two cops clambered up the slanted metal sides of the fountain cover and hauled me down, placing me in handcuffs at the bottom of the fountain where Ralph waited impatiently. I was hustled into a squad car and taken to jail, where I was charged with “illegal use of a bullhorn.” I spent no more than twenty minutes behind bars before our lawyers got me bailed out, a newly-minted minor hero of the peace movement. The next day in the New York Times, I read a small article about our arrests in Madison. The case itself was thrown out a few months later by Federal Judge Frank Johnson, who declared the law unconstitutional.

35 years passed and I grew up a bit. I was opposed to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as I had been opposed to the war in Vietnam. But I was looking for how we could create a dialogue that transcended political arguments and led to an exploration of the human cost of war. I helped produce a film called Voices in Wartime that included an interview with Jonathan Shay, a psychologist who has treated hundreds of veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder. One afternoon in the spring of 2004 I sat in front of a television with my laptop, transcribing the raw footage of Jonathan’s interview as he talked about how soldiers experienced war. Jonathan said, “We are talking about a clicking in of some very deep emotional mechanisms that bond soldiers to each other. The grief that a soldier feels when a comrade is killed or severely maimed is akin to the grief of a mother whose child has just been killed.” That last phrase of Jonathan Shay’s hit me hard. At a deep emotional level, I understood as never before the personal cost of war for soldiers.

In August of 2006, I was a speaker at a veterans’ conference in Seattle. I told the story of my first arrest, in October of 1969, to those present, an audience of some 50 or 60 veterans, many of them from the Vietnam War. I looked back and remembered myself as a nineteen year old kid, full of self-righteous energy and disdain for anybody who disagreed with me, contempt for Ralph Hanson and Lyndon Johnson and my own parents, full of righteous anger directed at anyone who was in the military or in any way a part of the political superstructure that justified, supported, or funded the war. It would have been far from my consciousness on that long ago October morning, I said, to consider what might be going through a soldier’s mind, or what the sufferings of any soldier might amount to or how they might matter. I was sure I was right and that anybody who made any choice contrary to my own was morally wrong. I was a fool, I said, full of my own sanctified disapproval of soldiers and disdain for their sufferings. I had been right to oppose the war. But I was wrong to oppose the warrior. I had failed to understand that soldiers themselves were victims of the war. I knew nothing of the sorrows of soldiers, of the fear and pain that attended their service and the nightmares that followed it. I was ignorant of their motivations and of the terrible cost they had borne and continued to bear. I had refused to grant them humanity, and in my refusal I had diminished my own humanity.

When I finished speaking, the first person to stand in the audience was a burly vet about my age. He was an ex-marine named Michael Patrick Brewer wearing a "Vets 4 Vets" t-shirt. Michael was crying, and had trouble talking. He said that my story had opened his memory to a story of his own from that same time – October, 1969. And he said he had never told his story to anyone for 37 years. On that day he was a young active duty soldier who had just returned from Vietnam after a year’s tour. He was in Chicago that day, only 100 miles away from Madison where I was. And he was also at an antiwar demonstration, part of the national Vietnam Moratorium. He was wearing his Marine uniform, and after much struggle and thought he had decided to speak at the demonstration.

Michael told us how he’d gone to the rally and up onto the platform where he had been invited. He knew just what he would say. He planned to make a short speech in which he would say that we needed to stop three kinds of hatred. We needed to stop hating the Vietnamese. We needed to stop hating each other. And we needed to stop hating ourselves. As he was waiting for his turn to speak, someone else on the platform saw his uniform and attacked him, screamed that he was a baby killer, and kicked him, driving him off the stage. He said he had never before spoken of his shame at being so treated.

“You know,” he said, “that was more traumatic to me than anything that happened to me in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969.”

After the workshop, Michael said to me, “You used the word ‘sanctified.’ You talked about your ‘sanctified disapproval.’ I’ve never heard anybody use that word before in that way. Nobody’s ever apologized to me for what happened that day. And I never knew how much it mattered to me. I’ve always known what I did the next day – I walked into Hines Hospital in Chicago looking for help for my sadness and depression, though I didn’t stay because they were just looking for guinea pigs to medicate. For some reason I never put those two events together until right now. I didn’t go for help again until October, 1997, the same month as the Moratorium. 28 years of repression. Ain't the brain amazing? When repression is perfect you can't find it.”

