Forgiving ourselves

April 1, 2010

Dear Julie,

With the video camera she received for Christmas, DC first photographed eagles. Then she aimed her lens at trees swarming with swallows along Kingshighway. A flock of swallows roosting is a sight neighbors are unlikely to appreciate, but it is magnificent.

Our neighborhood swallows are fewer but have pecked gaping holes to make nests in the beams that help support our house's roof. Our friend and neighbor Frank has been sawing, painting and climbing ladders this week to place new boards over the supports, reassuring DC each time that the nest no longer is occupied.

Birds generally feel welcome around our house.

Doves nest in the eaves on the side of the house. On the front porch, another pair of doves nests above the door. Inside the house each morning I awake to the sound of birds chirping as DC uncovers the cages where her parakeets, finches and love birds reside. Once warmer weather arrives she will move their cages to the screened-in front porch so that they might feel more part of the natural world.

To feel at home in the world is a powerful yearning.

Did you know the writer Raymond Carver graduated from Humboldt State? That was a bit too long ago for you to have known him, but it's easy to imagine him still there in Northern California, editing the college literary magazine into the night and then walking through the foggy mist to a bar on the Arcata Plaza.

He liked to drink but fortunately found AA before the juniper berries curdled his writing. Cigarettes ended his life at 50.

The epitaph on Carver's tombstone is a poem of his that reads: "And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth."

We all want that, don't we? To feel beloved.

The truth of that is in our hearts and in our struggle to find it that feeling. And if we don't we find ways to numb ourselves to the reality.

If Carver felt beloved, it wasn't because people loved his writing. Approbation comes and goes in the night.

The feeling of being beloved comes from inside. It could begin with compassion and forgiveness. If we can start to forgive every last thing anyone has done, a Christ-like feat indeed, we can start to forgive ourselves for our own failings and inadequacies, for our imperfections, and for the guilt -- conscious and unconscious, cultural and personal -- that bends our shoulders, yoking us to our past and creating fear of the uncertain future.

We can choose fear or love. Right now.

The swallows didn't mean to damage our house. Swallows make themselves at home wherever they are. Some build nests of mud, some live in man-made apartments in the sky. If we can forgive swallows for being swallows, we can forgive ourselves and everyone else for being human.

Love and happy Easter, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.