Guilt is the prosecutor who knows how to make every victim feel like the criminal. She follows the scent of doubt and self-hatred to its sources. She will not tell you what you have done wrong. Her silence is brutal. Her disapproval surrounds you in an envelope of cold nameless terror.
Guilt thinks I am hopelessly lazy because I won’t work the way she does. Her court cases are scheduled years in advance. She says horrible things about me to the neighbors. In self-defense sometimes I tell people what she says about me before she has the chance. I don’t care as much as I did, but I can’t pretend I don’t care at all.
You may recognize Guilt’s footsteps before you see her coming. She limps like a crippled bird. Even though her broken ankle is healing, the wound in her heart has become infected.
the nearness
there was this
song I heard
January 2017
I was driving
on a Sunday
evening I had
to pull over
in the dark
to cry for
the nearness
of you after
you had gone
Strangely, forgiveness never arises from the part of us that was actually wounded. The wounded self may be the part of us incapable of forgetting, and perhaps, not actually meant to forget, as if, like the foundational dynamics of the physiological immune system our psychological defenses must remember and organize against any future attacks — after all, the identity of the one who must forgive is actually founded on the very fact of having been wounded.
Stranger still, it is that wounded, branded, un-forgetting part of us that eventually makes forgiveness an act of compassion rather than one of simple forgetting. To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt, to mature and bring to fruition an identity that can put its arm, not only around the afflicted one within but also around the memories seared within us by the original blow and through a kind of psychological virtuosity, extend our understanding to one who first delivered it. Forgiveness is a skill, a way of preserving clarity, sanity and generosity in an individual life, a beautiful way of shaping the mind to a future we want for ourselves; an admittance that if forgiveness comes through understanding, and if understanding is just a matter of time and application then we might as well begin forgiving right at the beginning of any drama rather than put ourselves through the full cycle of festering, incapacitation, reluctant healing and eventual blessing.
To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seemed to hurt us. We reimagine ourselves in the light of our maturity and we reimagine the past in the light of our new identity, we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft.
This after-sunset is a sight for seeing,
Cliff-heads of craggy cloud surrounding it.
—And dwell you in that glory-show?
You may; for there are strange strange things in being,
Stranger than I know.
Yet if that chasm of splendour claim your presence
Which glows between the ash cloud and the dun,
How changed must be your mortal mould!
Changed to a firmament-riding earthless essence
From what you were of old:
All too unlike the fond and fragile creature
Then known to me….Well, shall I say it plain?
I would not have you thus and there,
But still would grieve on, missing you, still feature
You as the one you were.
Edge of Atlantic 