Artist (David Paladin)
Call Your Spirit Back
In the Colorado River,
David struggled endlessly.
The rapids swept him away again and again.
He sank.
Then surfaced.
Sank again.
Surfaced again.
Later he said:
This was harder than having his feet nailed to the ground.
Because this time,
he did not have to face an enemy.
He had to face himself.
The images began to surface, one by one.
Those who humiliated him.
Those who tortured him.
Those who caused him pain.
The memories he thought he had buried long ago.
And each time an image appeared,
he had to choose:
hold on to the hatred,
or let go.
He later said
it felt like peeling away layers of something inside his body,
one layer after another.
Until finally,
the most terrible image appeared.
In the prison camp,
a German soldier
had forced maggots and chicken entrails
into his mouth.
David had always believed
that was the deepest shame of his life.
And there in the river,
he finally broke down and cried out:
“I cannot forgive him!”
That voice
seemed to come from the deepest place in his body.
But then,
he began to pray.
He said:
“I know,
if I do not let go of this anger,
I will die here.”
So he began to release it, little by little.
And in that moment,
the face of that German soldier
suddenly appeared before him again.
The soldier said to him:
“David,
those things
were the only food I could find
to keep you alive.”
In that instant,
David suddenly understood:
what he had always seen as humiliation
was actually the other man’s desperate attempt to keep him alive.
And in that same moment,
he suddenly felt something:
feeling returned to his legs.
Later,
David not only stood up again.
He even became a well-known artist.
His works were collected by many.
Most people saw art.
But I always thought:
those paintings
were actually the process of him painting his lost spirit back,
stroke by stroke.
And I,
in my own writing,
slowly walked into my own river.
That was the first time I read David’s story.
Years later, when I came back to it again…
I suddenly stopped.
Because in that moment,
I knew:
what the Navajo elders said
was not only about David.
It was also about me.
At that time,
I was rewriting the story of the hotel fire.
I had thought,
so many years had passed.
I had let it go long ago.
But when I actually began to write,
I realized:
no.
The hatred.
The grievances.
The injustice.
The pain that had no voice after being hurt —
it was all still there.
Just buried very, very deep in my heart.
Only when I reopened those memories
did they come out, one by one.
Even my body
began to hurt.
I woke up in the middle of the night in pain.
My right big toe throbbed.
Later a doctor told me
it was an ingrown toenail.
But at that time,
I had a deep feeling inside:
some pain
truly seeps from the heart
all the way into the body.
I began to understand
why some people leave the battlefield
but never leave the war.
Because what truly traps a person
is sometimes not what happened.
It is the emotions that never left.
The hatred.
The anger.
The grievances.
The unwillingness to accept.
They live in the heart for so long
that we forget they are even there.
When I read this,
I suddenly relaxed.
Because I finally understood:
what truly traps a person
is sometimes not the harm itself.
It is —
the hatred that never left the body.
Around that time,
I reread Jesus’ prayer on the cross:
“Father, forgive them,
for they do not know what they are doing.”
I looked at those words
and shook my head.
I said to myself:
I cannot do this.
I am only human.
I cannot find a reason to forgive those who hurt me.
Later,
I also read the story of Joseph in Genesis.
From the coat of many colors
to the bloodied coat.
From the prison clothes
to the fine linen at the end.
He was betrayed.
Framed.
Abandoned.
Yet in the end,
he became someone who could provide for others.
When I read that,
I suddenly thought of
my English blog.
Love Never Ending.
Love never ends.
In that moment,
I felt afraid.
Because I knew:
if I continued to let hatred stay inside me,
it would eventually seep into my writing.
And what I want to leave for others
is love.
Not hatred.
Just then,
I listened again to Caroline Myss’s talk:
Why People Don’t Heal.
And when I heard those words again —
“Call your spirit back” —
I suddenly let go completely.
As if something
had finally left my body.
When I woke up the next day,
I felt much lighter.
Even Margaret, who prayed for me, was surprised.
Because the day before,
I had been crying and asking her:
“How much longer
until I can stop hating those who hurt me?”
And now, looking back,
I slowly came to understand:
some healing
does not come from forgetting.
It comes from —
when a person is willing to let go of hatred,
the spirit
slowly begins to return.
And on the day the spirit returns,
you will realize:
what truly survived
is not only the body.
Later,
even the pain in my toe
slowly disappeared.
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