Month: August 2014

I have a plastic bin filled with ideas, papers covered with notes.  I opened it today for the first time in a number of years.  It is so much, it overwhelms me.  It is something on the order of this blog in terms of content, none of it published on the internet.  3-4 diaries, and huge stacks of paper.

I will have to decide what to do with it.  I will likely put it back, for now.

Here is one line from a poem I wrote that I thought I might share:

If we can see the darkness, does that mean light is near?

I think this is a good question.  To recognize the category dark, you must be capable of imagining an alternative, no?

Oh, good things are happening.  I am shredded daily, and I have learned I can take it.  My wounds will not kill me.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for the world is nothing.  Often this is the best thing you can for yourself, and the two are obviously related.

“I cannot give of myself anymore, when I have no self to give.”

Rightly or wrongly, I think I understand some of what he went through.  He obviously entered “adulthood” with major traumas embedded in his system from a childhood of what I recall he described as neglect, but which likely had other elements, such as parental narcissism, excessive demands, and loneliness.

He never processed these traumas.  He likely did extensive talk therapy, but talk therapy does nothing.  Done poorly, it can even make things worse.

His humor was a shield, clearly, but he likely also discovered early on that the positive feelings he could generate in others made him feel better.  Serving others made him feel better.

But here is the thing with trauma: until you untie the knots, until you loosen the grip it has on you, you cannot relax into the arms of others.  You cannot accept help and healing from others, no matter how often or eagerly or sincerely they offer it.

I myself am gradually unfreezing.  I will likely have to work tomorrow, after a lot of 6 and 7 day weeks, and I was able to actually imagine being happy about it, singing.

Here is an interesting little tool you should use carefully if you have some visceral trauma: say VOOOOOOOO, for a full outbreath.  Peter Levine developed it as a way of loosening literal visceral trauma.  You have an enormous quantity of nerve endings in your guts.  You more or less have a “gut brain”.  And often trauma resides there, as I understand the matter.

In my own case, I usually go into uncontrollable shaking.  But this is fantastic.  It has an end.  If the shaking never comes out, there is never an end.

It’s hard to say with suicides what will happen.  We speak of a next life, with most of us knowing nothing of it (we do of course have people who have died and come back to describe it, among us).

My felt sense, though, is that Robin Williams did what he could with what he had.  He gave what he had, then there was suddenly nothing left, no reserve, no way of replenishing.  He was never led to water.

I aim to be a leader, someday.  I aim to find this water, and help others drink from it.  All of humanities problems have answers.  We are not helpless, and there is no reason for any of us to be alone together.

End Note: I have this vision of Robin Williams in heaven, tremendously relieved that he does not have to pick up and carry his burden of humor and goodwill every day.  No one is asking him to, and he does not need to.  He can take a walk in a beautiful park, and lose himself, without a care in the world.

Let’s call this number one.  More may occur to me.

The atrocities happening in Iraq were already happening in Syria.  That’s probably where they developed their methods.  I remember reading about them dismembering a small girl while she was still alive roughly a year ago.

Here is the thing: they evolved very quickly, in less than a year, from a ragtag bunch of sadistic psychopaths, to an ORGANIZED bunch of sadistic psychopaths.  They went into Iraq able to do large scale battle maneuvers, something like on the battalion level.  It seems obvious they got training somewhere.

It seems likely we provided that training.  If we were covertly funding them, and covertly providing arms–some from Libya, and some likely CHEMICAL weapons from Libya–then why would we not have been covertly providing training?

Obama is afraid if he gets too aggressive that they will let the world know this.  Hillary Clinton, when she said her major foreign policy regret was not getting our soldiers to fight alongside ISIS, so as to implement an Al Quedist government in Damascus, was tacitly admitting that they did not anticipate them leaving that battle entirely, and creating a large embarrassment–note, neither Obama nor Clinton have any moral compass or integrity whatsoever, and are functionally sociopaths themselves–in Iraq.

And one can legitimately question the whys and wherefores of Obama’s blatant commitment to the Muslim Brotherhood.  What is the connection?  How deep?  How long has it been there?

Obama’s enemy is the Western way of life, and that is the MB’s as well.  Perhaps the enemy of my enemy. . .  That saying does come from the Middle East, if memory serves.

I will add as well: why is the Middle East violent?  Because of Muslims.  If you could wave a wand and make Muhammad have died of cholera as a child, it would be peaceful.

If the water in which your children swim is filled with nutrients, it does not matter much what you say.  They will be fine.

Do you ever understand how important the tenderness with which you look at them is?

Do you see that honest, loving smiles heal and strengthen?

I think Robin  Williams death will resonate for a long time.  The loud echoes will disappear, but people will remember where they were when they heard the news.  It’s like Elvis.

