Six years ago when the sky fell, I was in Washington, D.C., snatching a precious few frantic phone conversations with my now-husband who watched with his co-workers at Goldman Sachs as a snowfall of paper swirled around the windows of their floor, only to then stare in horror as everything turned to darkness after the first tower crumbled into ash.

Despite my degrees and my faith and many other possible resources at my fingertips, I have no idea any more how to ritualize this day.

On the first anniversary I was working at NYU and living in Union Square, the original dividing line of post-tragedy forbidden territory, what suddenly became the makeshift edge of the New York City universe and the precipice where the city gathered to pray and pray and pray and pray and stand on the verge of this strange abyss that was now downtown. On the first anniversary there was much prayer and much gathering and much memorializing and more ritual—both traditionally religious and eclectically secularly spiritual—than I’d seen outside the walls of a church or a temple in probably my entire lifetime. It was intense and everybody wanted to do something and nobody quite knew how much was enough and so everyone and everybody did everything they could think of. My students and I that first year, we did everything we could think of, too.

Each anniversary since, the extent of our ritualizing wanes and this year, six years later, I am debating on what, if anything, I should do or say when I enter my classroom and sit down with my students to acknowledge that we meet together on yet another September 11th. A moment of silence? A poem? A prayer? Or do we leave memory and the divine and the sacred out of our class that’s about those very same things—spiritual memoir—at least in the way that these might reach out to mark this tragic event.

I still have time to decide, of course. But this is what I think about as I sip my coffee alongside my fellow, fashionable New Yorkers at this café-homage to the fantasy that so many Americans hold about this city.

And then, I can’t think of a better place to be than here at the moment, the day before this sixth anniversary.

September 11 brought this city of glamor and exuberant productivity and the quintessential power breakfast, lunch, and dinner to its knees. It turned the glitz into soot and knocked the wind out of its iron stomach. For a time, it collapsed all the power in the room into a pile of smoldering rubble. And somehow, at Balthazar of all places, I see the breath of this city’s life swirling all around me, so vivid and exuberant and colorfully wildly resilient that somehow these few moments become a memorial to the city I love on its 364 other days of the year, on the brink of that 365th day when all the power that is in this particular room will surely stop at some point to glance downtown, to pause, to be silent, to pray for just a minute and ritualize this anniversary in some small way.

In Eat, Pray, Love—the new favorite spiritual memoir that I am obsessed with—Elizabeth Gilbert describes how, at the beginning of a lecture by Thich Nhat Hanh, the high strung, frenzied New Yorkers in the audience—probably much like the ones buzzing around me right now—“became colonized by his stillness.” I can’t think of a better way to describe how the anniversary of September 11 works its way into the minds and days of those who live and work in this city. At any given moment we are colonized into stillness at the breadth of this tragedy. And perhaps this year, we will be colonized into stillness, too, at the way that this tragedy, our tragedy, has led this country to avenge itself by spreading tragedy to the Nth power across the globe—unleashing our own brand of extremism I suppose—and wonder, in our silence, what in this world and maybe the next and with all the religious wisdom we could muster, might possibly tame the monster that we first met six years ago.

But for now I remain in awe of the life that is moving on all around me.