Last night I thought I would turn on the fundraising concert for Haiti and keep it on while I caught up with many things. I didn’t know that I would be drawn in at the first moment and unable to take my eyes off of the screen during the entire event. My heart kept opening a little more and then a little more, like a flower.  I felt proud to be human, to be American and to be a fan of these musicians, actors and newscasters not only as artists but as people. I’ve watched them for a long time and last night more than maybe any other time I felt they made their souls transparent through their voices and their whole bodies. It felt honest and genuine in every beat. Thank you.

I thought of Woodstock, how the notes played in that one event spoke so deeply to and for a generation. Of all the artists and musicians in the world, somehow those ones became the voices to speak for us in that particular way. At the time we didn’t realize it, but soon and as time went on we surely did. At any random moment in the day or night since then I might hear Richie Havens voice singing “Freedom. Freedom,” or Jimi Hendrix’s guitar strains on the Star Spangled Banner, or Arlo Guthrie saying, almost in shock, “The New York throughway is closed, man!”  It feels like those sounds are now inside of me, part of me, for some purpose. I wondered last night if this concert might turn out similarly – a confluence of people and voices singing to and for all of us in a way that could soon become iconic. Time will tell.

And I will add one more thought. When the concert was over I wished that also we could somehow do the same for the victims of man-made disasters in war. When mother natures strikes, it is less complicated – we can gather and pour out our hearts. But when nature through the untamed psyche of man causes us to strike each other, it is harder to unite behind the victims. We have to stand back; and we find it hard to gather. I wish we could stop killing each other altogether, that there would be no more wars ever, obviously; but short of that happening I wish that we could carry out such heart-rending consciousness raisers to gather support for the people who suffer from these disasters every day. May it become somehow so.