WTC 9/11 Medicine Wheel 2021
Twenty years ago today, my old neighborhood was destroyed when hijackers flew two commercial jets loaded with passengers into the World Trade Center Towers in New York City.
I took these photographs from the Observation Deck at the top. I used to dream of these towers, rising silver against the blue sky. In my dreams, the windows were missing, the offices abandoned. A jungle of plants and wildlife climbed through the empty towers, every 10 floors a new microclimate. In my dreams, these gleaming emblems of capitolism became a vertical garden, a wonder of the natural world reclaimed.
That vision, that dream, ceased on September 11, 2001, along with so many lives, and ideals, and delusions.
This is my prayer of remembrance and healing.
East
The World Trade Center, the double hub of my life wheel. It was the first place I went when I ran away to the City in 1977. Wearing Earth Shoes and carrying an instamatic camera, I took the elevators to the observation deck, and took a photo survey of my new home.
This picture, unknown to me at the time, includes the building two blocks away where I would soon be living with my as yet unmet husband and nursing my two little boys.
South
My babies learned to walk in the World Trace Center plaza, played in the fountain. The endless construction and deconstruction inside the Twin Towers fed my children for years, as my husband the union carpenter built office after office for the junk-bond fueled Reaganomicans.
West
In dreams, I'd imagine the Towers as a great gleaming double hanging garden, the glass blown out, the people gone, and plants, vines, flowers, birds, animals of all kinds creating a new micro-ecology every ten floors or so. I figured if we humans moved out, it would take nature about 10 years to walk off with the Twin Towers.
North
We know that is not how the World Trade Center ends. My old neighborhood was destroyed when two commercial jets loaded with passengers flew into the World Trade Center Towers.
I was safely at home in Maine. My husband was working in New York City. His boss sent him down to the World Trade Center on a job — and at the last minute, called him back. That is how he came to watch the Towers fall from a rooftop in Mid-town, instead of being a casualty.
Center
I offer prayers to the four directions and the heart -- for those who died that day, for all our memories, for those who continually suffer the war, for our so-called leaders who cannot earn our forgiveness, and for the rest of us who stand and pray sing dance cry for a vision.
Update
20 years later, hubris soars and destroys unabated. A new taller “Freedom Tower” rises near the site. Our freedom took a hit that day, not from terrorists, but from our national and international response to the event.
I have changed from the eager and terrified college drop-out who ran away to the big city.
In the 44 years since I took that elevator to the Observation Deck, and snapped these photos with a cheap camera, my children have grown up, my grandchildren are born, my husband has died…
I am devoted to helping women and men remember their intimate relationship with Nature, and with Life.
The Towering Twin Towers forest garden of New York City I once dreamed about will not manifest.
Nature remembers the land before the white man, the corporation, and the patriarchy. Her systems of cleansing and chaos will restore health to the land.
Our work as humans is to shift as rapidly and fiercely and lovingly as we can and remember our partnership, letting Nature Lead.
This is my prayer at the center of the Wheel of Life in 2021.