Second blog post with
What's Going On (ephemeral stuff) and
What Goes On (the real thing).
Comments really welcome!
WHAT'S GOING ON
THE SHUTTLECOCK
Remembering our
vigil at Newgrange that solstice,
Awaiting the sunrise
like children,
I phoned on the
year’s longest night.
News had it that a
satellite
Was crash-landing on
Venus at the time,
And you told me
you’d just fallen asleep.
You said the roads
out there were impassable for ice.
Here it was
changeable, windy, mainly,
And of course wet,
though not as cold as last week,
But I said nothing
about all that,
And so you thought I
was fading:
You’re fading, you
said, can you hear me?
Can you hear me? I
lied, like a tongue-tied fool,
Your voice is
breaking up, it’s the line.
I might have told
you that a shuttlecock
Blew down last week
in a wintry wind onto the lawn,
But I thought it was
unimportant.
The caring leaves
which housed it
And hid it from the
smacks and wallops
Are all blown away,
but it’s still there now, unfazed,
Red-nosed in the
cold, probed by a washed blackbird,
Hopping about it on
the dazzling lawn.
Cropped from a sepia
photograph,
Slapped right out of
the snap,
It is a windfall
from the past,
From a game without
winners and losers,
A relic from the
world we abandoned
For the world and
its relics that we found.
Gregory Rosenstock
WHAT GOES ON
The above link is a memorable interview with the inimitable Wayne Dyer about forgiveness, that much misunderstood word. He refers to the beautiful analogy of forgiveness being like the scent of a violet crushed under heel.
The video is forty minutes long but if you can only see the first half, it's DEFINITELY time well spent!
A few personal thoughts on forgiveness:
Why forgive? Because forgiveness, like truth, sets you free.
OK, that makes sense.
But what if the offender has no remorse or is a repeated or even pathological offender?
To understand forgiveness, we see the offender of the offense as unconscious. Not unconscious of the offense, of course, but unconscious of his or her true self while here on earth. (...
they know not what they do.)
Where meaning breaks down, however, is that many people equate forgiveness with acceptance.
Quite the contrary: the offense is always unacceptable. You can't forgive an offense, even if that were possible; the damage is done.
You forgive the offender, not the offense.
In the interview above, Wayne's father is dead and at the age of thirty-four, he goes to his grave to piss on it. Is it possible, then, to forgive someone who is dead?
Contrary to what people may think, it is even more difficult to forgive someone who is alive; at least the person who is dead can do no more harm. People equate forgiveness with reconciliation; why would anyone be so foolish as to expose oneself to the potential of a repeated offense after reconciliation? If there's a loose cannon on deck, keep out of the way - if you can! Forgive and forget? Certainly not. Always forgive. Always. But forget at your peril.
One final thought: esoteric as it may seem to some, the reason why forgiveness sets you free is that we are, in the final analysis, really forgiving ourselves. Like the one hundred trillion cells in your body, we are all uniquely individual, conscious cells, comprising the single great organism of consciousness. That we think we are separate from one another and from anything and everything else - in the universe!- is just an illusion. When you forgive me, you are forgiving you, almost as if you had done the deed yourself.
Nah, you say, I'm not buying into that. Revenge is sweet, it's a dish best served cold; none of these new age cliches about being one with the universe. Forgiveness doesn't solve anything, you say.
You're right. Forgiveness doesn't solve; it dissolves. Solving has to do with working things out in your head.
Unconscious though the offender may be, the amazing thing about it all is that even the densest, most unconscious offender will recognize the power of forgiveness to dissolve the false self's (or ego's) attachment to the offense and to dissolve the hatred and poisonous feelings of retribution in the one who forgives.
Whaddya think?
