A Poem of Thanksgiving

A Poem of Thanksgiving  

By Bob Kamm

Inspired by elder Gerry Oleman
of the Coast Salish People of British Columbia
during his welcoming remarks at the 9^th Annual Imago Conference in Vancouver, BC

 Long before us

              skies

    sun and moon

     oceans

         deserts

forests

                                meadows

                                  mountains.

Long before us

eagle

       and all that lived beneath her.

Long before us

                rain tapping on the beetle’s back.

Long before us

reflections in pools of quiet creeks

flowing and frozen,

    reflections of overhanging trees,

the movement of light on berries,

the faces of buck, doe and fawn,

                raccoon, wolf, cougar,

                      ovenbird rocking on twig,

the tightening of night’s grasp

       on trunks and rocks.

But no images

                of human face

                        not one

not in puddle or pond

          not in the hand mirrors of ice-clad leaves,

               not even in the eye of predator or prey.

Long before us

      beings of all kinds

            writing their exquisite

and desperate

      life stories

on pages of earth, air, water, bark and stone,

leaving behind few traces

-- faint echoes broken by wind.

Not for us the great awakening of life

but each life for itself

and the shimmering whole

and the joy and sadness

of The Mother and Father of All Things.

The Mother and Father of All Things

who through their

restless risky dance

     made the universe

                          from a solitary seed

-the seed of all seeds

all beings

all things.

We are here now.

Though we strut about

proud parrots,

we are small.

We are late-comers to the festival.

We still don’t know the dances.

If we are honest

we must wonder

if The Mother and Father of All Things

for a single moment

in the reckless ecstasy of creativity

imagined

we would become so discontent

with the abundant gardens They provided,

would set out

to live

not just outside them

                                but

       everywhere

with such fiery intention

our success was assured.

Did Mother and Father,

having birthed all things

in the reckless ecstasy of creativity      

from the seed of all seeds,

pause

     even for a moment

to imagine

that one day

their favored principle

of hunter and hunted

would run amok in us,

that we would

discard and devour

                so much of the earth

and hound so many species

as well as our own mothers, fathers

                brothers, sisters

                sons and daughters

into a Great Vanishing?

With such history behind and within us,

how is it that Mother and Father

still let us live

let us struggle to find our way

                toward redemption?

Are They simply indulgent weavers who cannot discard

a deeply flawed blanket

whose dark designs they have come to love?

Or are They truly possessed

of  a compassion beyond our comprehension?

At this moment

life is ours.

Let us set our feet on the path

with prayers

of thanksgiving.

Let us say, “Thank you!”

to Mother and Father.

Let us say, “Thank you!”

to all They put here before us

that led to now,

“Thank you!” to all that is,

“Thank you!” to all that will be.

For fourteen billion years

we

    were

not

                                     yet.

Mother and Father birthed the universe

without a hand from us,

worked out its drama

through cold and hot fury,

barrenness, solitude, roar and silence,

then

gave us

     the chance to wriggle

from long-ripening wombs.

Why us? 

Why was each of us born and not others?

Why did we make adulthood and not others?

How can we show our gratitude and worthiness

for such a chancy investment?

Let us offer still more thanks.

Let us give thanks

to The Mother and Father of All Things

 for having

the wild, foolish, restless impulse to choose

us

and not brother sperm

                or sister ova.

Let us thank the earth They made

which has given rise to all we draw upon

                for sustenance and succor

--to the waters we use

to grow and cook,

slake our thirst,

 clean our bodies,

          frolic and fish;

 to the soil that gives rise to plants

that give us sweet air to breathe,

 plants we eat,

 plants we use to weave, build, warm,

trap, hunt, play  and heal;

Let us give thanks

to all the beings

         from the tiniest we cannot see

to the largest

whose flesh, bones, sinews and skins

we have taken

with ecstasy and sadness

for we know they were not made for us

but for themselves,

for the shimmering whole

 and for Mother and Father

in their incomprehensible creative fervor.

Let us give thanks to the long bead chain of grandmothers

who

carried and birthed other grandmothers until

our own mothers ripened and carried us

and helped us wriggle into the wild,

beautiful,

sad and terrifying

world.

