All sorts of things influence us: our experiences, our
relationships, our genes, our environment, the knowledge and wisdom others pass
on to us. And the stories we hear. B. is relating in this poem how stories come
to him through letters, often from strangers inhabiting what he calls “pockets
of grief.” With a letter, a pocket of grief becomes a pocket of his own
experience, and he revisits it in dreams and nightmares. Nightmares cost him
much in the way of sleep, peace, rest. So, letters are the agents. Life
inflicts tragedies on innocent people—like a ten year old rape victim, who for
the rest of her life cannot untangle what was done to her and thus cannot love—and
when these tragedies are given form in letters, which are offered as a request for help through
advice, the evil spreads. If you’re put in the way of it, then it erupts in
your dreams. Is this the price we pay for empathy? Maybe it’s the price we pay
for imagination, because we imagine stories as we hear them and through this
they can become as real as experience. The evil I do now erupts as a nightmare
in some awaiting innocent a generation hence through transmission through
stories. One can only hope that a counterforce works through the same system of
emotional underground story-transmission. The kindness I do today comforts the
sleep of someone a century from now, who I’ll never meet. On this Christmas Eve
evening, I leave these thoughts with a faith in the echoing power of kindness. And
rather than diminishing over time, from devastating crime to a stranger’s temporary
nightmare, I’ll posit that kindness grows in the transmission, forming the trust
of community the world over. When you sleep soundly tonight, warm and safe and
at peace, thank the untold millions whose untold millions of kindnesses
provided for your comfort. And like me, give thanks. Pass it forward.
Remarkable poem, deserves rereading. Lovely commentary, my friend. Pax on this holiday night.
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