Forgive

‘Spring Dreams’ painting by the author 

An old, unabridged dictionary points out that Middle English gives us ‘forgi fan’ as the root words for the contemporary English word, forgive. Those root words mean, literally, ‘to put away from’ or to create permanent distance from an injury or emotional pain. Distance from pain or injury was ‘hard-wired’ from our earliest, evolutionary, tribal beginnings to identify differences, to identify ‘other.’ A couple of million years ago ‘other’ meant threat to survival. Threat to survival, that atavistic, tribal, evolutionary hard-wire carries over into the present by whole peoples finding reasons to judge and, unfortunately, to despise anyone or any belief, geographical region, culture or people whose ideas and practices are different… Difference no longer necessarily equals a threat to survival.

Much of my own life was spent, albeit outside my awareness, by practicing occupational cultural mores without ever thinking about where my beliefs came from, if those beliefs were spiritually correct or what their long-term consequences would be to me. Thus, fueled by envy and anger, I burned away about three decades with nothing to show for it except a first and second mortgage, the makings of a heart attack from stress, and lots of soured residue from my resentments.

Then life itself, my own dis-ease and my own poor choices got me almost physically crippled from an auto accident and financially crippled with debt. I changed careers and three years later had to be hospitalized for alcoholism after which I had to start from the bottom to rebuild that career again. Next, I literally lost everything to a divorce…everything… and had to start from financial Absolute Zero. Finally, I had an emergency triple-bypass surgery and had to deal with permanent disability.

I know all that sounds grim but, things have worked out better than I could have ever planned myself. I’ve learned what’s important and it is tolerance and love…

I have forgiven all circumstances, people and institutions that I felt ever did me wrong. I have put away from me all resentments, anger and envy. I even enjoy the benefits of growing older because I found a deep appreciation of simple things. Here’s a poem I wrote that talks about misfortune and hope. I hope you find it moving:

Promises

     It was at the very beginning of the Autumn of my life
that I became a furnace lit by sorrow.
     Throughout the Earth’s Fall and Winter of that year
I burned the volumes of my life, page by page…
ashes and ashes…
     When fields and forests burn to cinders,
to fingers of charred sticks upright upon the ground,
new seeds wake and burst,
and then carpets of green and saplings soon cover
all that was before.
     And so I thought about today
full of gentle winds to tousle my hair
and flutter my loose garments
like a flag;
     yes, I thought;
sleeping promises lie beneath the Winter at my feet,
beneath the ashes in my heart…

February, 1997 – February, 2009