A treaty with the body
Concluded on foot, in a forest near Homberg, over a gully where a stream used to run.
There were two parties, and there were never two parties.
The mind arrived at the table the way minds do: early, with documents. It had come to resolve things. The conflict could not continue, that much was obvious, the mornings spent as opposing camps, the demands issued downward, the aches filed upward, the whole cold war of one person. The mind wanted signatures by evening.
The body arrived the way a landscape arrives. Which is to say it had been there the entire time, and the table was standing on it.
Understand what the mind was proposing peace with. Not an idea. A country. Bones that have held up every single day of the story so far. Teeth, the little white cliffs, grinding out the energy for every noble thought the mind ever congratulated itself on. A heart that has never once asked for the afternoon off. Feet that have landed a thousand footfalls, a thousand thousand, on gravel and tile and hospital linoleum and forest floor, and caught the whole weight every time. This is the epic nobody writes because its hero never leaves home. Its hero is home.
The negotiations went as follows.
The mind asked what it could possibly offer a country. It went through its pockets and found four things: attention, love, intelligence, curiosity. It laid them on the table and felt poor, and the feeling was wrong. Those four are what anyone has ever offered anyone.
The mind then did the thing minds do, and it should be recorded here honestly, with a laugh, because the treaty specifically provides for laughing at it. It tried to love the body the way you love an old cat while demanding her body heal. Demands issued out of love, and love is truly where they come from, and they cannot be heard. Cats do not read demands. Countries do not either.
So the schedule of resolution was struck from the document. The mind had come in a rush to resolve things, and there is only one quick resolution available between a mind and a body, and it is the one that is in no rush to happen. Every other peace is slow. It is walked, fed, slept, stretched, and renewed each morning without ceremony.
One article deals with insults, and it is the article the whole treaty rests on. It asks a single question: from what perch would the cursing even be delivered? Find the high ground the mind thinks it is standing on when it sneers at the knee, the gut, the tired back. Go look for it. There is no such perch. There is no distance from which to send the insult, and this is the good news of the entire document, because it means there is also no distance between you and the joys of your body. The warmth of sun through a shirt does not have to travel to reach you. Nothing does. You were never two countries. The border was drawn in ink the landscape has already eroded, the way this gully was made: no argument, just water, patiently, for longer than the trees.
The treaty is reverent for one reason. The body never needed to sign. It has been keeping every term all along, the breathing, the mending, the carrying, and it will keep them tomorrow whether or not the mind ratifies anything. The mind's signature is the only one that was ever missing.
It is easy to start the conflict going again. A sore morning will do it, or a mirror. The treaty anticipates this and is not alarmed. Reread the insult article. Laugh at how fast the old war reconvened, both delegations played, as ever, by you. Then offer what you have: attention, love, intelligence, curiosity. And maybe active faith, the walking kind, the kind already implicit every time you stand up and trust the floor of yourself to hold.
Tell your grandson it was signed in a forest, by one party, twice.