Testimony of Forgiveness: 19 Ways in Action

With Annie Licata

The receipt or transmission of the 19 Ways (for a Viable Future for All Beings) just before the end of a 5,126-year-long cycle in the Mayan Long Count calendar felt like a great gift from the universe and a small version of the transformative events that had been predicted to help establish a new time. I could claim to have thought of them myself but I believe that creativity and vision are spiritual events based on reciprocity which can occur when we allow for a relationship with the spirits who act on behalf of the world, especially this broken world speeding toward extinction. The 19 Ways were announced as one guide to changing our minds significantly so that we would live differently and act in ways that preserve the future and protect the earth and all beings.

It is easy enough to read the 19 Ways and assume we understand them.  But it has taken many years for me and for those of us who have been studying them to fathom what they truly mean so they are integral to our minds and hearts and integrated into all our responses and actions. It probably takes a minimum of five years to be aligned but several of us are still immersed in understanding since 2013 when we began. This attention is because we see that we are living differently and that our lives do not do as much harm as do the ordinary reflexes and assumptions of contemporary life.  

Some of the 19 Ways are more difficult to live by than others and the one that classically challenges everyone is the No Enemy Way, the Way of Peacemaking.  To imagine not making enemies, not identifying others as enemies, while living in such an aggressive, militaristic, combative, competitive, violent culture which is increasingly dominating the world, where, indeed, refusing to recognize enemies is considered, unorthodox, dissident, heretical, even criminal.

But to not have enemies is to engage in the marvel and wonder of forgiveness. which appearing in a time of increasing alienation and brutality guides us out of the violence and wars that follow endlessly until we open our hearts to the other.  

Annie Licata joined the 19 Ways three years ago. Our original meeting had been entirely unexpected, actually magical.  A young woman, thirty-three, she had been heartbroken about the world and the consequent limitations of her and her generation’s lives and future.  Her family had been torn apart by a war between brothers.  She could not forgive her father and certainly not her uncle for this schism and how it mirrored the many divisions on the planet. She could not possibly imagine how to heal the wars and armed conflicts that abound and neither she nor any of her therapists nor advisors had any idea of how to heal this split in her family.  To the contrary, she was advised it was impossible. 

The Turquoise Gate

In this July, she wrote a letter to her colleagues in the 19 Ways to chronicle a remarkable event.  It is reproduced here.

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I remember the first Christmas alone in 2012, without the cousins I grew up with my entire life, raised down the street from each other and two classrooms over, kindergarten through high school. We had the same friends and the same family and the same childhoods and we were turned into strangers overnight. A battle broke the family apart; lost cousins, lost holiday gatherings, lost family stories. I could not forgive my father or my uncle for the loss…

By the time I walked through the turquoise gate to learn the 19 Ways, a conveyor belt of therapists shared failed solutions of a family reunited. My dad and his brother coming together? Impossible…two stubborn old Italian men who learned grudge-holding from their own father, whose own father did not talk to his brother because of a dispute over 11 dollars who learned it from his father, who learned it from his father. Romulus and Remus, repeating for 2000 years. 

It was a nighttime visit to Deena’s land where we planted the seed. “It is not your father’s fault,” she told me, nearly a decade later. Her words hung in the air, “and you need to read Nadine Gordimer’s novel, My Son’s Story.” With those words, moonlight illuminated the pathway to forgiveness, the hands of spirit prying my chest open and planting this heirloom seed in an otherwise forgotten hole in my heart. 

That was two years ago, the moonlit path having some twists and turns. So this summer, when my littlest brother was about to turn 18 years I offered to throw him a graduation party at my house. As I was planning it, my brother and I started talking about our estranged cousins. Perhaps my dad and my uncle would never reconcile but the kids—the cousins—I was not ready to give up on them yet. "Don't get involved with this," my sister warned me. But I had this little seed. 

I took on a 19 Ways approach. All were welcome! Only one rule: no guns. I tracked down phone numbers from this cousin to that cousin, I invited aunts and uncles that I have not spoken to, I ordered a lot of antipasto and rented chairs and tables and held onto this wild idea that the family would come. No one would be turned away. Every time I found a new relative to invite, we would all sit around and say, "Noooo way, no way that person will come." And then the person would answer with a Yes! 

