Apologies to the Goddess

Kwan Yen--our little goddess of compassion.  We found her in a local nursery.  She is slim

and stands only four feet tall but weighs close to two hundred pounds from molded concrete.

A concrete goddess…how’s that for an oxymoron?  She is coiffed and clothed as a Chinese girl should be and would even warrant the adjective demure but for her small right foot—all five perfect little toes--boldly presenting themselves from beneath her floor-length skirt. Is it because she is going somewhere?

Did the artist capture her in the midst of a small but sure step or is this a subtle offering, a promise of a different kind of divine delight?  I guess we will never know.  Her lips are sealed.

When we stood her against the small arched wooden bridge in our front yard we thought it the perfect place for her energy to emanate and envelop our entire acre.  And for a number of months it was so. This goddess of compassion made compassion reign.  Flowers bloomed, fruit appeared, birds and butterflies filled the air.

But then, the plague arrived, the plague of oak moth caterpillars gnawing their way through our luxuriant oak canopy, rappelling down from the heights like an endless gang of warriors.  They covered   our walls and walkways with their skinny black and green bodies and copper helmets and their poop—which scientists have given the dubious name frass.  Frass descended from the leaves above blanketing everything, its smell spoiling every inhale.  A biologist friend told us this is a once every six or seven year phenomenon.  If you don't do commercial spraying (expensive!) right at the first sign, it's a waste.  The oak trees, though utterly stripped, will rebound. The caterpillars will become pupae and the pupae moths but once hatched they will move on and even if they don’t their children, the next generation of caterpillars, will die at the hands of a tiny parasite that takes but a single generation to catch up to its prey. Isn’t nature wonderful?  The balance!  Ah!!  It only takes one year for the parasites to overtake the marauding worms and set things right. So our friend, counseled, since we woke up to the invasion too late for commercial spraying, we should “become one with the caterpillars.” In other words, let Kwan Yen’s spell of mercy abide.

Alas, we could not. The smell of the frass was too “in your nose”, the sight of the caterpillars too icky.  Yes, so icky that a couple in their sixties had to reach back to the childhood word icky to describe them. And the final straw floated down when they covered Kwan Yen’s tiny toes, nose, eyes and ears.

Now you might say they were showing her affection.  One of the stories about her tells us that animals had an affinity for her, even helped her do burdensome chores in a monastery hundreds of years before St Francis spoke to birds in Europe.

You might say they were showing her respect.

You might say the caterpillars were worshipping at her feet, on her feet, limbs, hands, face and hair.

And you might say they were a dastardly pestilence

that needed to be mercilessly wiped

from the earth.

Believe me, we tried to be good students of our goddess, to be one with one with the worm, one with the frass, one with the pupae.  Unfortunately, like all humans except those who attain godly status we were weakened by our anger.  We attacked those worms and their little sleeping pods with environmentally friendly death sprays, wire brushes, power washers, blowers and outdoor vacuums strong enough to uproot an oak.  We sucked, squashed, smashed, blew and blasted them off our walls and deck.  As each day passed we embraced our murderous mission with greater zeal, driven to the precipice of madness by the pungency of frass.  

But finally, it was over.  

Every last worm was either dead or had spun its tiny sanctuary of transformation in the branches beyond our reach.  Then and only then did we approach our freshly washed goddess to ask for compassion when we had given none, mercy when we had been merciless.  For the legend tells us she refused to go into heaven because she heard the cries of the world and wanted to return to assuage them.  Weren’t those cries now coming from us?   Yes, but our cries, were not at first for forgiveness, because we did not seek it.  We did not feel guilty, initially.  After all, if we had not done the killing, wouldn’t the parasites?  How would that have been preferable?

