Shaublog

It has been quite a time since the last post. Spring and Summer have been a rich and transitional time. Today I read with sadness the word of Steve Jobs’ resignation as Apple’s CEO. I’m not a techie by any stretch. But I’ve admired this man’s innovation and impact on our culture. I love my iPhone.  I have joked for the last couple of years that if I had to give up my family or my iPhone……well, I’d be weighing the options.   Such cleverness.  Such usefullness.  The drive behind that creativity is falling to his physical limitations.  We are all dust, after all.  I, as we all, embrace the fiction that we…. WE…. are special in some way.   We will live long and healthy.  If we have not achieved our dream, we have time yet for that.  If we have achieved our desires at the various stages of our lives, we feel blessed.  Somehow God touches us.  We don’t know why or how but it is our abiding knowledge.  

Who among us would be more blessed than Steve Jobs?  But today, he succumbs to illness of the body.  Steve Jobs, whose mind is so beautiful as a creative engine, which touches us all – whose body is so mortal.

When I was a kid, I loved the giants of Folk Music.  I’m going to date myself here, but I loved The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary.  The power and DRIVE of their music inspired and empowered me.  In the last few years, Nick Reynolds of TKT and Mary Travers of PP&M died.  Here are pictures of each at the height of their power and in age and infermity.

Mary:   Here’s Nick: r’

The people whose passion and life force energy can inspire and touch us are gifts.  Be they Steve , or Mary or Nick (as they do me) or Barack Obama,  Rick Perry, Bruce Springsteen,  Lady Gaga, or any writer, singer, innovator, crier, screamer, tickler, we all pass through these stages.  Our task is to love ourselves and one another as we pass through this universal course.  None of us gets out of this alive, but we can strive, always, to find the love and passion that makes us alive.

We said good-bye to our sweet golden retriever, Buddy, three nights ago. He was 10 1/2 years old. He had cancer all throughout his body. As he lay on the floor, with the three of us sitting around him, stroking him and holding him, the drug was administered and he quietly left us. From the time our, then,  7-year old daughter picked him out from an array of  six-week old puppies sleeping in our backyard (a young 4-H fellow was breeding retrievers and brought a dozen little fellows to frolic in our back before, one-by-one, they plopped off to sleep) to this week, our Buddy had been the sweetest, most loving of companions. Happy (happy?…..In heaven) to have his ears massaged – never more content than to be under our dinner table while we ate, my daughter’s toes tucked under his belly or resting on top of his body - loving to shimmy on his back on top of a new scent in the grass.  Oh lord, the open, complete love that he gave.  He’d stay with a good friend when we’d be away and she told us she loved his company, he was so mellow.  She joked that he just needed an easy chair and a smoking jacket to fill out the image.  I loved taking him for walks off leash – he never, but for a couple of times in all those years, roamed and always stayed near as we approached an intersection in our neighborhood, would sit until it was time to be released to run across the street.  He was our happy, loving boy and the warmth he brought to our home will be sorely, sadly missed.    I wish I’d walked him more, given him a few extra goodies, somehow prolonged his time on this plane – but that’s over.  We lit a memorial candle inside his collar placed beside his picture and we’ll keep that for another few days.  So here’s to the love in our lives, wherever its source.  We often don’t know how it fills our hearts until it’s gone.

I’ve got to admit, I think about Pompeii from time to time.  When Vesuvius buried that Roman city nearly 2000 years ago in ash, the inhabitants were frozen in time.  They exist today as human forms only – their personal histories, their essence, erased.  Forms only.  Who were these individuals?  None were “famous.”  Their names do not pass down the generations.   But in their time, as they breathed and gazed on sunlight, they touched others with simple acts of kindness by the boatload.  There must have been the teacher who encouraged a child and transformed his view of himself…and the wife who cared for an ill husband whose life faded -before a mountain erupted to bury her as well.  No doubt those of light spirit brought smiles and laughter to others who were otherwise burdened by their own cares – daily worry must have been as much a part of First Century Roman life as it is in ours.  Those of gentle heart or fierce passion touched their fellows and raised their spirits.   Gifts were given out of the blue; visits were made to the grieving to lighten the weight of their loss; countless acts of simple kindness were made without any thought of compensation or return.  And in a literal flash, they were all gone.  Does that render the love and life-force-energy they shared pointless?  We read history to hear stories of the storied.  Yet the fabric of life is made up of the millions and millions of normal, loving, caring, giving, simply kind people who came before us and who live among us today.  Every day I experience acts of kindness in my own home – simple gestures that no-one but me will ever know about.  I do believe that these loving gifts have a power - a grace - that is transcendent.  So when my mind wanders to these forms in ash, I invariably think about the blessings of simplicity and kindness all around me every day – and do everything I can to let them fill my heart.  May 2011 be a year of kindness we provide, and receive….and recognize.

A client I’m quite fond of has felt unfulfilled with his career.  He’s got a wonderfully sharp, analytic mind and so I asked him if he ever considered law as a career.  He scoffed – commenting that lawyers suffered from an impaired moral sensibility.  While that’s an all-too-common belief (and at times, well placed) that moment put me in mind of a truly lovely man, and a great lawyer.  Bruce Winick died last week.  His life was the response to anyone who believed you could not be a lawyer and possess kindness and integrity. 

