Connected

It wasn’t something I had to work hard to understand.  For me, it just is – the sense of being connected to one another.  I resonate in a very small way to Thomas Merton’s famous “Fourth and Walnut” experience:
 
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers … There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
                                            ~ from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander