Father. The heart, the courage, the relations.
I felt so tired since the morning! With an incredible weight – as I slept little and not well.
Yes, the body was tired, but there were more. And in the afternoon, it got off, it moved, and felt, and I gave it back, what wasn’t mine. With love, and respect, and compassion.
My father is, and I am because my grandfather and grandmother survived the Holocaust. Miraculously. So feeling in my father is also feeling in all those lives of my family who never came back. And the father who he never had, for my grandfather, passed away when he was 6 months old.
At the end today I received the gift of being able to give back all those remorse that survivors can have. Even in the second generation, yes.
Viktor Frankl, the father of Logotherapy, a survivor of 4 concentration camps, wrote a poem to express his grief in 1946. I only have a Spanish translation and could not find the English one, so here is what I can do for you with it:
“Pensáis tanto sobre mí, vosotros, mis Muertos,
estáis a mi alrededor como una obligación silenciosa
de estar ahí por vosotros; así me es permitido
pagar lo que os debe el exterminio,
hasta que descubra que en cada resplandor
de sol vuestra mirada lucha por expresarse,
hasta que me dé cuenta de que en cada florecer
de árbol hay un muerto que me saluda,
hasta que oiga cómo cada pájaro
le prestáis vuestra voz para su canto:
quiere saludarme, o tal vez decirme
que me perdonáis que siga viviendo.”“You are thinking so much of me, my Dead Ones,
you surround me like a silent obligation
that I should be there for you; like this I’m allowed
to pay what the extermination ows you,
until I discover than in every radiant
sunbeam your gaze is fighting for expression,
until I can realize than in every florishing
of each tree someone dead is greeting me,
until I can hear how you lend your voice
to each bird to sing their song:
they want to greet me, or maybe tell me
that you forgive me to be alive.”Viktor Frankl, 1946
That’s my grandfather in the middle of this photo-montage.
It’s all love. Release. Space. Love. That’s what is. Such a gift.
Onward,
xx
ps: We had the Catalan class in the morning… it was a true effort. <3
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