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The idea of treating trauma passed down from one generation to the next in humans was highly controversial, to say the least. Just the idea of historical trauma was argumentative, though the concept had been widely accepted in Native American communities for hundreds of years, or more recently, within groups descended from Holocaust survivors. Yet therapists and geneticists had been puzzled for decades, searching for evidence of what they called transgenerational epigenetic inheritance.
old poem by Wendell Berry. Something about fearing for what a child’s life may become. Then she quoted the great Southern poet as she opened the door. “I come into the peace of wild things.”
“We don’t have to grieve only those we know. Sometimes we grieve for that which was lost, that which was never allowed to be.”
“Perhaps you are searching in the branches for what only appears in the roots.”
“As the US poet laureate Anis Mojgani once said about toddlers: They cannot be understood because they speak half English and half God.”
being praised for having wings but kept in a cage.
“I’ll be better. After all, in this country a man shouldn’t hit a woman until they’re married.”
Happiness is free.
“Some prisons have armed guards, bars, and iron gates, and some have a white picket fence and a garden.”
“But as the saying goes: pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Whatever happens, I look forward to the karma that accompanies it. Karma, after all, is the great teacher.”
“But that’s the point, isn’t it, to keep learning, to grow, to do more good than harm, to create compassion, to understand that every person you encounter is not there by coincidence? All of us play a role in another person’s life.”
Karma is more like a suitcase. You have to be unafraid to open it up and look at what’s inside, to unpack the things you don’t need. Karma is the climate of the past, which shapes how much leeway we have in the future.”
“The oldest known manuscript on Earth is the Diamond Sutra.” He turned his attention to her. “You’ve read it?” She shook her head. “Just a few verses in school, some lines of poetry about stages of enlightenment and the nature of reality. How we don’t have a stationary soul. That our existence is fluid and relational.”
Grief is unexpressed love.”
“Strangers are the people we forgot we needed in this life,”