To all who were present at the moment of our births

we give thanks,

the family and tribe that cared for us

in our helplessness

when we were pure

and yet

 knew nothing

and all those who caressed and patted us

                along our way to discover

                how to become human beings

how to live and love

with elegance and awkwardness

                                brilliance and ignorance

                how to sing, dance, drum, whoop, laugh,

          whisper and weep

                                together,

how to hold each other with bold affection

                and yet step back so each of us can

                                hear

                                the song of his own being.

May we raise our children

                with such right love

                    --devotion without indulgence--

                that before long

                across the many lands

                each soul is a gathering place

                                where all souls are safe.

Then may our ways

                           be fragrant as spring soil

and  tasty as ripe berry juice

                                                                to Mother and Father

so They might find us worthy

     of their work and worry

give us

lives

   that are

good

                and long

and end
  
with our cheeks

      on Their chests

as we listen to Their hearts

drum

  drum

      drum

before setting out

                for the gardens

in the bright reaches

of their eyes.

C Copyright 2012 Bob Kamm, reproduction by author’s permission only.

        

 

The Central Problem of American Democracy

As in communities across the country, we had an election here on June 5th in San Luis Obispo County.  Thirty-nine percent of registered voters actually cast ballots.  This means that just over 19.5% could have determined who the next County Supervisor will be in a given district, or whether or not a proposition imposing a tax on cigarettes passes.  The news wasn't much better across the state or across the country.

If you go all the way back to 1960 and look at turnout in Presidential elections, the highest turnout
was in 1960, the year JFK was elected.  The fact that he was a Catholic was a big controversy back then.  In fact, it may have been the central controversy of the election.  An awful lot of people got riled up.  You'd think, then, that perhaps the turnout was above 75% or even higher.  But no, it was
just above 63%.  In our most recent Presidential election in which the first individual of African-American heritage was a candidate--another point of controversy--the turnout was just above 58%.
You have to wonder what it would take for our turnout to rise above 70%.

When you look at these numbers, you can't resist the basic arithmetic that less than 30% of the registered voters in America can determine who becomes President, what kind of economic policy will be put forward, what kind of foreign policy, who is likely to sit on the Supreme Court, immigration policy, education policy--and other matters of great consequence to every living person in this country...and in most of the world.  And that 30% does not even have to be informed.  It only has to be motivated.  Given the absurd amounts of money allowed to be legally pumped into our political system, it is not hard for corporate or other interests to sway with marketing and advertising just enough people to carry an election, with the same kind of approach used by agencies that represent food, detergent, cars and technology companies--short, catchy phrases and flashy images that have little or nothing to do with the challenge of making a sound voting decision.

Since 9/11, it has become fashionable to make fun of the French.  But the French just had an election for their top position and the turnout was above 70%!  In Peru, the turnout generally runs upwards of 95% because you cannot get a driver's license if you don't vote.  Over the last year, we have regularly seen the looks of joy and the huge turnouts in countries in the Arab world exercising real voting rights for the first time.

I could marshal more examples but I think the point is pretty obvious.  We trumpet to the world that we are its greatest democracy yet a large segment of our citizenry is, for various reasons, asleep at the wheel or willfully not participating.  So when you feel like screaming at the people in your local government, or in your statehouse or in Washington, think again.  If you're going to talk to anyone, maybe it should be the neighbors or friends who tell you they never vote.  After our 2000 Presidential election, who can claim that votes don't matter?  How can we have a government of, by and for the people when the people don't vote?  What does it say about a person's integrity if they fail to vote but love to complain about the way things are going?  Even worse, what does it say about a person's integrity if they have never voted and then run for office, as happened in the last gubernatorial
election in California?

