Stars at Elbow and Foot

Why do people not reply to our hellos and goodbyes?  What brought my attention to this was a trip to Paris. Before my trip, I had read that people over there are very big on being polite and on saying hello and goodbye. Once I was over there, I tried to practice this and I noticed that I started having a greater awareness of others. I thought that it was a beautiful thing that an entire city of people seemed to encourage this awareness and respect of other people. Since that trip over five years ago, I have kept practicing this. It is amazing how many people would rather treat you like an inanimate object than acknowledge that you are someone alive and worthy of mutual respect. I once read that one of the biggest problems in African countries where war and killing was a commonplace thing was that children would just walk right up to the bodies of the dead and poke and beat them with sticks and further defile the bodies. There was a loss of the importance and

Have you seen Terence Malick's Tree of Life?  It speaks about the way of nature and the way of grace, a conflict within man and the very world we inhabit. It seems that there seems to be a lot more of the way of nature and less of the way of grace now.