I can't remember sleeping or eating because I did neither of those things. I remember at some point in the day mentioning to Jessica that my legs were sore and her telling me that I'd been pacing and running for 12 hours, I didn't know that. I thought I'd been standing still. By midmorning that cloudless day of Sept. 11, 2001 had turned to a gray fog over our home in Brooklyn. Our little house on the tree-lined street that 80 years earlier had been built walking distance from the very last stop on the newly built subway system. It had turned foggy with the debris from the World Trade Center buildings that had become transformed into a fine gray powder much like you'd imagine the lunar surface to be covered by. In the air, burned pieces of paper floated down from thousands of feet up in the sky.

A page from a hard cover Webster's Dictionary, a copy of a contract for the performer Madonna. In the five boroughs that day, it was a day of panic and anger and desperate sadness that all felt like a poison meal in the gut.

Many people deride the state of our culture. Certainly those who sought to further a geopolitical goal by attacking us felt this way. And it is easy to see why they do sometimes. But let me tell you firsthand what it was like to be in New York City on Sept. 12, 2001: everyone was family on that day. Everyone helped. Everyone gave. Jessica and I spent the day at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge gathering supplies for the Ground Zero relief effort and delivering them to the Firehouse at 74 Middagh Street, Engine 205 & Ladder 118. Finally, around dusk on Sept. 12, the firefighters of the house on Middagh Street that sits in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, whose granite was quarried off the coast of Maine and which stands a gothic sentinel over them, came back home. I was there when they got back, lunar gray, chalk covered skin. I'd never seen battle trauma before but I saw it that day. Eleven of their brothers died the day before. They had spent the next day and a half searching Ground Zero for them. But they realized then what we all realized and never spoke about. The force of the implosion turned their brothers and three thousand other human beings into a fine gray dust. A dust that floated over Brooklyn and landed in the streets of our innocence and the Atlantic ocean and covered them like kabuki makeup.

Sadness and resolve. Demonstrations in the streets of New York of support and compassion. From all over our country people joined us and helped. On TV, the horrors of that day came into the lives of every American. Add to that feeling the loss of neighbors and the smell of death and the sounds of sirens and F22s flying overhead and that was our September of 2001. On that day that lasted 72 hours I met the finest people I have met to date. They had a special name that the came together as and remain named ever since. That name is 'village'. You also know them by the more familiar name 'neighbors'. They are our greatest strength.

Seth Silverton is the director of The Wood Chop School. On Oct. 11, The Wood Chop School will be offering a three-hour class called Attributes of the Sustainable Mind that provides participants with 21 tools and practices designed to inform and develop a sustainable and durable worldview. The class is being held at The Conway House in Camden and one can sign up by clicking here.