“AS A MAN OF FAITH, this isn’t like, theologically, how could this have happened? It’s obvious how this can have happened. We’re a big country with enemies. This issue of faith for me has more to do with how can we respond, rather than react to what has happened.”

-- The Rev. Sky Kershner from the article “Religious communities unite in prayer.’

I RESPOND BY REALIZING that I had better meditate a lot -- and a lot more regularly than I normally do-- in the days and weeks to come after these terror attacks. And not get drunk on red wine, although I do have a glass-and-a-half of Black Opal Australian shiraz before the open mic night on Friday while visiting a friend’s house.

And definitely don’t get stoned. “Don’t let me get stoned,” I tell my friend when I call to say I am coming over. “It always seems to show the hollowness behind everything.” “Or the emptiness at the heart of things,” my friend says.

Whatever it is, I say, that hollowness/emptiness is not what I need now. Meditation, too, shows the hollowness and emptiness, I tell him. But it seems to give me the wherewithal to cope with the realization -- and to go deeper into it without fear.

As opposed to being stranded in a world revealed to be not quite what it seems. Nothing is quite real, in the marijuana world. It’s like a Hollywood stage set, in which all the buildings are just mock ones, and youare just a character actor called in from Central Casting. Yet you lack the capability of doing anything with such insight beyond being merely agog or interested. Then the insight fades with the high.

Enlightenment lite.

It’s no place to be when 5,000 or more of my countrymen and women -- a doctor from my town on one of the planes, a former quarterback from West Virginia University in one of the towers -- have been cremated alive, maybe atomized, in an Old Testament conflagration in lower Manhattan, for god’s sake.

AT THE OPEN MIC NIGHT, I play a piano piece that I introduce as “Elegy for Family and for the Kids Without.” I am too much the artiste to tell the audience outright that I just made up the piece and pulled the title out of thin air. And that its chief purpose is to release some of my own aghast feelings for the children whose parents went off to work in those towers, on those planes. And who never came home again that night. Or the next, or the next.

At the end of the evening, the host of the show has us all sing “America the Beautiful,” a tune now back in fashion. Then we join hands in a big circle and recite some Unity prayer about God being within us and around us. I am more moved by the simple hand-to-hand contact, all of us swaying back and forth like reeds in the water.

After the lights come up, I go home home. I go downstairs, light a tall, vanilla scented candle in front of my Buddha shrine and sit and meditate for more than an hour, deep into the night.

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