Next . . .

We go on because we have to, and because we are breathing rhythmically, in and out, and therein is momentum, that combined with the turning and the rising and the setting. . .we go on.

We pay the bill, prepare the meal, wash the clothing.  We make the phone call; all because there is a "next", a time when the bill will be overdue, when the meal will be digested, the clothing worn and back in the hamper, when the information given over the phone will no longer be needed, will have evaporated.

We call into the next room to someone who is there, for now.  We make a lunch date, write an appointment on the calendar, remember that we forgot something that is now more urgent, all because we assume there is a "next."

And yet, as we do all these things one after another, there is a drag, there is a darkness that stretches to Newtown, Connecticut, to the black hole that began with. . .well, we honestly don't know where or how it began, but its focal point is a young man, was a young man, lost, lost, lost. It is unfathomable to most of us how one can be so lost that the only way home is. . .well, you know.

This lostness has reverberated around the world. And we are pulled by it, mesmerized by it, into deep deep confusion and sorrow.

I can't help but imagine that when Made-In-The-USA missiles fall out of the sky from an airplane driven by a computer and a faceless "operator" thousands of miles away, and they explode into a village, sometimes into a school in a place where we can't pronounce the names of the victims, where they won't be read out loud by the American president, where there won't be banner headlines declaring "Before Their Time," where the deaths won't be the topic on all the American news channels for days and days and days, where the reason won't be assiduously searched out, where people who kill innocents won't be said to need more services, where it won't be said that we finally must ensure that these people no longer have access to such weapons; I can't help but imagine that to those parents, to those families, to those communities, those deaths aren't just as heart and soul-numbingly inexplicable.

So perhaps, for a moment, maybe now, we acknowledge that they matter, all of them.  All of them matter.