Winning and Losing in Love Relationships

By the time we reach adulthood, most of us have participated in some form of team--athletic, social, religious or work.  We have been exposed to people who place their own ego's above
the success of the team.  Probably the easiest example to consider comes from a sports team.
Think of an athlete, man or woman, who has great stats game after game.  Now imagine that in spite of their performance (or more likely, because of it!) the team loses game after game.
Would any of us, with the perspective of adulthood, call that person a success?  Unlikely.  We might marvel at his or her persistence and talent.  We might also think of him/her as "a ball hog"
or selfish.  Does any of us believe that Kobe Bryant or Mia Hamm would consider themselves successful if they hadn't won championships?  A no-brainer, right?  But here's the thing.  A love relationship is a team of two.  It calls for an even greater commitment to collaboration than other teams because our hearts are so fully engaged.  We are more vulnerable on the "love team" and our childhood hurts are so much more likely to be triggered.  But the core question is the same as on a sports team:  are you a team player or a ball hog?  Do you push for your own victories over your partner as if they were actually the other team...or are you capable of letting go of the need to win in order to serve the greater good of the relationship?  

We know what the answer is for most of us much of the time.  We have a hard time letting go
of having our way or being right. Why?  Because being wrong has such powerful resonance during our early years.  When we are little, we need to be attached to our parents.  It is not a desire.  It is a biologically written need whose goal is to serve our survival and optimal development.  Far too often, when parents correct children they come down hard.  They forget they're dealing with a small fragile being whose brain is nowhere near fully developed.  As children, we immediately fear the loss of love, which is potentially catastrophic for such a genuinely dependent being.  Since our parents tend to react to us in fairly consistent ways, we develop a pattern of adaptations to those moments.  We try hard to be right, to be on their good side.  Some of us fight for it, meaning we cry, flail, object, blame someone or try to talk our way out of a situation.  Some of us flee, meaning we hide within ourselves and physically withdraw from our parents.  Some of us freeze in the moment, become paralyzed and speechless.  Some of us discover it is safer to just submit.  In all these cases, we are feeling a great deal of discomfort because the withdrawal of parental love, even for seconds at a time, is so potentially devastating.  

Fast forward to adulthood and you find yourself and your partner having a difficult time allowing the other to be right.  On an unconscious psychological level, the dynamic is, "If you are right, I am wrong.  If I am right, you are wrong.  Whoever is wrong is going to feel bad.  Someone is coming out as the parent and someone the child."  It's a zero-sum game that parallels the childhood pattern when parents had all the power and we needed them with all our hearts.  So here we are in our twenties, thirties, forties and on, being ball hogs in our relationship so we can avoid feeling that feeling.  Of course, we don't live with a coach in our home to help us run better plays.  We don't have crowds cheering us when we serve the team. But we can gradually learn to get in touch with the deeper feeling that drives this reaction, grieve it and be liberated from the impulse that drives us to create win-lose.  We can do some of this work when we are single, but the deepest work comes when we are in a relationship for there are wounds that are only triggered and therefore available to work on when we actively seek to be in loving connection with another.

We are strange creatures, aren't we?  We long for love.  Then, when we find it (after the 
romantic phase is over) we treat our partner as if he/she is the competition, not a teammate!  We have to defeat the very person who might love us...for fear of feeling unloved.  Once again we see how early patterns can hijack the present and deprive us of the thing we cherish most.

Losing Phil Smart, Sr--a Eulogy

My dear friend, Phil Smart, Sr, the sage of Seattle, died over the weekend.  He was 93. When we lose someone close, we are prompted to ask, “How do we measure the value of a life?” The easy answer would be, “We measure a life by how much good a person did in the world.” By that measure, Phil’s life had exceptional value.  For twenty-six years, he was Santa Claus to the young patients at Seattle Children’s Hospital, to whom he referred as the “angels among us.”  He gave innumerable speeches to tens of thousands of people exhorting them to use the “third eight” hours of their day beyond sleep and work to do some good for others.  He gave ridiculous amounts of money away to right causes.  He was an exemplary automobile dealer, as is his son, Phil, Jr, in a business that does not boast many exemplars.  And, of course, he was a veteran of WWII who actively continued to honor veterans of all wars in any way that he could. 