Obviously, it is also important that we cast informed votes, that we actually relish the responsibility of learning about what is going on in our country and voting for real people rather than deeply wounded people with grandiose dreams of self-gratification, and for real issues rather than those pumped up by special interests. When you look at the kind of people our founding fathers and mothers were, it is easy to imagine that their vision of America two or three hundred years after the Declaration of Independence was a society of highly engaged, fully informed, community-focused individuals reveling in their freedom, exercising it robustly and spending much of their leisure time in discourse and actions with friends and neighbors designed to make the common good even better. Given that they were thoughtful, educated people, we can imagine their thinking of our future much like the grand discussions in the Greek polis of ancient times--the original democracy--where all the men (alas, even the Greeks had not discovered equal rights) were vitally engaged in discourse that was passionate yet civil.  In my own nearly two-year experience on an Israeli kibbutz, in my early twenties, I saw this in action only with women fully empowered.  The "asifa" was the meeting of all adults in the community.  There were brilliant, articulate debates over what served the greater good. 
I'm not saying it was perfect.  After all, the members were human.  But by and large, this was exactly the kind of respectful, committed engagement our founders must have dreamed.

For the moment, I leave it to you to think about why a significant portion of our populace does not vote.  No doubt, there are different reasons for different segments that may have to do with socioeconomics as well as educational, religious and cultural factors.

But how do we avoid the conclusion that the lack of informed participation in American democracy is our great hypocrisy and great shame?  Do we think the rest of the world doesn't see this?  More importantly, this failure to fully engage is probably the prime contributor to the conviction many of us have that the citizenry does not control the nation's destiny in today's America, that we are certainly not being led by the best and the brightest our society can produce and that our national ethos and essence are gradually leaking away into the sands of history.  To put it more bluntly, there is an old saying, "Use it or lose it."  We're not using it, so we're losing it.

C 2012 Bob Kamm

The Way Forward

Go back

                to go forward,

forget

              to remember

--origins

     accomplishments

        calamities;

Forget how to count

                how to name

judge, categorize, diminish,

                        fear.

Peel away
           
                belief,
  
                      identity.

Go to the sea.  Study tides, waves, broad wings.

Go to the meadow,

         Get on hands and knees.

Squish mud between fingers and toes.

                    Study earth, obsidian, clay, quartz.
                            
Get face to face with caterpillars.

Wonder at the wings of bumblebees,

the hunger of grubs.

                 Caress roots,
                          
                        seeds,

                                
                                    shoots,

 blossoms.

Go to the mountain.

Consider sun, wind, angles, elevations.

Go to the river.

            See our own naked shapes

                in the still pool.

Inhale.

Exhale.

See.

Hear.

Smell.

Touch.

Feel.

Fall, scrape, stub,

                whack, sprain, break

our bodies.

                Weep until  gasping

                    till the wall of each cell

                                knows

                               how easily

                              it can be

cracked.

C 2012 Bob Kamm

The Myth of the Pelican & the Truth About Humans

 

There is an interesting bit of information about pelicans circulating among bird lovers. It holds that because of their diving into the water from heights up to 60 feet and at high velocity,

they eventually go blind from the accumulated damage done to their eyes when they

hit the water. In other words, some of the very things that serve their survival—their keen eyesight and diving ability—lead to their demise. Now I have discovered this is not true. It is a myth. First of all, not all pelicans dive for prey. Some of them paddle along the surface and do quite well catching dinner

from a sitting position, thank you very much. Those that do dive have protective sacs that cushion the

impact on their eyes. Pelicans have been around for roughly 40 million years without significant change in their anatomy, from what we can tell. So the design seems to work. Individual pelicans also live up to

forty years, which puts their diving scores far beyond those of any human Olympian.

So this is a myth, but we have many myths in human culture. They are not true on the surface, but they are true at the depth. An obvious example is the myth of Superman, which I have written about extensively (my first book, The Superman Syndrome, 2000, Authorhouse). When is the last time you saw a man flying around your city in blue tights with red boots? No, there is no superman, no superheroes, no X-men, no Prometheus giving fire to man (if you want to go all the way back to the Greeks). Nonetheless, a careful examination of these myths teaches us some valuable lessons. The preeminent one for me is that all these superheroes have some kind of terrible wound visited upon them. In the case of Superman, his entire planet exploded with his family on it when he was merely a baby. He had to endure a long solitary journey to his new home on earth. He grows up to be the Man of Steel. But there is something very interesting about this man. He doesn’t feel very much. He’s not the sensitive type. If he has any feelings, they seem to be a kind of detached amusement or righteous anger. But the deep truth is conveyed to us when we discover that in order for him to be in love with Lois Lane, he must give up his super powers. In other words, steel and feel don’t compute.

