NOTES ON LIVING

Forgiveness. I’m tired of watching it used as a leash.

Someone is always sending me something soaked in it. Forgiveness is the light. Forgiveness is salvation. Forgiveness is your function. The language does what it was built to do. Make you kneel.

These aren’t my words. I don’t speak this language in my mouth. But I’ve learned it the way you learn any language you need to survive inside of – fluently and without belief.

I want to lay this on the rough table and cut it open.

Original sin. You arrive in debt. You arrive already wrong. The sacred books all say it. The bible says if you don’t forgive others, god won’t forgive you – and without that forgiveness there is no heaven. The quran says hasten toward forgiveness from your lord or remain outside paradise. The sutras say eliminate your attachments, follow the path, or stay trapped in the cycle of suffering and rebirth. Three books. Three languages. Same locked door. Same man holding the key.

christianity built the gate. buddhism sat down in front of it and called the sitting a path. islam called it submission. The new age put it in a yoga studio with candles and a subscription. Charged you for your own cage. A woman at columbia in the 1970s claimed jesus dictated a course to her. It circulates now like scripture among people who think they’ve left the church but just redecorated the room.

Sin – what they mean is you arrived wrong. Repentance – say you’re sorry for being born. Enlightenment – obedience that learned to sit cross-legged and close its eyes. Non-attachment – don’t feel too much, don’t want too much, don’t be too hungry or too loud or too much of what you actually are. Surrender – stop fighting us. Contemplation – sit still and be quiet. The work – the assignment you never agreed to, that never ends, that you will be punished for not completing.

Words written on scrolls by men who needed you to come back. To kneel. To consult the manual before trusting your own body. Always a reference text. Cross-reference your behavior against the rules. Did you sin. Did you sit correctly. Did you perform the assigned surrender.

They call it medicine. Compliance with a better name.

And the threat. The real machinery. Forgive or be denied paradise. Detach or stay trapped in the cycle. Repent or god won’t forgive you back. Some of them take it further – shun your own daughter if she leaves. Cut off your son if he stops attending. Don’t even say hello. Use the dead as leverage – your mother is waiting for you on the other side, but only if you come back to us.

And you stop living. Half here. Eyes on a destination you can’t touch or smell or verify. Meanwhile the actual trees are outside the window right now. The actual body is breathing right now. The actual child is being born right now. And they’re looking past all of it toward a reward that requires them to leave this life half-lived.

I knew this at twelve. Maybe younger. Adults trying to press my head down. Repent. Be reborn. Accept that I arrived on this earth already wrong. That something in me needed correcting before I could stand in whatever they were calling light.

I wouldn’t do it then. I won’t do it now. I was whole when I got here and no man’s book gets to revoke that.

I reach further back than any book. Before the scrolls, the sutras, the testaments, the lessons. Before any man decided he’d found the path for everyone and wrote it down. Go back to the body. The animal body. The one that crawled from water onto whatever landmass it found and adapted. Skin. Hair. Lungs. Teeth. All of it shaped by geography. Different coastlines making different people. Nobody first. Nobody better. Just organisms finding their way on their particular patch of earth.

The body that woke in the dark and smelled rain before it had a word for rain.

What did it need.

Fire. Water. Shelter. Food. How to read weather. How to recognize a predator. How to protect its young. When to fight. When to walk away.

Forgiveness is not on the list. It was never on the list. It was added later by people who needed you to stay.

No animal forgives. The prey escapes or it doesn’t. If it lives it goes back to eating. No ceremony. No debt carried forward. The threat passes. The body continues.

Walking away. The oldest intelligence on this planet. Older than any altar. Older than the first stone someone stood on to speak above the others. Every surviving organism knows it. The threat is gone. You keep living. You owe it nothing. You go.

Before anyone wrote down a single rule, human beings carried their medicine in their mouths. In their bodies. In the living mouths of the people who carried it. When harm came the community addressed it. The elders gathered. Balance was restored or it wasn’t. Nobody sat alone in a room performing a private transaction with their own pain. The medicine was communal. It was carried. It didn’t require a shelf.

I didn’t do the work. I did something older. I kept moving. I disregarded what needed disregarding. I stopped regarding what stopped deserving my regard. The animal body knows what to move toward and what to move away from. It has known this since before the first man picked up a pen.

What the forgiveness industry sells is a private cage. Your darkness. Your assignment. Forgive or remain in pain. And if you won’t – you haven’t done the work. You haven’t surrendered.

Punitive. Patriarchal. It asks you to remain soft toward the thing that damaged you and calls that healing. It says your wholeness depends on completing an assignment you never agreed to.

Because that’s what it all comes down to. Under the scrolls, under the paths, under the gates and the rules and the leverage – one message. You are not enough as you arrived. You need us to complete you. And if you refuse – you’re not lost. You’re bad.

My wholeness is not an assignment.

You want to forgive – forgive. That’s yours and I won’t take it from you. But don’t send me the lesson. Don’t tell me I’m in darkness because I chose a different door.

The animal body knows what the scrolls forgot.

You were whole when you got here.