Editor's Letter

When I began to wear glasses as a child, I was able to see individual leaves on distant trees for the first time. I understood distant trees had leaves, but I hadn't yet apprehended the wholeness of the experience, the knowing with the physical experiencing. It felt thrilling, like an illumination, but also a recognition about how truths in our experience are concealed.

A man told a story of when he was a child traveling with his parents in a van. They stopped at a gas station on the outskirts of a small town. He describes the van they traveled in, the itinerary of the trip, and what happened when he got out of the vehicle to use the bathroom and buy some snacks. He recounts the story with such uplift and humor that I begin to feel uncomfortable recognizing the foreshadowing of trauma. He doesn't remember feeling panic or despair when he realized his parents had driven away without him, only that he was certain at the time they would return.

This man's account both conceals and reveals the pain of an absence greater than the physical absence of his parents. He chooses not to blame them, nor does he forgive them — yet he continues to struggle with feeling as if he does not exist in their minds. Mary Oliver (2016) recounts a similar experience as a child when her father inexplicably left her at a skating rink. Her father explained afterwards that he simply forgot she existed. Forgetting and forgiveness are delicately balanced in Oliver's account when she suggests that her father's brief amnesia temporarily freed him from the responsibilities of fatherhood, opening him up, for a moment, to a liberating happiness. Oliver writes:

… never had I seen so handsome a man; he talked, he laughed, his movements were smooth and easy, his blue eyes were clear … One could see — I can see even now, in memory — what an alleviation, what a lifting from burden he had felt in those few hours. It lay on him, that freedom, like an aura. (pp. 17-18)

Oliver's account moves towards the clarity