InterGenerational Forgiveness

Maybe the Trees do Talk After All

For many of us, we were not guided in life, especially not in the way of spirit and gratitude and forgiveness.

It’s only upon reflection can we see the times we stepped off the path or made mistakes, as we call them now.

We can imagine in our young years that parents and siblings and systems should have known better. And maybe that’s true. Yet, if we weren’t guided, it’s easier now to see that they probably weren’t guided too.

I can vision a 6 month old me being held by a 40 year old parent, having themselves already raised 2 others should have known better. But that too is an illusion in a world that changes so rapidly and one that even when best interests are at mind, a more careful examination would reveal that they too carried the trauma of their lives, and their parents lives and who knows how many cycles of not understanding.

And today we can set forth inquiry into how much of the world we’ve yet to see or understand.

And, even today, people of the mindful communities we belong too can more easily forgive from our adult selves than from our inner child, and believe that a complete forgiving has occurred.

But what about the child within whom still asks for your awareness and tenderness and love? Maybe it is in that train of thought we need to hold our inner child closer, walking them back to the event that changed their life, or hurt another's, and make a proclamation that together you will both ask for forgiveness and offer forgiveness simultaneously.

And just perhaps both of you standing present upon the very wounds you’ve carried through life, will set in motion a healing process for the two of you. One that will finally return you both to the one love that you always were.

Now gratitude, having space to grow, wraps around you in a blanket, soft and warm and comforting. That’s a beautiful moment, it’s a gift in a gift.

We stand at the doorway of promise —the two of you as one, seeing more possibilities than you could have ever imagined alone.

Maybe that is true of communities and countries too. That one generation after the next is responsible to revisit the pain and suffering of the generations before in hope of waking and forgiving and healing.

It is possible.

It’s possible because you and I are possibility, against all odds walking through fires and waters so deep it seemed we’d never emerge whole. But we did.

What’s possible? Anything our minds and hearts can feel and sense and vision.

And I’d venture to expand those ideas to include more on our blue planet. Maybe the trees do talk after all.