Elvis, too, was a seemingly ALIVE person, filled with energy; and yet he died on a toilet, of the acute effects of chronic drug consumption.  In important respects, he killed himself too.

For me, though, it has been therapeutic.  It was like somebody tore a veil off of something I needed to see.  I was dreaming, in coded language, last night of a move that was very traumatic for me in my teen years, something I have never been able to mourn properly.  The feelings were overwhelming.  I woke in a state of unreality: so much pain–how can anyone take it?

Well, I don’t know.  But I can.  Most qualitative break-throughs are not like the sky opening and rainbows coming down.  What happens is that POSSIBILITY emerges into consciousness, where it was not before.

But I felt what I think these poor people in Iraq are feeling, abandoned by America, abandoned specifically by Obama–who is comfortably thinking about his approach on Hole 15, and wondering what they will serve for lunch.  I felt sleeping in a home I knew I had to leave forever at dawn, hearing gunshots in the distance, wondering if some monster would suddenly come bursting in.  I packed all my stuff, the things I loved, and when we finally ran from the house, I forgot them.  Everything I knew, every connection with home and that life was gone.

I understood, on a deep level, the connection of Peter Quill, in Guardians of the Galaxy, to his Walkman.

And we got to a crowded depot, filled with people, and I lost my family.  They put me right to work, with a new group of people, and I grieved that I may never see my family again.  EVERYTHING was lost.  Everything.  I did not know if I could ever get it back.

But you go on, do you not?  We all do.

Feeling love in the abstract has never been a problem for me.  Neither has expressing it with individuals, for limited periods of time.  What is hard is feeling that sense of embeddedness, of belonging, when you have been ripped apart multiple times, and never fully integrated those horrible feelings.  I lost my first best friend suddenly, when I was 3, when we moved.  I lost my second best friend suddenly, when I was 7, when we moved.  I lost my third and last best friend suddenly, when I was 14, when we moved.

Some part of me has apparently never recovered.  That is a lot of loss, and I am at heart a very sensitive person.  I need to recover, and I think typing this will help.

 I understand, though, on a deeply personal level, how Robin Williams could be simultaneously so caring and available, and yet so alone.  He killed himself with his wife in the house.  How horrible must it have been for her to know that despite all their good times, he found himself unable to open up fully even to her, to cry, to mourn, to access those antique, primitive child states, that primal horror and confusion and loss, meaninglessness, vertigo, and loss of self.

I feel all these things; and I think in feeling them claim them and create the possibility of growing beyond them.

If I could offer any motto, any summation of what matters to me, it would be Churchill’s “Never quit.  Never, never, never, never.”

Life is an exercise, nothing more, but nothing less.  You win by continuing.

I say again: I will be human someday.

consists in first learning to cling to this and not that.  It then becomes becoming that, and not this.

That is as short a summary as you are likely to find.

It is apparently the case that within the nervous system, curiosity and trauma are incompatible.  They run on separate or at least opposed circuits.  You cannot simultaneously feel curious and traumatized.  I read this in Peter Levine’s “In an unspoken voice”.

For some time I had “Be Relentlessly Curious” as a bumper sticker on my car.  Perhaps I felt this.  Curiosity continues to be one of my principle values.  I can and have argued at times that it is the single most important virtue, as it leads you to discover all the others, and why they matter.

If life is an adventure, curiosity is what gets you out the door.

I’m still processing, but the thought that keeps recurring is that he was like the Sean Penn character in “Mystic River”.  He was a warning, a warning about emotional isolation, going it alone, doubting humanity, allowing fear to win. No one kills themselves who does not feel alone, not like that.  His wife may well have been in the house, and found him.  I know the lead singer for Boston was engaged to a woman, killed himself in a bathroom, and she found him.  That is a horror I hope I never know.

At the end of the day suicide is a selfish act.  He brought joy to millions, and that is worth something.  Clearly, he never fully developed the ability to connect with others on a really deep, emotionally meaningful level.  He was too good at deflecting intimacy.

But I think of the Kevin Bacon character in that same movie, who, confronted with the crime Sean Penn committed, struck by the senselessness of it all, opens himself up emotionally to the woman in his life, who could not speak because she never felt heard.  That is how I remember it in any event.  It’s been some years since I saw the movie.

Let this be for us a reminder, an opportunity: connection matters, people matter, love matters.  Value those around you.  Give hope a chance.

I think for a great many people, the largest kindness you can show them is to listen to them.  And when I say listen I mean LISTEN.  Don’t have any thought at all as to your story, or what you can say in reply.  Have no thought at all but understanding on a deep level what they are saying overtly, and what they are trying to say subtly.

So many ships sail alone, and the sea is vast.