The myth is repeating to us a basic human truth. That when we undergo trauma in childhood, we tend to shut down. The capacity to feel, to yearn for connection is there under the surface but we are not fully in touch with it. We become grandiose. We become world-shakers, masters of the universe in business and politics, figuratively or literally insane artists who create magnificent paintings, sculptures, poetry, film roles, or athletic stars--all to feed the public hunger for someone to instill hope that we can triumph in the end.

But, like the teaching within the myth of the pelican, what we discover is that while being able to disconnect from feeling has allowed us to survive through the traumas of the childhood of our species and our individual childhoods, in the long run, this dampening of feeling puts us at risk of vanishing.

We seem to need crises to awaken our deeper sensibilities—like global warming today, or the suffering of our fellow man paraded before our eyes on evening TV such as happened during the Viet Nam war and the Civil Rights Movement or more recently, the devastation of Katrina on the people of New Orleans or the brutal suppression of human rights in so many countries around the world. But reacting to crises is a risky strategy at best. We are always trying to catch up. We don’t seem capable of grasping and acting on the essential truth by asking the core questions: why would humans treat each other this way? Why would humans treat the planet that has given them life this way? How could we be so insensitive to the evidence that surrounds us?

Jill Bolte Taylor, the Harvard neurologist who suffered and recovered from a left hemisphere stroke has written: “Although many of us may think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, biologically we are feeling creatures that think.” (Her italics). Yes, we are birthed and experience are first most vulnerable years of life with our sensing and feeling brains (brainstem, right hemisphere, right limbic system), and have to wait for more than two decades for the left hemisphere “thinking brain” to completely come online. But it would probably be more accurate to say that we are feeling creatures that disconnect from our feelings under certain levels of trauma and stress, but that the feelings from which we disconnect to not vanish from our biological system, only from our conscious awareness. Then they exert tremendous influence on the further development of our entire physiological system, including how and what we think about later as the left hemisphere does develop. We are, in many ways, at war with ourselves—a heightened feeling capacity being “told” by other parts of the brain that it does not or should not feel so deeply. As long as we obey those messages which are delivered by life in general and often our quite specifically by our original caregivers and instructors as agents of a disconnected society, we will increasingly be at risk. As individuals, a lack of feeling will lead us toward less than best-case decisions, at the least. As a nation and a species, we will not feel danger until it is upon us—until we are nearly blind from the impact of so many dives in our frenzied pursuit of what we have come to believe is the real sustenance—material possessions, status, money, power. Even political freedom, while a necessary precondition, does not guarantee psychological freedom from this cycle of reinforced suppression of feeling.

So, do we ultimately perish from using the same strategy over and over again as the myth ascribes to the pelican? Is this a fatal glitch in our design—that in order to survive we must disconnect from our deep feeling nature, and that disconnection will render us incapable of responding to the very crises it impels us to create?

The jury is still out, out on the question of whether or not enough of us can see this and change

However, the jury is not out on how we make it through. Nowhere is it more exquisitely stated than by Martin Prechtel in his luminous book, Long Life, Honey in the Heart: “For me, true initiations would be impossible until the modern world surrenders to the grief of its origins and seeks a true comprehension of the sacred.” He goes on to discuss the perverse hunger that is the result of being disconnected from the simple feeling truths of everyday life: “…hunger for entertainment that hopes to fill the spiritual void of individuals and a whole culture with talk shows, corn chips, movies, dope, fast cars. That hunger is an emptiness that should be wept into, grieved about, instead of blocked and filled up” (my italics). What an irony. The teaching here is that, like the pelican, we have protective "sacs" near our eyes--tear ducts! The pelican has been here 40 million years. Homo sapiens has only been here 150,000. Our survival repertoire is still largely untested. Still, it is a sad measure of the breadth of repression that there are still large numbers of people in the psychological community that not only fail to give grieving its due importance as a healing process, but actively denigrate it.

