San Miguel de Allende
My teenage neighbors Alejandro and Karina have invited me to attend a Posada tomorrow night. It will begin at 7:00 with prayers at the home of the woman who’s organized it. Then the procession will proceed down the street intersecting mine. I will go so I can share something special in the lives of these beautiful young people, and to deliberately open my self to a communal peace.
A wreath on my window
Despite my love of the Christmas holidays – based on a fondness for eons of human celebration rather than Christianity itself [which I hold to be a current manifestation of something ancient and nearly primeval] -and because my love is held fast by an idea of tasting a few days of peace and celebration on a good portion of the globe, peace I find is hard to hold on to today.
Like millions around the world, I am hurting over what happened in Newtown, Connecticut Friday.
I search my soul.
Thousands of children are murdered every day by psychopaths who shoot or cut or deny them food or medicine for the sake of profit. Mexico witnesses the slaughter of its innocents in a wave of horrendous violence reported nearly daily…
The earth is heavy with sorrow.
So, it is only that I’m American that I mourn so grievously for these families. And because it comes so close to what should have been joyous for them that it slices so…
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Peace, I remind myself, is found in the details. The slant of the sun. The cry of a bird. Wind on the tongue.
And maybe it comes in cracking hearts.
Because they’re open.
jax in da' Ville 
There have been 12 “mass shootings” in the US in 2012. Not to mention the thousands of deaths by gunshots. What has to happen before the US gets every gun outof teh hands of everyone except the military. In Britain the police don’t even carry guns. Are we so sick that we believe it is our “right” to carry a gun even though it keeps these massacres happening. I wonder if the NRA is proud that they support gun possession and removal of school books from the “cold, dead hands” of so many children.