These and many other notable accomplishments have been and will be cited by those who will eulogize him.  I only knew him from 1995 when he was 75, till the present, less than 20% of his life so I am not the most qualified person to list all the good he did in the world.  But it was my privilege and joy to spend many hours over those eighteen years sitting in his office at Phil Smart Mercedes-Benz at 600 East Pike Street chatting about business, family, philanthropy, war, politics and love.  His eyes were always bright and engaged and continued to be as he passed into his nineties.  He was a master storyteller whether sharing something seemingly mundane about home life, a vignette from his childhood, an authentic drama from the war or the miracles he had experienced at Children's Hospital.  He loved to talk about his faith, pointing often to the collection of feathers he had found one at a time and kept as a sign of angels at work.  He loved to walk through the dealership and check in with the team (he knew everyone’s first name) to see how they were doing personally and professionally, through good years and lean.  A moment with Phil lifted the heart.  He continued to do this long after he had sold the business to his son, understanding that he was a key spiritual force in helping Phil, Jr,  to keep the sense of family, style and commitment to do the right thing as alive as possible in each person who called 600 East Pike his or her work home.

So I have no doubt that using the usual measure of a life, Phil’s was both beautiful and very, very good. But I have another measure of life that occurred to me when I heard that he had left us.  I knew he was well past his ninety-third birthday.  I knew he was ailing. I had watched over the years as frailty gradually settled in him.  I knew he had already lived a superb life, a life to be envied and emulated for its vitality and generosity right to the end.  It shouldn’t have been a shock when my good friend, Don Stevens, a long-time Smart leader, told me he was gone.  But it was.  And it is.  I felt as if I’d taken a punch to the gut.  The wind went out of me.  My knees felt weak.  I had to sit down.  It seemed like a large rip had opened in the fabric of reality and something of rare value had been stolen. 

So for me, this is the measure of a life—do people feel like they’ve had the wind knocked out of them? Does the world tilt and spin as if its sense of true north has been shaken?  I have no doubt that thousands of people in the city of Seattle know exactly what I’m talking about, and many others across the country.  I contemplate a world without him with a mixture of visceral sadness and profound appreciation…and am moved to say, “Thank you, Phil.  Thank you for all that you shared, all that you gave, all that you exemplified.  Thank you for your life.” 

We will all reclaim our breath.  That’s what he would want.  We will walk with more determination in our stride and when memories of Phil visit us, which they will often, we will salute or nod or doff our hats and then shift eyes forward to the next opportunity to do some good.

C 2013 Bob Kamm

In the Beginning and Still...

After decades of scratching and tapping

letters on paper

    and launching verses

                from lips

and listening in the night

    for the infinite magical

                combinations

of which the human vocal chords,

jaw, teeth and face are capable,              

the poet finally enters

the central holy ground

 of language

understanding

that in the beginning

there most assuredly

was the word

              and the word really

was with God

               and the word actually

was God and is God.

It doesn’t matter what name, gender or genders

                we give the Creative Force

                --Yahweh, Vishnu, Allah, Jesus, Nature,

         even Laws of the Universe.

                                Truth is truth.

And the Truth is

everything is comprised

not of zeroes and one’s

       as the young masters of technology

would have it

or

               neutrinos, quarks

          protons, bosons

and such 

                    as the old masters of physics

                                would have it

but of vowels, consonants, clicks, pops,

syllables,

sibilance’s, suspirations, gutturals,

                glottal stops,

   and

 all the permutational possibilities

of syntax and grammar.

These make up the essence of

all things,

the irreducible

tightly wound  subatomic

 scrolls of sound

                rolling out of

                                  the dark seeds

                of the universe

                                       into

time, space and matter

--God’s original tongue

 made manifest

   everywhere

at once.

There may have been a beginning

but there will never be an end

because long after

man has come and gone

                spewing a language

                                        that has spiraled

                                further and further

from the first vocabulary

                                     God will still be speaking.

                                               

So now the poet

knows for certain

 the answer

to the age old

                                        tree-in-the-forest

                                conundrum.

If a tree falls in the forest

                and no human ear is present

there will be a sound

because the tree itself is a living tower of words

                  just as its tumble

is a cataclysmic poem,

    the leaf shower, the bird scatter

                        the tearing of the forest’s flesh

       --all part of a great epic

                                whose every utterance

God

is speaking,

                                                God is hearing

                                                     until

            silence

 and rest

               and the next

ecstatic rush.

C 2012 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 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