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David James Duncan [Peter] on Forgiveness

The Brothers K (Bantam Books: July 1996), p. 81.

You, me, before we die we’ll all get nailed, lots of times. But that doesn’t mean we’ll al get turned into witches. You can’t avoid getting zapped, but you can avoid passing the mean energy on. That’s the interesting thing about witches, the challenge of them — learning not to hit back, or hit somebody else, when they zap you. You can just bury the zap, for instance, like the gods buried the Titans in the center of the earth. Or you can be like a river when a forest fire hits it — pshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Just drown it, drown all the heat and let it wash away… And the great thing, the reason you can lay a river in the path of any sort of wildfire is that there’s not just rivers inside us, there’s a world in there… Not because I say so. Christ says so. And Krishna. But I feel it sometimes too. I’ve felt how there’s a world, and rivers, and high mountains, whole ranges of mountains, in there. And there are lakes in those mountains — beautiful, pure, deep blue lakes. Thousands of them. Enough to wash away all the dirt and trouble and wretchedness on earth.