Close To Home

After I wrote a post regarding a current event... a mine collapse which has trapped six souls in its belly less than a hundred miles south of my home.... I've been wondering why I might feel a more keen awareness of this issue than another would, say one who resides a thousand miles away.

I'm positive it's not a "Utahn" thing. I have no "state loyalty" to my area. I have no real feeling of allegiance to those that share my (imagined) boundaries.
Nor is it a "close to my heart" issue.
Some of Eric's ancestors were Irish minors back in the (Great West) day, but I never knew them, and have no knowledge of their names, faces, or personal stories.

So then why?

I think I know why.
My brother in law recently posted about his not feeling the war. To him it feels vaguely "somewhere out there" as he waves his hand over his head.
I understand what he means.
Not that I can easily dismiss it, for I do not. I feel that harm to one means "harm to us all".
But in my more every day moments it does not have great bearing on my life as a mother, in my own home, and with my own joyous children.

So why do I feel this tragedy so keenly?
I am suspecting that it has something to do with permeance.
Not, as I might have imagined before, others wanting to witness a certain drama and claim it for their own, but more of a tangible thing.
Literally, feeling another's pain. Feeling the sadness. Feeling the frustration. Angst. Heartbreak.

Why did so many of the alumni of Virginia Tech feel the pain so keenly? Because they wanted to boast and gasp "Ah! It could have been me!?!" I think not. I think because they feel a sense of brotherhood to all those that bore the terror, and it rung a chord of sympathy in them.
What was done to a brother, no matter how detached, was done, in a lesser way, to them. They empathized.

Yes.
I think that's it.

Another demonstration that We Are All One.

Mayhaps all of the things that I see as my Life Lessons will not come upon me as epiphanies, as I imagine and urge them into fruition, but experience by experience.

Maybe my learnings and greatest understandings will come to me moment by moment.
A great challenge (irritation) to one so impatient as me, but there you have it.

So here's to recognizing and acknowledging Truth.