Dear tweeters, I just opened my email to read about Susanna. I am in shock.
We go to the wilderness for solace and beauty, for the affirmation of life,
not its violation. How can we make sense out of this senselessness?

Throughout our lives and in all the things that happen to us, we struggle to
find meaning. But where is the meaning in the deaths of two people who bent
every effort of mind and body to make this world better? Why does a criminal
have the power to deprive us of such lovely souls, thereby impoverishing our
lives and the light of the world?

Thomas Jefferson, a man well acquainted with grief, wrote this: "There are,
I acknowledge, even in the happiest life some terrible convulsions, heavy
set-offs against the opposite page of the account. I have often wondered for
what good end the sensations of Grief could be intended. All our other
passions, within proper bounds, have a useful object. And the perfection of
the moral character is, not in a Stoical apathy, so hypocritically vaunted,
and so untruly too, because impossible, but in a just equilibrium of all the
passions. I wish the pathologists then would tell us what is the use of
grief in the economy, and of what good it is the cause, proximate or
remote."

He had no answer, and I have none, except to say that when we remember the
lost, they are still with us, they still exert a power for good as we recall
their deeds and their spirit, they still inspire us to hold onto a vision
that we can help others and bring beauty and love into this world. - Connie,
Seattle

csidles at isomedia.com