5 June 2017

This discipline doesn't require brute strength, but joy. In order to forgive, the teacher tells us, you need to go back into the wound. Forgiveness has more to do with memory than with forgetting. If, in this forest, I recover my wounds, tie them in a bundle and leave them on the sweet soil beneath the ferns, and if, amid these birds in whose songs I infer (but cannot know) joy, then I can leave them to their composting. We remake ourselves in the image not of our attackers, but of our forgiveness of them, less image than the skittering sounds of these birds after a night's rain. We see evidence of the pig in wet soil, her rooting about near the tea plants. We hear coqui frogs, and we call to them with smart phones before consigning them to freezers or feeding them to the chickens. The wound is what we work on, tethered like a goat to a stick. The girl with a violent mother used to tiptoe into the kitchen to get herself bread and cheese. She'd tuck herself in bed, putting food in her mouth with one hand, stroking her own hair with the other. She murmured kind things to herself before she fell asleep. 

--5 June 2017