We are human, we are emotional, we are empathic. We are also connected to everything around us in ways that great thinkers and spiritual explorers have been trying to understand for aeons. Because of this, yes, we can grieve for "other" losses, and it is no less "honest".

Memorialization is, like spiritual practice, a private matter often done in public. As there are different churches and religious ceremonies for spirituality, there are different ways of remembering, honoring, commemorating. You might be drawn to formal ceremony, or to light candles with prayer, or to even watching the clouds skitter across the sky.

In all of this, it is most important to be conscious, to be aware. The primitive part of our brains ignores repetitive stimuli, as a cat does with finger snaps. In evolutionary terms this is important, but it also dulls us, reduces portions of our lives to rote. Be aware of your life, as you have shown us you are with your words.

We all lost something a year ago. Obi-Wan Kenobi's statement about feeling a disturbance in the Force is, I believe, appropriate. Our feelings of the September 11 "disturbance" may have come from a reading of whatever Force we may believe in, or they may have come from watching and reading news reports. I don't think there's a difference in the end result.

But we also perhaps gained something: a temporary alleviation of "rote". Events such as these, even painful ones like September 11, offer a doorway to observations and discoveries of ourselves.

In your confusion and pain you are the same as me, and of most of us. That doesn't make it better, of course, but know that for all of your feelings of isolation or disconnection, you aren't alone in what you feel, what you hope.

I hold you all in my heart and arms this day of remembrance and reflection.