We felt ambivalent and confused. We were both sorry and not sorry.  That's what we cried to have lifted from us--ambivalence and confusion.  We cried over our low tolerance for frass falling from the sky, sharp smells, gangs of insects that, unlike the migrations of monarch butterflies, had for us no redeeming qualities whatsoever; a low tolerance in general for beings—human and otherwise—that were different, and neither beautiful nor useful in their differentness.  We cried out not only for mercy and understanding.  We cried out for the the spell of being human to be re-cast so that compassion would live in our hearts, not just flop on the couch for a week from time to time.  We cried out for the strength to  trust more, allow more, witness more.  We cried out for our capacity for anger to be reshaped into a greater capacity for love that we might be one with nature and one with mankind and our wars against both might finally come to an end. 

Only weeks after the moths left, the canopy was full and lush again, in fact, more luxuriant than it had been before the caterpillars arrived.  The irony weighed heavily upon us.  Heavily.  We stood in the shade surveying our little piece of reborn heaven, trying not to notice that the ground was littered with tiny graves.

C 2014 Bob Kamm

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 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

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

Fierce Attachment, Part II

Before my son, Ben, was born, I had tried hard to imagine him as a particular individual with particular features...not just "the baby." But when I saw his face for the first time as the doctor held him up, I realized this was no baby. This was a person, of me, of my family. He was completely recognizable. He looked an awful lot like my Grandpa Sam, my mom's father...except for his creamy blue color. After more than thirty hours of labor, it felt as if the room were tilting and spinning when he finally emerged. My eyes were fixed on Ben but I was falling away in a strange kind of slow motion. I was on the verge of passing out when I felt his tiny spirit lasso and haul me back. I tumbled forward off the cliff of my own breath as he took his first. In an instant, I knew him and he knew me. Our souls collided.

Fatherhood comes upon men in different ways. During the six weeks that followed Ben's birth, I experienced a high beyond anything I'd ever felt. This was not just a new page or new chapter in my life. I had been transported to a new planet. Everyone and everything was different, as if the world itself had just been born. And I had a mission unlike any I'd ever imagined--to protect, nurture and love this person into full flowering. There was no questioning this. It had an irresistible primordial potency. I'm sure millions, perhaps billions of fathers before me had felt this same flooding of the heart...but it was my turn now.

That high felt as if it would never end. I would be the best possible me for the rest of my life, victoriously dueling with the demons of the world to make a sanctuary for my boy. But it did end, almost as if scheduled, right at six weeks. It ended with a bang, not a whimper. Like a lightning strike. I fell into a massive depression. I'm sure I'm not the only man who has experienced "post-partum depression." It isn't talked or written about much, but it happens. We could talk about the crashing of the happy hormone-neurotransmitter pump...but let's not.

The high was followed by a low that matched it. My confidence had flown. I was in the world without any refined skills to make my way and provide the safe-haven Ben deserved. I had just turned twenty-eight. Much of my twenties were spent traveling in Europe, the Middle-East, writing songs and performing. I dreamt of a career as a folk-singer, though I was a few critical years late. That train had left the station. Music was changing. Besides, even when everything is in sync, how many people actually get to live that dream? I went to the local city college and started learning carpentry. I'd have something to fall back on, I thought. But when Ben arrived, I was still in contractor kindergarten. Everywhere I looked, I saw closed doors. Unlimited optimism had turned into unlimited despair and utter paralysis. I contemplated suicide.

Fortunately, there was help available and I grabbed it as fast as I could. Within a few days,

I was on the floor of my therapist's office sobbing my guts out. Initially, all I could feel was that I loved Ben so much more than I had ever loved anyone or anything--yet, I couldn't be the father he needed. I didn't have the skills or the smarts. I had spent most of the last ten years in self-centered pursuits. How could I possibly be a father? What preparation did I have?

After about ten minutes of "woe is me" in the present, things shifted. An image of my father showed up in my mind's eye...not my father as he was in this day, at the age of 58, but as he was when I was about four years old. The image was so clear, it was as if he were in the room with me...and I was that four year-old little boy. "Dad!" I cried, reaching up for him as that little boy. I was inundated with memories from that time...most of them about his absence and my longing to be close to him, to climb in his lap, nuzzle into his body, ride on his shoulders or just be in the same room with him so I could see and hear him. They didn't present themselves as memories, though...but as the present, as immediate reality and need.

