Two Weeks in America (Not Long Enough)

I have lived in New Zealand for nine years now. And, it helps to be specific and say, Christchurch, New Zealand, as now, I live in a place that feels continuously dangerous on many levels. Any level over ground level feels dangerous when you are plagued with the mountain building a country can do when it is having earthquakes and aftershocks nearly every day, many times a day, without any way to predict, and/or eradicate them.
So, two weeks in America was sounding good for a change, and I had important people in my life to catch up with.

Needful to say, I would be travelling back to my original home during two marked anniversaries. One year from the original earthquake in Christchurch and ten years on from 9/11. It has been a shocking decade for me; it has been a shocking decade for most people. I am here to tell you it makes no difference what you are afraid of; FEAR is a democratic e-motion that propels seemingly sane people into insane head spaces, fear is now our common enemy when we take off our shoes and empty our pockets to board every airplane anywhere in the world. All our spaces have become homogenized by fear.

And yet, what I found living at grass roots level all over the United States, where ever I went, was not fear at all, but the stuff that made me realize once again, America is a truly strong country, not because of anything more outstanding and important than its PEOPLE.

I have to tell you American PEOPLE, I was truly impressed with the lot of you. And, not just because you were already important to me, as you are and always will be, but because I had an opportunity to peek into your lives rather quickly and on the fly with not much opportunity for you to change any existing situation, altercation, lifestyle choice, or the colour of your walls, your walls all seemed the same in one profound way, they were all still standing and without one single exception, built with LOVE.

I was LOVED on by ex-husbands, ex-step children, friends I had not seen in a shocking decade and even longer, taxi drivers, waiters and waitresses, my own children and theirs, strangers on street corners and even those I had altercations with due to jet lag and the inability to wear my own shoes, other Americans offered me their shoes instead.

America, you are amazing and gifted with the profoundest capacity to spread the most powerful e-motion yet. Your rootstock e-motion is not one of fear, but of LOVE. This profound capacity is your major Major, which equips you with the arms to end all wars poured out onto your mediated heads. I stand in awe of you, now from a distance and reconcile why on earth I would ever live anywhere else, if but not for a chance, to spread the LOVE somewhere else.

And, I have no fear left in me that you might not always be the greatest nation on this planet as long as you remember to LOVE all others the way you loved on me for two weeks in America.

Thank you one and all, you KNOW who you are, and you KNOW what to do, and ‘y’all’ do it better than anywhere else I have ever been. It is in this way that Americans are truly EXCEPTIONAL. Keep living it, it is not a dream, it is your reality that makes all the difference and can be the best ‘wildfire’ of all.....xoxoxo, yours always!