Category Archives: 9-11

Letting Go of 9 / 11

In my heart I feel it’s time for us Americans to decide our most important ENERGY FOCUS to carry from past tragedies like 9/11 into our future:

Should we focus on the personal hurts, the torn families, the great damage to our national sense of stability and pride?

Can we find deep emotional and spiritual closure by dwelling on or suppressing the past?

Can we transcend the pain of our dreams and loves lost by daring for a revitalized brotherhood and sisterhood in our homes, our communities, our world?

Or should we continue obsessing over endlessly seeking vengeance on old enemies to the point that we endlessly create new ones?

Can we secure our country’s borders and our citizens’ liberties by letting our naturally spirited, free-speaking, free-acting, free-thinking people be treated as suspects by the endless motley parades of suspicious military, police and political bureaucrats who would “make our world safer for us”?

Isn’t it approaching time for us all to end mourning of the dead so the sparkling possibilities of today can emerge from their hiding places beneath the rocks of our guilt, anger, fear, habitual blindness?

Do I respect the dead? Do I respect those still in sorrow? Do I respect those who have sacrificed for our country and for a more peaceful world?

Yes, I most certainly do–
but I respect the claims of no man or woman, dead or alive, rich or famous, to chain me, you or any human being on Earth to any vision of our collective future that denies the great endless spiritual growth that is everyone’s sacred birthright.

No more excuses, my friends.

Your natural claim to a more joyful, peaceful, creatively sane existence is inextricably tied up in the fulfillment of every other human being’s very same birthright.

No matter how stifled or controlled by others in the past, this vital joy of our collective human birthright is meant to push up through the ashes of the Great Crusades, the Inquisition, the Black Plague, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Bhopal, 9/11…

We’re to water with work and bright expectation the unseen seeds of an unknown harvest now germinating in the earth. These seeds now yearn inwards and reach outwards for Divine blessing to awaken their core potential.

How can we do anything but say YES to the opportunities for good that seek our patient attention through the tragedies inescapable to all human life?

I am honoring the dead of 9/11 and the newly born every day since by knowing and trying to live by this scientific fact:

LIFE NEVER ENDS.

Your life, my life, the actual existence of everyone’s spiritual beingness, simply never ends.

It only changes shape, changes focus, changes riverbed. Changes wind current, changes fragrance, changes intensity of awareness for our true hearts’ desires…

Peace, Blessings, Happiness and Solace to you and yours–
living, dead and yet to come–
on this good day of September 11, 2012.

Rev. Scott Ufford
Spiritualist minister
Copyright 2012

Raw 9/11/2001 WTC Memorial Poem: YOU DIED

A raw memorial poem I wrote in NYC in 2001 immediately after destruction of the World Trade Center & the slaughter of 4,000:

YOU DIED.

My heart is ripped open.
Gouged open.
I am in shock.
I am grief.

* * * * * * * * * * *

My brain is pounding pounding
My pulse is crazed
Everything is askew
Empty
Whirling
Gasping breathless.
I’m spinning.
Who will catch me?
What can heal me?
What is real?
Where are you now?

* * * * * * * * * * *

No words to cry.
No one to hear me.
No way to cry.
My blood runs away.
Painfully sweet.
My pain flows like warm honey
Into your hive.
Into my full memories of you.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Incredible loss.
Horrific waste.
No comprehension.
I will never see you again?
Impossible.
My heart recoils at the thought
Like a gunshot aimed
In a terribly
Insanely
Wrong direction.
Look, I’ll prove it.
With my eyes closed tight right now,
I can still see you . . .

* * * * * * * * * * *

Life.
Slowly.
Flows.
Back.
Into my wretched heart.
Heals it like a
Long-vanished ocean tide
Returning to bathe crusted shores
To wash away my grief.
I am so grateful to you.

* * * * * * * * * * *

I can feel you grinning with relief.
At me.
You live in stunning new dimensions.
You see me finally
Waking up.
And.
Breathing.
Deeply.
On my side of the ripped veil.
We are both going to be
Okay.
In the morning, my tears taste
Good.

* * * * * * * * * * *


Bloody History of this Raw Memorial Poem

These few words about slaughtered friends,
about unexpected sacrifices, losses, grief and redemption
at NYC’s World Trade Center and across America
were written one gray morning after September 11, 2001.

Pinned to the sagging wire fence at Union Square Park–

surrounded by heaps of sad flowers taped to hopeful notes
pleading for any word of the whereabouts of loved ones lost in the confusion–

lit by nearby pools of candles burning in memoriam over smiling family photos of the doomed–

abandoned to the elements just a stone’s throw from the Dalai Lama’s
scale model of the Twin Towers wreathed in carnations and tears–

half hidden next to park visitors’ unforgettable words and pictures of anguish,
anger, prayer and pleading scrawled on a giant public paper canvas taped around all the paths–

two weeks later to be rolled up & shipped to the Smithsonian for what?
for safekeeping?–

my simple words lost in the miserable maze heaped
below the 145 year old gray equestrian statue of Washington
inscribed in bold chalk letters with the message PEACE NOT WAR–

this little memorial poem somehow got scooped up & quoted
on sites dotting the countryside, such as Tulsa World.

Is it all just about luck?
About the Divine Hand?
About when it’s your time to go, you go?

By the grace of unseen guidance I and so many others survived.
Others did not.
We still remember them.

The blessings and lessons of our lives go on.

Scott Ufford
Spiritualist minister
Copyright 2001, 2011