As is so often the case, artists and soul-adventurers like Prechtel know better than so many of the people who purport to be experts on healing the human heart.. There will be no true transformation into the centuries-old longing for peace and collaboration among humans without our first feeling the brutal and sorrow-filled episodes of our origins—as a species and as individuals. No feeling, no tears; no tears, no truth; no truth, no vision; no vision, no potency to manifest what lives beyond political freedom—psychological and social freedom that cherish, respect and mobilize our essential nature as brilliant feelers.

C 2012 Bob

Parenting From Depth, Part II: Children Should be Seen and...

 

Early in our Imago Parenting Course--Connected Parents, Thriving Kids--we give a quick survey of how parenting styles have changed over the years. For hundreds of years,
parenting was parent-centered, authoritarian, "because I said so", "children are to be seen and not heard." You really have to shake your head on how this approach dominated for thousands of years. Why didn't we as a species see the terrible limits of this approach sooner? Well, that will be a discussion for another day. Suffice it to say that parent-centered parenting did a lot of damage on this planet, some mild and some on the level of holocaust--children treated as slaves, property, brutalized and even killed because "father knew best"in some way. Finally, after the World War II, there was a gradual shift towards child-centered, permissive parenting. "Cchildren are to be seen and not heard" gave way to, "Children are to be seen, heard and given whatever will support their 'self-esteem'". Being a baby-boomer, my experience is that I and my cohort grew up with a sometimes confusing blend of authoritarianism and permissiveness. I think this conflation of the two styles dissipated gradually over the balance of the 20th century and into the 21st.
In the last few years, a lot of parents and professionals in the field of child development have arrived at the conclusion that child-centered parenting has frequently gone too far, indulging children, allowing their scheduled activities to run the life of the household and generally being unwilling or unable to leverage a "positive no" that actually can give children a clear boundary and nurture in them a greater sense of responsibility, a sense that there are other people in the world besides themselves and a mature person makes room for those others. Now what we see, and what we in the Imago community are working towards, is parent-child centered parenting; parenting that emphasizes the relationship between the two, that sees both as catalysts for each other's growth and enrichment. Toward that end, children are to be seen, heard, felt and responded to in ways that are appropriate to the need and the developmental moment, but not over-indulged. As our workbook states: "I am in healthy connection with my child when I'm emotionally available to learn what he/she needs from a parent who is willing to take charge." One obvious example: Conscious parents know that four year olds need about a dozen hours of sleep and are best served by a bedtime around 7 in the evening, not nine, ten or eleven. They also know that it's a good idea to make sure kids burn off a lot of energy about three hours before that bedtime so that they are ready for the quiet enjoyments of bath and reading and gentle play.
My own mnemonic device for this parent-child centered approach is the Italian word cara,which means dear. I set it up this way:
C=Consistenly (consistency across situations, not constancy which is impossible)
A=Attuned, (meaning emotionally available to "get" our children's reality)
R=Responsive, (in a timely manner to the present and long-term needs)
A=Appropriate (to the developmental moment the child is experiencing)

