Agreements

What do we agreed to?

Last night a 2-year-old video clip in the news feed: a baby pulled crying from war rubble. For every 5,000 human beings lost to bombs, we’ll give you a baby like this. Twenty pounds of hope for each five or ten thousand tonnes of steel and TNT.

That's one agreement, even if the war-makers and media didn't give us a voice.

With recent rains, the tree frogs have returned to sing in the pond. I certainly agree to that.

Each night, having cracked the bedroom windows, I wake and lie listening to all the little frogs, their happy longing.

When I first moved to this home in a redwood clearing, the frogs arrived earlier and sang all spring. In recent years, they arrive later and fewer, their singing lasting barely a month at best.

To get more of some things—clever devices and gadgets, boxes at the doorstep, easy beef and avocados flying the globe, artificial intelligence we think can answer all our questions—we agree to less of other things.

Tree frogs in your pond, for instance, and families for those babies.

Ah, too somber, think as I write. What else do we agree to?

• Pay taxes for decent roads and teaching our kids to read.
• Say “I’m sorry,” so we don’t lose each other.
• Stop at red lights to let all get home safely.
• Bring bags to the grocer’s, not only to haul home heads of lettuce, but starve fewer sea turtles of plastics in their bellies.
• Listen, so we each have our stories heard and know we matter.
• Show up to vote to ensure power circulates instead of calcifies.
• Keep on loving the people we love not in spite of their flaws and frailties, but because of our own.

We forgive ourselves in great part by forgiving others.

Years ago, travelling in Sierra Leone a decade past that country’s convoluted and brutal civil war—hmmm, how can any war be civil?—I met with a village chief, several really, but one returns to mind in this moment.

I’d been told by my Freetown colleague, Fataba, who was leading me through her country, not to ask about the war unless a local brought it up.

As I sat with that village chief, he told me how so many young people grew up through the war, thinking violence was an ordinary response to life, the cutlass and the Kalashnikov the way you answered anyone or anything you didn’t like, or a fear you felt but didn’t understand.

His words, that conversation, come back to me now, in bits, gauzy yet real.

“After the war,” he explained, “we were afraid of our children.”

“At first, we sent the children, returning to the village, away. The boys turned child soldiers and the girls, stolen and abused as war wives, we sent them away. There was no trust.”

“But how do we go on?” he asked, “This village, our people, without children?”

“One boy came back. I did not recognize him.” This man’s voice became quieter, slower.

“When he said he was my brother’s son, I did not believe him. I knew my brother’s son. I thought both had been killed. Then he said a story of me, and when I looked into his eyes, I finally saw it was him.”

This chief had witnessed his village burn and his people flee over splayed bodies into rainforest, before he, too, abandoned what had been home.

As he talked, he was surrounded by other men who bore thick, ridged scars running cheek to ear, or motioned with missing hands, sometimes entirely absent forearms. A few embodied the kind of deep sadness that makes eye contact hard, leaving them to look at their feet just to stay safe in the midst of memory.

“When I went to embrace the boy,” he continued, “tears behind my eyes, so happy I was to have him back, he pulled away from me, jumping backward, almost falling.”

The chief paused, brushing his sleeve over his glistening forehead—a hot, humid afternoon in the upcountry of Salone.

“This boy. Who knows what terrible things he had seen, he had done? He had no trust for me.”

The chief went on to explain how that meeting was the turning point of accepting the war children back into his village, taming the violent minds and volatile emotions, helping them reinhabit the peaceful hearts children are meant to have.

One thought from that weathered, hopeful leader, from that afternoon together, sharing his story, has stayed with me for more than a dozen years.

“I thought it was only I who needed to trust. No. Trust is an agreement. And you must first agree to respect each other’s fear.”