Like most men of his generation, my father was a career man. We lived in northern New Jersey. He commuted by train into New York five days a week. Most of the time, when he was around, he was engaged, energetic, warm, playful and funny. Clearly, this was a far better situation than if he had been cold, distant and cruel. Still, it had its own odd curse. Since my father was such a magnetic person, my little boy soul could not help but yearn fiercely to be with him. But being the third of three boys, there just wasn't a lot of time left for me. So that was my deepest hurt with my father--needing to be close to a dynamic man who certainly loved me but just wasn't available enough. I was left gasping for the oxygen only he could provide.

I had known this intellectually for years. I wasn't a novice at psychology or therapy. But for the first time in my life, I was feeling it from the top of my head to the tip of my toes. I was that little boy.

I needed my dad desperately. There was no other reality.

After nearly two hours of crying, I was exhausted. The therapist hugged me and told me to go rest. The next morning, I was back. More tears. More images from the past as clear as if they were happening for the first time. I stayed with the little boy. I surrendered to his need. I was him and as him, felt helpless within this need that could not be met no matter how hard I reached for my dad or called for him.

After another two hours, it ended, cleanly. There were no more tears. I sat up, blew my nose and said, "That's it."

"What's it?" the therapist asked.

"I couldn't be a man because I wasn't done being a little boy. I needed my dad to come home and be with me."

"Well, that's very clear!"

I stood up. "I've gotta go," I said.

"Where to?" the therapist asked.

"Home. I've gotta go home. I've gotta go get a job and take care of my kid."

"Alright!"

We hugged and I was out the door.

Two days later, I got a job selling cars. This was not even on my list of "things I'd like to do". But I had a friend who had done it and told me I had the requisite people skills and there was good money in it. But I needed to make a living and right now. He turned out to be right. Within a month, I was making more than I ever had, and learning the art of selling. Some of it was repugnant to me. That just spurred my creativity so I could find other ways of relating to people without manipulating them. Some of it was quite satisfying. All in all, it was a legitimate way to make a living. Over a couple of decades, I mastered selling, moved into management and ultimately, beyond into consulting and the deep work of leadership development. I never looked back. I never had that feeling of needing my father as a four year-old again. I never again felt paralyzed in the face of life challenges. I had a firm grip on my manhood and did a decent job of raising my son, who is now a grown man and a father.

So, think about attachment. It was fierce attachment to Ben that both triggered the unmet need of my father and gave me the courage to face its force. That need is an intense dynamic which I would argue is common to all children. By fully processing the sorrow of not getting enough of my dad, I was liberated from it...detached, so that it no longer ran my life from its subterranean realm. I was also able to detach sufficiently from my unrealistic dream of fame and fortune so I could be a real and present dad. I would have to do some more work on that dream later, work that had to do with my mother, but the key factor at this moment was that my feet were planted firmly on the ground. I had been the victim of what we might call "the artist's conceit"...meaning that artists so often believe there is an intrinsic beauty and value in their work that the world should and will beat a path to their door eventually to embrace them. That conceit, in my view, is a projection of unfulfilled early needs.

I said in Part I that the fierceness of our attachment to our caregivers is beyond what most of us allow ourselves to feel most of the time. This was true of this situation following Ben's birth. If you had told me that I was going to have to cry for my dad as a four year-old for nearly four hours in order to stand up and be the father I wanted to be, I'd have been pretty skeptical. Having actually done it, there is no way anyone can talk me out of the value of those tears, and the truth that as children, our need to be close to our parents is the dominant force in our lives. There is also no way anyone could talk me out of my appreciation of how our extraordinary brains are capable of holding onto enormous old hurts in the hope that one day they will be healed. Frustration of early need sends the resulting pain underground, from which place it will run our adult lives until we are able to connect with it and grieve it in its original context. No amount of thinking or talking about it will yield the same result.