There was a lot of talk whether he would come....my father’s brother. I wanted my aunt to come—his wife—who had this great laugh and used to rock me when I was a baby. I had not seen her in almost 13 years so I told her that he was welcome in my home. The brother who I always blamed for tearing apart the family. But I have been talking about healing and looking for healing and praying for healing for me and my family around this for so long that it was time to apply what wisdom I carried from the 19 Ways and ask the spirits for help. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to heal myself, my father, my cousins, my aunts and uncles, and the ancestors. 

If my dad was willing to forgive his own brother, so must I forgive my father and then his brother. We all guessed with nervous excitement and apprehension, what would it be like if my uncle came? Hugs? Tears? Fisticuffs? 

Well, my uncle did come to my house and he walked right up to my dad in the driveway and they embraced. At the party, I caught my uncle with his hand on my dad's leg, squeezing it lovingly. My dad and his two brothers told stories together to all of the children. The last time they were together, their kids were heading off to college. Now, they were all grandparents. 

It turned out that every single person who was invited showed up to the party at my house. Time had passed—time lost—and we all cried, we met new family, the cousins introduced their own kids to each other. I looked around, saw the hugging and the tears and saw my ancestors standing around laughing, smiling, healing. 

Everybody kept asking me, "How did you do this? How did you pull off this miracle?" I told them it was Spirit. With gold crosses and Italian horns hanging around their necks, I told my family that the Tarot led us here. Spirit led us here. Our own ancestors led us here. But in truth, I do not know how the sky opened up. How did this happen? 

I walked with the possibility that we might all be together again, and I tried and failed for many years. Just like we are trying and failing to meet this moment of extinction. Maybe it was that I believed in my heart that the ancestors needed to heal as much as we did. You see, my family, they do not forgive. They do not forget. And yet.... here they were. Forgiving and forgetting. Not to mention they were all donning Trump hats and Trump shirts and asked, "who are you voting for" to everyone who walked in. And here I was, a house full of Trumpers and a house full of liberals, laughing, listening, uninhibited and together. 

The work of the 19 Ways, my elders and the community taught me what is really possible when we believe in another future. We have the power to change our lives and the events in it when we walk without rancor, without bitterness and instead with the possibility that we can be something else. Maybe my family came together on that fateful summer afternoon because I never give up on them. Just like I will never give up on the Natural World and Earth’s healing. 

(To contact Annie Licata, write licata732@gmail.com)

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Here is the evidence of possibility.  The joy in the piece is equal to the level of despair Licata felt for so many years and her anger at all of us who are adults who have failed to stop violence and have so abused the Earth that so many of Annie’s generation, Millenials, believe they have no future and question bringing children into this world.  Now Annie is the one to bring us hope, Annie and her unlikely father and less likely uncle, all reconciled.  

In the last eleven years since we received the 19 Ways, we have experienced the possibility of change and restoration and are living according to its forms, grateful because we have seen that consciousness is contagious. As we understand that it would make an essential difference for the Earth and all the beings if the 19 Ways were widely practiced, I am offering a new class online, An Introduction to the 19 Ways, beginning in October. For further information please contact Sarah Velez deenasassistant1222@gmail.com.  Please join us and bring a friend.  

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On another note: I have been freely offering my writing to the community for about 60 years and posting essays on Substack since January 2022 and earlier for many years on WordPress (and will continue to do so). My intention was and continues to be to provide support, understanding, vision, and the wisdom, as I receive it from the spirits, in all the ways I am able.  But the current grave urgencies and also the possibilities are calling me to post more often, perhaps twice or more times a month.  If you can support the work with a paid subscription or an intermittent donation and recommend it to your friends and colleagues, it will be greatly appreciated and make it easier to meet this summons which I cannot deny. (It helps the work circulate if you leave a comment and check ‘like,’ when you do.)

Thank you and Blessings,

Deena