Imagine then our mind to be a garden. The kind you and I pause at when we see captured within the pages of a book. It is the garden you and I dream about. With stone cherubs and grass as green as jade. Where flowers bloom and leaves glisten. The splash of water and the singing of birds, the hum of bees and arc of rainbows as butterflies drink deep of this glorious world....into that serene landscape suddenly something sets loose a monstrous creature, a wrecking ball on a chain.
In a moment that radiant and beautiful world is no more. Bits and pieces fly. A flower is crushed; a butterfly's wings are torn. A tree lies uprooted and a side of the cherub's head is smashed in....what is left is a bleak demolition site and devastation.
Some memories are like that. They have a way of creeping up on us out of no where. Anything could trigger it. A scent, a paisley, a line in a song, a particular shade of lilac....
I think we all know what it is to be stricken by a hurtful memory. Of how it can tear us up and squeeze the very air out of our breath.
So where do we begin in our road to recovery? How do we create that garden again?
What is that first lesson in forgetting?