I am also convinced, from my own experiences and from what I see all around me, that the need for attachment is life-long in humans, though its nature changes with development and aging. Look at human history, at both our cruelty and our finest accomplishments. Look at it through the lens of attachment and all comes clear, from Caesar to Hitler, from communism to capitalism. None of it happens without the fierce need for attachment being unmet, distorted and driven into other areas where it writhes and dominates our lives with sub-optimal adaptations, including cataclysmic brutality. You will also see, laid plainly before you, what we need to do to end the cruelty and create cultures of compassion and connection.

C 2011 Bob Kamm (For more on my fatherhood experience, see my second book, Real Fatherhood: The Path of Lyrical Parenting, available at amazon.com and other book outlets).

Fierce Attachment, Part I

 

Two days before my father died, I felt him leave. I had just spent a few hours at his bedside. He was at home. Eighty-five years old. Until a few months before, he had seemed young for his age. Then, suddenly, it all changed. On this evening, he had slipped out of a diamond-hard clarity that had been the treasure of his last week, into delirium. With his eyes closed, he swung his legs over the side of the bed as if to get up.

I stood in front of him. He leaned forward until his forehead was resting against my stomach.

“Where you goin’, Dad?”

“School,” he said softly.

“No, Dad. You don’t have to go to school. Let me help you.” I bent over and lifted his legs. He lay back down. I caressed his forehead. He fell into silence.

An hour later, I left to drive home alone in my truck—a fifteen minute drive. When I was halfway there, I felt him go. It was as if someone had grabbed the skin at the edge of my chin and ripped it all the way down my torso. Tears came on so quickly, I had to pull off the road. Mind you, there were years when there was so much anger between us, we did not speak. Our relationship was complex, like so many parent-child relationships. If you had asked me at thirty if I would cry over his death, I’d probably have sloughed it off in the negative. But now, I was fifty-five years old. We were lucky enough to have had the time to work it all out and rediscover each other as grown men. In those sobs, I felt the purest truth. My attachment to him was fierce, fiercer than I had ever allowed myself to feel. I would simply not be me without him. It hit me in a way I had never experienced. The knowledge was straight, undeniable, painful, yet rich. Those were beautiful tears. I would not trade them for anything. I thought at the time that I had never before allowed myself to feel the full magnitude and meaning of our bond…and that this is likely true of most people.

His body lingered another day and a-half. But he was not in it.

Nine years later now, I feel my father in my own gestures, see him in the mirror, sense his presence in the shape of my thoughts and passions, hear him in the tone of my voice, my inflections, the words I chose to speak and write.

What really distinguishes humans? Is it our capacity for language? Abstract thought? Mathematics, Art, Music? I would say no. While our experience and expression of those things are certainly wonderful and unique among all known creatures, what really marks us is how fiercely the need to attach drives everything about human life. It is our primary survival strategy. How else would a creature as fragile and vulnerable as the human baby survive into adulthood? We attach first to our caregivers, but ultimately, to things spread around the 360 degrees of our field of being. We attach to our homes and hometown, to favorite places and memories, even trees, rocks, rivers, shorelines, mountains, to colors, foods, times of day, to equations, paintings and songs, to product brands, to certain sports, teachers, doctors, heroes, even villains and torturers as well as political parties, to our armed forces, our nation and, occasionally, our planet, to our clothes, toys and tools (whether high or low tech), to money, power, drugs, ideas, careers, identities, beliefs, ways of doing things and to dreams. Some of us even develop a stubborn attachment to actively denying that we are, first and last, creatures of attachment all the way through our lives…to that last delirious moment when we think we have to get up and go to our school.

To acknowledge the fierceness of attachment manifest in our very genes and brought fully into relief in our individual lives and our cultures, is to have the courage to say, “Yes, I need. I need others. I cannot fully be me without you, Mom, without you, Dad, without you, my brother and sister, without you my wife, husband, child, without you, my dear friends, students and beloved mentors. I need other hearts within which to place my own…and that I may welcome into mine. To be human is to need the solace of touch, the comfort of companionship, the safety of love…and to grieve ferociously when one to whom I have been deeply bound, dies.”
C2011 Bob Kamm