3:36 pm. The school bus stops at our driveway, across from the pond, but no one gets off.
Our youngest, 14, has just, this very moment, touched down in Liberia, Costa Rica with his Junior High classmates.
When his older brother made the same trip a handful of years ago, I was a wreck; but he was only 12.
Still, I’ve splintered this entire day checking the status updates of Jet Blue and the posts in our parent Facebook group.
We brought our kids to school last night at 2:30 in the morning, and gathered in the parking lot in front of the bus until everyone arrived, and we chatted like it was normal to be there, in the dark, in the middle of the night, hanging out. Someone joked about getting breakfast afterward, and we all felt the longing for connection…
Kelly, assisting with the 2014 Let Your Yoga Dance teacher training
Dance into Winter with a community of WOMEN welcoming the Dark, the Light, and Everything in between.
Skill & experience soooooo not relevant. Letting go, relaxing, and being who you are–on any given night–most WELCOME. Gently-guided. Intuitively led. Divinely held. Irreverent. Sacred. Whole. (With a little CHAOS thrown in.)
Let Your Yoga Dance Winter Session Details
Who: Women–with Kripalu-trained YogaDance instructor, Kelly Salasin
What: 90 minutes of music, movement & meditation through the chakras
Where: Southern Vermont (Rte 9 in Marlboro)
When: Tuesdays Evenings (6:30 to 8:00 pm)
How: Barefoot, in clothing comfortable for movement; without any concern for skill or ability
Cost: $123.45 for the 9 week session
Drop-in, when available: $21.
December is a time of preparation, of advent, and in that spirit comes “Holly Days”–a weekend of local shopping in downtown Brattleboro–with deep discounts & holiday spirit.
One of my favorite things to do this weekend is to select my annual calendar; it’s a ritual that helps prepare me for the New Year–shaped by spirit and intention.
This tragedy does call into question so many things, that indeed should be questioned:
Why did we grieve the second murder but not the first?
How can we claim to have such a strong community when we kill each other?
What could we have done to make a difference?
What could the Co-op have done?
I felt compelled to write about this tragedy when I discovered that someone I knew had been taken into custody. I continued to write each day after, trying to make sense of how this happened. As the days passed, the comments grew, and it is the readers who grapple with this question; and I watch, ever so slowly, as grace and grief are replaced with blame. It is my teenage son who labels it so.
“Did you ever see the South Park episode when a house is burning down and the community stands around asking what happened?” he said. “The kids tug on the parents, saying–Shouldn’t we help? But the parents answer–No, the important thing is to find out who is to blame.”
I think it’s good to tell each other who we blame, for no other reason than to let it drain from our minds so that we are better prepared to help. But our blame must be conscious in order to be healing, otherwise we will dwell in it at the expense of actually doing something to make things better.
Hindsight makes it easy to blame as is evidenced by the subtext of the readers’ comments I see:
If only Michael Martin had never been hired.
If only Richard Gagnon had been fired a long time ago.
If only the Co-op had done something to mediate sooner.
It is only natural that we want to find someway to escape this pain, and blame is a strong distraction.
Captain Hindsight, South Park
“Captain Hindsight always appears just in time,” my son says, recounting another South Park episode. “He’s the Super Hero who tells people what they did wrong and how they could have avoided it. This makes people feel better even though it doesn’t change anything.”
But the truth is that there is no escaping grief if you intend to heal; and if you don’t, you add more suffering to the world.
I don’t typically follow sensational news stories. For starters, I don’t have television. And news journals are too hefty for me–both in size and content.
I enjoy the local paper now and then, especially for the classifieds and the obituaries, but my entire day can be thrown by one sad extraneous story from across the country. I’m hard-wired that way.
Occasionally, there’s no avoiding the news–either because it’s posted all over Facebook–as with the Kasey Anthony saga, or it is so compelling that I can’t ignore it–like the massacre at the youth camp this summer in Norway.
I’ve continued following that story because I know that Norway treats its criminals with greater dignity than others societies; and I suspect that this gross violation of humanity will challenge that distinction. I hope it doesn’t.
I’ve never been in favor of the death penalty, and never wished death on anyone until the summer when a cousin’s young friend was raped. I remember thinking that it was a good thing that I was not the officer who pulled over the car and found the missing nine-year old girl stuffed under the rapist’s back seat.
I would have strangled that man on the spot; And this realization made me more grateful than ever for our judicial system–in that it doesn’t allow people like me free range with grief.
After the atrocity in Norway, I was heartened to see a quote shared on Twitter by 18 year old, Helle Gannestead, who had been among those attacked at the youth camp:
“When one man can cause so much harm – think how much love we can create together.”
I find the same spirit alive in Brattleboro. Despite the pain that Richard Gagnon’s act has inflicted on so many, the response of this community has been one of true beauty. Though no beauty can replace life that is stolen or take away the heartbreak of those most intimate with the loss, there is hope that something good can come of that which hurts us.
Though I can’t explain it, I’ve always had a heart for those labeled “criminal.” Perhaps this is due to my early steeping in the tender teachings of Jesus, or that as the oldest of eight and later an elementary teacher, I could see that even the most hardened criminal was at one time an innocent child.
There is a quote that I know to be true even though the truth of it confounds me in the face of such horrific acts as rape and murder:
“The real measure of a society is how it treats its prisoners.”
This truth runs tandem with that which I also know to be true–that we cannot separate ourselves from our problems; that there is no way to simply get “rid” of them: The toxic chemicals that we dispose of leach into our water and air. The children that we abandon in cities grow up to hate us. The elders that we dispose of in institutions become ourselves. The hurt that we stuff inside one day acts out.
Though we cannot change what Richard did, we are responsible for how we respond–in our community and in ourselves. Like Norway, I think Brattleboro is up for the challenge.
“The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms.” Santayana
Aidan at the bus stop, with his luggage. 
This Vermont Life 