So, being a C.A.R.A. parent means we would respond to a crying infant by picking it up, comforting it and attuning to learn what it need: Just the comfort? A diaper change? A warmer/cooler/quieter/more-or-less stimulating environment? Food? Etc. We would understand that an infant can't meet its own needs and certainly cannot regulate its own emotions. She needs us to do that for her just as she needs us to walk for her because she can't walk and speak for her because she can't yet speak and make decisions because the left side of her brain where decisions largelyt get made is, for all intents and purposes, not at all functional. But an appropriate response to a crying teenager might look very different. It might mean that we would mirror his feelings: "Oh, I can see that you are really hurting over this." Or, "You seem really angry about this. Is that what you're feeling?" It might mean we offer hugs. It might mean we let him know we're available if he wants to talk, but empower him to work it through on his own if that's his choice. Your get the picture. The bottom line is to be Consistently Attuned, Responsive and Appropriate...which includes our own needs, thus the parent-child relationship. Sometimes, especially with smaller children, it IS appropriate to drop what we're doing and come to their aid. But as a child matures, we have more choices about our proximity to her and her issues. It's important for kids to gradually get through living examples that their parents are "others" and have needs themselves and those needs will sometimes preclude an immediate response to their own. For an infant, the experience of an unmet need can be catastrophic. For a four year-old, far less so. For a fourteen year-old, still less--IF the parent has been consistent over the years in balancing (based on the child's developmental stage) the child's needs with their own. Children ARE to be seen, heard, felt, "gotten" and responded to with appropriate loving behavior; but parents are people, too, and also need to be seen, heard, felt and "gotten"...mostly by their life partners and other adults but, over time, by their children, too. When kids get that their parents are separate people, they grow up to be much more responsible contributors to culture. So there is no danger of children becoming narcissistic if they are truly seen, heard and gotten by parents who intuit or have learned through study what is appropriate at a given moment.
In my book, Real Fatherhood, there are a number of examples of good moments...and bad ones that I tried to correct as quickly as possible. Our Imago Faculty has called such errors, "beautiful mistakes" to remind us all that none of us can be perfect. In one such situation, my son was eight years old. I had been giving him an allowance of $2.00 a week, for which he did certain chores. He got very money focused because there were things he wanted. Suddenly I realized that it was a significant error to pay him to do things. After all, he and I were a family (I was a single dad at the time). We were a team. To pay him changed his status. He became an employee. Kids are not our employees. They are family members and what was appropriate for Ben was to bear his weight as a family member.
Obviously, there were chores he could not do, given his developmental moment. But he could help prepare meals, do dishes, wash the car and do yard work with me. So I self-corrected by telling him that I would no longer pay him for specific chores. He would still get his $2.00 a week so he could learn to manage money--which was the real and right purpose of an allowance. His initial reaction was to pitch a fit. "How will I make more money?" he cried at me. I held steady and let him know that he really couldn't right now. Eventually he'd be old enough so he could perhaps do things for neighbors or have a paper route. I let him cry it out. He was mad at me and he had cause. I was correcting a decision that was less than attuned to the situation at the time. He had a right to his frustration and tears. But the whole thing was over in about a half-hour. That was one of the best half-hours I ever invested in his character...and mine. Parent-child relationship!
C2012 Bob Kamm

Your Child's Emotional Tuning

 

When an infant calls for help and her parent is consistently available and responsive in a
way that meets the child’s need, that child is implicitly learning that it is good to express need
because it will be satisfied in a timely manner. She can’t think at this age, of course, but her
body knows at the cellular level what is happening. This is the ground floor for emotional
balance in adulthood.
A child who experiences such emotional attunement and response from
her parents doesn’t have to escalate her expressions to magnum crying, screaming and flailing
to get mom and dad’s attention. Consequently, as an adult, she is likely to be able to do
without rapid escalation to bring attention to her needs in an intimate relationship but also in
friendships and the workplace. This truth debunks the old idea of letting children cry it
out…which we now know stresses the child’s system with large flows of cortisol and other
stress hormones that can actually do damage to her hippocampus—a part of the brain that is a
building block of IQ because of its key role in creating long-term memory.
Our degree and accuracy of responsiveness is what we might call “emotional tuning.”
Indeed, the entire neurological and hormonal system, of which the brain is the most obvious
component, is an instrument for sensing and feeling in the early years, not thinking. It is being
tuned by caregiver interaction as certainly as a piano is tuned by a piano master. This
emotional tuning determines which emotional notes, note sequences, chords and reaction speeds will
become the most common in the life of the individual. You can continue the metaphor by imagining what kind of parent interactions will lead the child to produce Wagner-like reactions rather than, say, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven or, in today’s terms, the quiet and contemplative music of Michael Hoppe or the blaring, machine-gun like emanations of metal rock and rap…as well as all the possible variations along that continuum.
Unfortunately, we parents are not perfect and there are plenty of times when we either
miss our children’s cues or are simply unable to satisfy them due to outside stresses pulling at
us—a bad economy, a catastrophic act of nature, ethnic strife and war, just to name a few of
the possibilities. So, many of us will pass through our critical and highly dependent first four or
five years experiencing something between inconsistent emotional attunement and response
from our parents to very little at all. When we arrive on the shores of adulthood and find
ourselves drawn into an intimate relationship, friendship or important workplace issue, it is
natural that these old deficits come with us and do a lot to shape the dynamics of those
relationships. The good news is that through the right kinds of courageous emotion-based
work in adulthood, those old tunes, as deeply written as they are, can gradually be rewritten
into a more harmonious musical score.
C 2012 Bob Kamm

