sensing energy

The ebb and flow of belief, part three

This is the third installment of my story of spiritual exploration, finding belief and the releasing of belief. It’s a long story, so I’m sharing it in a series of writings. It’s also a story that feels intimate and tender to me, so I’m gently placing it behind a paywall.

My time in New York was bookended by two shocking events.

I moved to the city on Thanksgiving weekend 1992 and in late February, I made a trip home. While I was in Kentucky, a bomb exploded in the parking garage of the World Trade Center. By the time I got back to the city, there was not much of a discussion about what had happened. I ended up getting a job in the financial district. The building I worked in was on Wall Street. I never thought about the bombing. No one ever talked about it.

I graduated from my MFA program in May of 1998. I was living in the suburbs then, but I got a job at an elementary school in Manhattan. The school was located in two brownstones. From the play yard in between the buildings, there was a clear view of the Twin Towers.

I worked there for several years. In the later year, I began to feel a sense of impending doom. I remember one afternoon standing at the stove in my galley kitchen, the window open to my right. It was quiet out. Dappled sunlight danced on the sheer curtain. A sort of knowing flooded my body. I needed to leave New York. It wasn’t a premonition, but more an energetic shift. I could feel the approach of an energy that I did not like, that I did not want to be a part of. An image flashed in my mind of a moving truck traveling down the Interstate.

I moved back to Kentucky during the summer of 2001. On the morning of September 11, my mother called me and said, “Turn on the television. Something is happening in New York.”