By giving me his forgiveness in so graceful and compassionate a way, Michael helped me understand that I was much in need of it.  That day was important for both of us. As Michael told me, it was a big emotional “clear” for him, helping to close a chapter of his life in which he had difficulty trusting others or committing himself to being part of a community working for social change. He needed to hear how I had learned I was wrong,  how much I wanted and needed to hear his story, and how I had come to feel compassion for him and other veterans. Michael needed to experience the liberation that came from forgiving me.

A gulf of perception, personal experience, expectation, and memory separates us from each other. On one side is who I am, my relationships, my pangs of hunger and desire, my terrifying loves and magnetic fears. On the other side are those others, like Michael, unknown and alien to me, whose emotions, experiences, and deepest beliefs I can only view “as through a glass, darkly.” Even as I tell myself the story of my life, it changes. The story finds new pathways, enters new dominions. I discover new metaphors to filter and explain my memories and reshape my learning. I discover new connections and synchronicities between myself and those whom I identified in the past as my opponents.

For my part, I needed help from Michael to reach across that gap. I needed Michael to tell me his story, and I needed him to hear mine without judging me. We both needed to understand deeply the fear and sadness that had motivated each of us. And then we could begin our lives anew, having reconfigured the gap, having changed each other and ourselves. We could become each other’s salvation. We could become each other’s brother.

Now, five years after 9/11, we confront one of the most critical moments in our nation’s history. With much blood and treasure, we have paid for some powerful lessons and deep wisdom. Out of the wreckage of this war, might we come to a new understanding of the terrible human cost of war, and the legacy of trauma created by war? Are we nearing an historic "teachable moment" when we may be open to new insight into how we can live in a more sustainable and peaceful world? The world is waiting.

Written in the fall of 2006.

From my grandfather, Dr. John R. Rice, I learned about story-telling, poetry, and the importance of expressing love, grief, and joy. He was an old-fashioned, fundamentalist, fire-and-brimstone, country Baptist preacher from Texas, and he was the son, himself, of generations of preachers. My grandfather’s religion was no academic religion, no intellectual exercise in theology or disputation—though he was a theologian who engaged in many polemics about dogma, faith, and belief. His was a religion of the heart and the soul, a religion of the poor and the humble, the brokenhearted and the lost. And he was a preacher because he loved his fellow humans.

As I was growing up, I heard my grandfather preach hundreds of sermons, and each of them was a string of stories—one story or parable or illustration after another. As he preached, he recited poetry, recited long passages of scripture, sang scraps of hymns, and talked to people alive and dead, from his wife sitting in the front pew to his own long-gone mother looking down on him from heaven. In every sermon, he broke into tears a half dozen times as he spoke of his passion for winning lost souls to Jesus.  

For my grandfather, his religion, his faith and the core of his motivation as a pastor, teacher, counselor and evangelist were all about telling stories and hearing stories and exchanging stories. What I learned from him was that we all make meaning out of the heartache and struggles of our lives, and we do so by constructing a narrative that can contain the sense of what we have seen and experienced. We convey our grief and suffering through storytelling, we communicate our happiness and rejoicing through storytelling, and we teach some of what we have learned from our lives and from each other through storytelling.

But I also learned from my grandfather an absolute, black-and-white morality. He believed that all of us are sinners and doomed to an eternal hell, literally a lake of fire in which we will experience the torments and agony of the damned forever unless we have accepted Jesus into our hearts. For the living, my grandfather had a very strict set of moral categories. Either you were an agent of God and living for the Lord, or you were an agent of the Devil and living for yourself. As humans, we could do evil, or we could do good, but there was little in between. And his own very literal interpretation of the Bible determined to which category you belonged.