Love Complete

 

for Annie

When I arrive

shipwrecked

on your shores--as I do from time to time--

and the love I haul from the waves

is soaked

barnacled

and cracked…

the cause is in me

and me alone,

my darling,

for you

are perfectly loveable

and deserve

a fleet

with full sails

flags flying

fresh paint

and a cargo of love

complete,

intact,

delivered onto the docks

with gloved hands.

I have been at sea

too long

yet also long enough

to know

you have, too.

It is my prayer

and my intention

now

to keep land beneath my feet

to witness and adore you

in each of your many moments

…every

shift of wind

on the surface of your eyes

the smallest movement

in their depths,

the subtle telling of your own long voyage

that words can’t touch.

No part of you

should be left behind

dismissed, neglected or

partially embraced.

That was done

by others in your past

so that you buried the full treasure of your heart

under dunes, driftwood

and these stones

that, for all the hiding

over many years,

still held sunlight

captive

in dark flecks

like waves at night

do moonlight.

So, we will

go together now

in day and darkness
you and I

digging

carefully

with our hands

until every chest is open

and every jewel revered

The Rug

 

for Annie

I've always liked this rug

since you first showed it to me.

Its reds and blacks call

to the heart and the will

as clearly as a native American dance

before a great journey,

hunt or battle.

I see men

stomping the earth

around a fire

encouraged by their ululating women.

But then

the patterns pull me away

from the night and human noises

into big spaces

--mountains rising above mountains,

diamonds sparkling on high waters,

crosses pointing to the four directions.

Within these patterns

more colors emerge

... white, beige and at least five shades of gray.

I particularly like the latter,

as if some medicine man

collaborated with the weaver

to remind us

not to be so quick to judge

but rather

to welcome subtlety, nuance, uncertainty

and contradiction,

to walk in the world as if

either danger or wonder

could confront us

beyond the next rock or tree,

to be steady, strong and fully awake

as we place each foot forward,

to be ready and willing

to live whatever

there is to live.

So, yes, my darling, I like this rug very much.

It's the placement I've had a problem with

as you know...

here in the kitchen

where it gets walked on

kicked and

dirtied up with dog hair and vegetable cuttings.

Still

you want it here.

You

don't want it hanging on the wall.

It's sturdy. You're not worrying over dirt.

I usually defer to your taste

but this is a loose rug that slides and folds.

It has felt like an accident waiting to happen.

It has also felt disrespectful to the weaver

and the poem in the patterns.

Part of me wants to dig in and fight this out.

But I have decided

to embrace the placement of the rug

for one reason.

Because it makes you feel good

to have it under foot,

to see it when you enter the kitchen,

to make sure one of us engages

in a weekly ritual of cleaning.

I want you to feel good.

You deserve to feel good.

We will dance together around the symbolic fire

woven in the reds.

What could matter more?

So if you or I trip, I will not go to "I told you so".

I will not allow this rug to become a field

where our two inner children skirmish

over whose needs are more important.

I embrace the placement of the rug

fully

and, as the saying goes, without reservation.

With this commitment

I entertain another possibility

--that I might not have paid so much attention

might not have seen the pictures and heard the stories in the rug

were it not constantly under foot.

Just as, now,

standing in its middle, looking down,

I wonder at the white twinings that extend from each end of the fabric

...reaching forward and back

as if the rug itself

is a sacred between

connecting past with future

earth with sky

water with wind

love with learning

all shades of gray

with each other

and, most important,

me

with you.

C 2011 Bob Kamm