Winick may be best known as a co-founder of Thearpeutic Jurisprudence, the exploration of the psychological impact of law on individuals who are swept up in its process.    How is legal process harmful to our spirit?  How can the law be improved so that it inflicts less personal damage?  Winick and David Wexler counseled years ago in their initial work not to forget that legal involvement has profound emotional and psychological consequences.   They can be justly seen, and thanked,  as the forebears of Collaborative Law.

I sat next to Professor Winick a couple of years ago at a law teachers’ conference and, while he was perhaps the most eminent of the participants, he was gracious and warm.  His eyesight had been stolen by the illness that took his life last week.  He managed quite naturally and with good humor.  I recall his description of a fairly new form of (humane) legal analysis which he called a legal autopsy.  “What would happen,” he asked, “if we rewound some bit of case law (a conflict that had made it all the way to an appeals court) and explored if other choices could have been made, early on, to spare the participants the ravages of prolonged, intense, litigation?”  He authored a riveting account of the Terry Schiavo case to illustrate his point.  What to  most of us was a political flash point around the “right to life” debate, was, in Winick’s deft hands, a tragic story of a family ripped apart by many early decisions made with the help of lawyers for whom litigation was the only tool they knew.

We lost a fine man last week.  His passing should be noted in the collaborative law community.

I just got interested in golf…at 59. My lovely 17 year old daughter has, for years, gauged an activity by whether it was “fun.” That’s a big word for her, and judging by the kind of person she has turned out to be, I’d say “fun” is good.
Golf is fun. Funfunfunfun. Of course, when the day comes that I care how many strokes it takes me to get from the tee to sinking the ball into the cup, I’ll maybe change my tune. Yet, for now, just getting the ball up the hole, to the green and into the cup is an accomplishment. My wife and I just saw the most recent Harry Potter movie. Our family has read and listened to these wonderful books since the first. On the way out of the most recent movie I leaned into my wife’s ear and said, “This installment…Just moving the ball down the course.” Yes, golf imagery is seeping into my discourse.
So I just went on line to see what websites had to say about putting, which remains for me a dark art. The site I hit had a side-bar ad showing a very unattractive, exposed belly (actually grabbed to accentuate the fat) and beside it the flat result of…something. Obey the rule is all I could garner. For not the first time I thought, “What a shame.” Our culture pushes, presses, shoves us into desire for no fat, six pack abs, tight buns – while seducing us with fat laden meals that taste great and convert themselves into the handfuls that web ads use as a cudgel to sell something that will give us a fabulous body. There is cruelty in our society that masquerades as advertising or culture.
I have yet to see an ad for integrity, courage in day-to-day living or just plain satisfaction with our lives.

We sat around with some good friends this past weekend and, perhaps inspired by the wine, one of us looked at our neighbor and said, “What words or phrases would you use to describe your mother?” There were 3 women and 2 men. We went around the circle and each of us uncovered our little nuggets – the first words that came to mind. Here in this group of fairly satisfied, positive people in their 50′s, the power of our parents in our psyches rose up luminous. Some associations were painful – “angry” “frustrated” – others were romantic – “brilliant” “loving” – but none were flat. “Mother” and “Father” have the capacity to evoke our deepest feelings, well into middle age and (I’m guessing) beyond. Handling all that in therapy is interesting and tricky. Truly our families of origin have an enormous molding influence on our lives, but as a wise friend likes to say, “It’s fine to look at that past, just don’t stare.” I like that one. I think therapists need to carefully balance acknowledgment of the past that brings a hurting person into our office, with a deep appreciation (honestly conveyed) of its impact – yet at the same time our lives are most definitely in the present and it will be in the future. People who come to us and are hurting are experiencing a painful present and if we are able to work well together, a positive, productive, less painful future is the goal. I heard a therapist say this weekend that people come in oftentimes with the attitude, “I will not be happy until my parents were nicer to me as a child.” The power of this past can never be underappreciated. Yet dwelling on this past in the hope, somehow, of understanding something that will set us free, I believe, is like trying to get some sunshine by heading for the Canadian North in December. Ain’t going to happen. Freedom comes in mastering our lives today – in whatever form that takes for each of us.

Tonight I got to hang with my 16 year old daughter. We had leftovers, hung out for about a half hour and then went our separate ways. She’s doing her homework and I’m here typing this. Her mom’s with a good friend who fell a month ago and broke her arm so bad that a piece of the bone was found a couple weeks later in the flower bed. I’m serious. I’ve heard of bone meal fertilizer, but I think that’s taking gardening too far. Anyway, she is in recovery, but still needs a good friend’s help and TLC and that’s where my love is tonight. My girl is a teenager so “Mum” is definitely the word. She knows this drives me nuts – I took her to the bookstore yesterday and I asked, “What are you getting?” and she replied devilishly, “A book.” Well thanks a lot for the deep info. I log onto the online news and I see that the AIG execs are trying to use our dollars for multimillion dollar bonuses. Our country’s drive for more, bigger, richer is what drove us to the current brink and I think it arises in part from our collective failure to embrace the pleasure in the little things. They’re really not so little. To hang out with my beautiful child tonight and engage in a 20 minute “nothing much” conversation over leftovers was very sweet. Asking a question and getting a real answer feels like hitting a vein of gold.