What so funny about peave love and understanding?

Elvis Costello said it best.
What’s the meaning of this?…This is the one question that we’ve been asking ourselves recently. The subject of this question is pointed to the violent and destructive energy that’s been following us, and in general, seems to be erupting all over the world lately. When we arrived in Northern Thailand, Chiang Mai and Pai were just recovering from disastarous flooding which took lives and livelihoods of people living there. The next tragedy to strike was the furthest from us but closest to hit home when Hurricane Katrina decimated Louisiana. What was almost more atrocious than the damage done by the hurricane was our own countries efforts to help the people in need. Then hurricane Rita hit not more than a week later at just about the same time a typhoon ripped through the Northern Vietnam in our hemisphere. All of the global unrest seemed strangely parallel to the violent energy that was present in our immediate surroundings. Everything from witnessing a man being beaten in the street on Khoa San road to seeing two street vendors quarrel, leading up to the man beating the woman in front of her child. This was the cresendo to our own run in with the group of Thai men who attacked us. Yet it didn’t stop there. Once we left the scene of Ko Phang Ngan, we walked onto the set of yet another violent play when we arrived on the peaceful island of Ko Phi Phi, where one evening while sitting on our porch we heard a gunshot ring out, only to find out the next morning that it was the sound that took the life of a local man who was shot dead on the floor of his shop, and who we had spoken with a day earlier. When we arrived on Ko Phi Phi, the locals were just getting back on their feet after the Tsunami of last Decmber. Some of the people we met there had lost their entire family and everything they had owned, but they, themselves, were still alive, trying to find a way to live with their loss. Then after leaving the islands we heard of the bombings in Kuta, Bali where we had just been weeks before. This tremor was just the precurser to destruction of the earthquake which shook parts of Pakistan and India. So again the question was asked….What’s the meaning of all this!? Well it’s hard to say exactly what the ‘meaning’ of all this suffering is but maybe the answer to that question isn’t one that ends with a period but rather one that ends in a question. Maybe the question is really one that we should be asking ourselves…asking us to look around ourselves and at ourselves, to see the connection between the destructive energy in the world and the destructive energy within us. Maybe instead of finding an answer to our question we should find a new question…”What’s the meaning of this, and how is the energy that I put out related to this.” Am I a part of the suffering in this world or am I part of the healing of this world. Are the choices I make choices which help or choices which hurt. Maybe through the experience of suffering ourselves we might be able to identify with the suffering of other people or another country…and recognize it as the same.