This has a particular relevance to the subject of war and to the human response to war. Violent conflict is perhaps the most extreme and intense collective human activity. As many veterans of combat have said, it is hard to go back to an ordinary life, working in an ordinary job and living in an ordinary house behind a white picket fence and a patch of green lawn when you’ve lived at the very edge of human existence in the course of a war, under conditions of duress and danger, terror and exhilaration, and in the company of comrades who have shared that experience with you. Combat provides a peculiar and deadly thrill, even as it rewires the brain and unleashes the nightmares.

As a young man and a civilian during the most tragic and terrible years of the Vietnam War, I understood little or nothing about the experience of the combat veteran. I was deeply opposed to the war and horrified by what I saw on the television evening news and the daily newspaper. I hated the politicians who launched the war and the generals who led the war and the officers and soldiers who participated in the war.  And I hated my grandfather who justified the war in the name of God, and who was enraged by those who opposed the war. He thought of them as hippies, communists, apostates and agents of the Devil. When I joined the ranks of the peaceniks, I was tarred with their brush. And I proclaimed my own absolute and self-righteous opposition to the pro-war politics of my grandfather.

I would have made any sacrifice during the Vietnam War if I thought it would help to end that war, and I devoted myself completely to the peace movement. I gave up college, forgot about a career and an ordinary life, was arrested several times, and devoted myself to being an activist against the war and then an activist for civil rights and social justice generally in the years that followed the war.

It is interesting to me now to look back on those days and understand that I shared my grandfather’s absolute morality and his sense of self righteousness. I believed that US soldiers were engaged in an immoral enterprise—the war in Vietnam—and thus were available for my condemnation. I had little compassion for the suffering of the soldiers themselves, and I failed to understand that they were themselves victims of the war. I refused to look at their motivations, and resisted looking at their sufferings and sorrows, because I thought they had made moral choices that were worthy of my own sanctified disapproval.

I have a history as a fool, and an arrogant one. My foolishness was not to oppose the war, but to oppose the warrior. My arrogance was to imagine that I had a lock on truth, justice, and morality, and that my motives were clean and pure, while those of my opponents were racist, violent and morally contaminated.

I have learned lessons in the making of the film Voices in Wartime. Compassion for the warrior, even as we search for alternatives to the practice of war itself. Regard for the long-term costs borne by the civilian victims of war, and their need for healing, support, and opportunity. Respect and gratitude for the soldier who volunteers to give his life for the health and safety of his community, even as we might decry the policies that thrust him into danger. Love and support for the families of those soldiers, who suffer from their absence and pray for their safe return. Finally, an appreciation for the role of art in general and storytelling in particular in healing the wounds of war and rebuilding the community.

In the end, all we have are the human bonds of love and care that connect us. Those bonds are forged through the telling of our common tale, across the gaps of history, culture and language, through the poems, stories, images and chaos of our common dilemma – how to listen to each other and work for healing when every instinct tells us to hoard our suspicions and launch preemptive strikes on our enemies.

In the end, the memory of my grandfather that lingers is the one that reveals him most as my kindred soul. In one of his sermons, he told the story of the death of his mother, Sarah LaPrade Rice, when he was a little boy of five:

“I remember the November day when we lay her body away. My father knelt beside the open grave. There was no white muslin to hide the raw dirt of the grave – like a wound in the earth. No fake, manmade carpet of grass was thrown over the clods. My father put one arm around his two little orphan girls and one around his two little boys, and watched as they lowered the precious body in its dark casket into the bosom of Mother Earth. The rain beat down upon us, and a friendly neighbor held an umbrella over our heads.”

In that paragraph is the core of the grief that remained with him throughout his life, and that fueled his passion to win souls to Jesus. It was an impulse toward redemption, sacrifice, and love, and what he thought of as Heaven itself, in the most literal sense.
In the grief of my grandfather, and in his love and sense of loss, is the seed of compassion that we will all need to heal this damaged world. From Baghdad to Baltimore, from Fallujah to Birmingham, from Jerusalem to Seattle, we connect with each other through what is missing from our lives. We evolve by means of the stories we pass from one to the other, around the circle, close to the fire.