Jacob Lawrence, "The Life of Harriet Tubman #28"

Jacob Lawrence, The Life of Harriet Tubman No. 29. She nursed the Union soldiers and knew how, when they were dying by large numbers of some malignant disease, with cunning skill to extract a healing draught from roots and herbs that grew near the source of the disease, thus allaying the fever and restoring the soldiers to health. (1940)

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How do people heal?

For the longest time I believed it was through anger. Had actually convinced myself that this mean falsehood was the hard-won fruit of experience. It went like this. Once when my heart was busted-up good I reacted with intense emotional violence. I believed the anger was necessary to survive the experience, and afterwards that idea seemed to be confirmed when I met someone new. I believed I was "ready", and all was well.

Greece. Interior of a cheap hotel room with falling plaster. Sad-faced boy sits in the window sill, knees up, looking at the moon.

You told her, "I want your heart, you're free to share your body with anyone you like." Big mistake.

You live inside a split world. Your ideals are in conflict with your feelings. What to do? Does one have to take priority over the other?

In truth the anger had prevented real healing. It was the experience of starting that new relationship which caused the old hurt to become less significant. Nothing had been resolved, it was merely pushed away from consciousness, into those dark corners where things start to stink if you ignore them.

So that when the second and far deeper relationship died I was unprepared to deal with it in a healthy way. With the belief that the road to recovery ran through anger, I bent over backwards to be pissed. And anyway there was good reason to be. But time passed and I found that I did not recover. Very much to the contrary. My universe was grief, and it remained that way and would not fade. Not good.

La Jolla. A brown-sand beach with roaring breakers. Angry-faced boy marches with clenched fists. Neutral-faced girl struggles to keep pace.

"I won't live this way. I'll rip her out of my heart. There's someone else who loves me more."

"She has the right to choose her lovers."

"So do I."

Because people don't heal through anger. Never did, nowhere in the long sad history of the species. Never will. Nobody, not one of us. Not even you. You know who you are.

So that I challenge you now to hear this, difficult as it is. All my experience of life convinces me this is the only way forward. We heal by forgiving those who've hurt us.

People are wired this way. We have a specific set of emotional switches in our nervous systems which are connected to emotional recovery. Maybe this sounds loopy to you, I dunno. But, check it out if you can. It's really true.

This is not a new insight. Smart people have been trying to teach it to us for a zillion years. It's much of Jesus' message, if that's not too big a name to drag in. Unfortunately people in our culture are uniquely positioned to be deaf to this particular wisdom. We value war over peace, death over life, money over everything. We value struggle, and we teach our children that it's the universal struggle of each against all which creates wealth and therefore happiness. We disrespect the very concept of forgiveness. All of our instincts are to try to crush those who harm us.

So I tried to crush her, lord help me, I tried with all my strength to rip her from my heart as if ripping her limb from limb. And totally failed, and totally failed to get over it.

It took a long time to cotton-on to the idea that the approach was wrong. After dropping the anger I became increasingly healthy, increasingly quickly. To my great surprise it became possible to view the relationship with new eyes. I realized that many of her actions had been the result not of evil or of malicious intent but of frailty, of alcohol and depression and the damage that had been done to her over the years, in part, I hate to say, by me. And I began to think that maybe she had reasons to be angry with me, for not understanding this at the time, and not helping.

Pacifica. A clifftop apartment cluttered with books and guitars. Lonely-faced man sits with pen in hand, struggling for words. Part of what he writes is:

"I'm sorry not to have written before. Maybe this will strike you as funny -- I hope so! -- but the truth is I've been afraid. The sight of your picture or the sound of your name is sometimes enough to send me into duck and cover drill under the nearest furniture. I really think fear is a stupid, evil thing, but then on the other hand I wouldn't be me if I weren't a complete idiot."

I would so much like to go back to the moment which decided this history and act based on what I've learned since. That fear is evil, anger is unhelpful, and the worst thing you can possibly do is allow a friendship to die.

Poor young grandson
there's nothing I can say
You'll have to learn
just like me
-- and that's the hardest way.
Ooh la la. Ooh la la, yeah yeah.

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