5 Random Thoughts On the Expression of Human Potential and Spirit

On the Tensions and Bigotry Between Ways of Believing:

This is where the work begins and ends. To be able to continually make distinctions between what is sheer bigotry and cultural megalomania disguised as religious integrity and practice, and what is truly a part of effective human perceptual evolution... that part of each religious tradition that in fact does deserve respect and nurturing.

There is something of a winnowing out that has to take place with a constant vigilance or else we stand to lose some of the daring heights and depths of how the species has come to broaden and account for our own peculiar manner of perceiving ourselves on the planet, in the cosmos. Without it, god or no god, we deprive ourselves of the basis upon which we must go forward or die. Secularism, atheism, formalized agnosticism belong in this pool of what has been called religious/spiritual as well... because, on a transcendental level, there is not enough difference between the highest renderings of our way of seeing ourselves in the world to bother with.

Questions to ask during this winnowing search process: What has been useful but is no longer useful? What continues to serve evolution and survival of the whole species that has been in place but is threatened with extinction (and what can we do about it?)? What changes in our beliefs about "the other" do we need to invent and institute to survive? What about our collective belief patterns increase the friction between beliefs and what enhances our transcendental unity?



Here-in Lies the Difference

Here-in lies the difference between the expressions of the highest aspirations of humankind side to side with its lowest denominators of cruelty, mass murder, violent bigotry and hate. That both ends of the spectrum are contained in a single human attribute, its penchant for religious spirituality, is typical of almost every aspect of human life on this planet. It is why Tony Blair's recent foray into support for religion can never be taken as seriously as the bombs and murder he unleashed upon the unwitting and innocent who may have been praying the most genuine prayers available to the human heart. It is why the religious who go forward with no ability to poke fun at their own foibles, and who cannot see the damage from their most megalomaniac collective actions, are at the root of most of the collective sins that humans can muster; and it is why those whose belief in atheism is so religious that ultimately they commit the same errors of ethics, morality and cruelty of thought and deed they speak so vociferously against.



On The Error of Thinking Society Can Go Forward Without Coming to Terms and Facing the Consequence of the Past

A refusal to come to terms with the past and acknowledge the wrongs done... as well as ask for some kind of atonement or indictments for the worst of the guilty by first familiarizing oneself with the details of what must not happen again in order to truly move forward... is a tactic used by uncommitted alcoholics and other "stuck" personalities and systems that believe that they can move into the future without doing an exhaustive inventory of the past and how one got where one got.

Those who practice these kinds of refusals are more interested in bringing their enablers firmly over to their side than they are in instituting real change. They are terrified of being abandoned by the people who wittingly or unwittingly support them in their personal and/or systemic failure to change, in their addiction to patterns of behavior that are destroying them. And they are just as terrified of the change itself. The addictions (in this case to what? Oil? Big Money? perceived loss of control and power? Deep guilt by complicity? Cars? Mass murder and torture? Hiroshima ?) have a biochemical, electrical, systemic, hold on them. They are terrified of the vacuum of a monstrous unknown that they, perhaps errantly, perceive must follow a true commitment to change.

This refusal to look to the future while concurrently carrying and reading the completely open book from the past is a faulty and manipulative excuse to maintain, consciously or purposefully unknowingly, the unexamined tactics and habits of the past that are patterned into a system of avoidant and repetitive failures. It is exactly how and why the system or person ends up, time and time again, back where they started.

If you are not familiar with, and have not gathered extensive evidence and research about, what went wrong and why, from, in particular, the people and other systems your actions have damaged the most, then you are not really committed to moving into the future unencumbered by the same self-defeating patterns from which you claim to want to be loose.

Pay attention campers. Leaders who refuse to judiciously and, in a democratic system, publicly, examine and autopsy the systemic diseases that have felled us are not as much interested in developing a cure as a major characteristic of how they move forward as they are interested in putting a new mask upon the unrelieved symptoms. They are not much interested in moving forward at all.



What Pushes Us Forward Starves Us.

History shows that people/cultures who migrate, live and grow into desert areas, or into areas otherwise balanced in a precarious climate, soil and geological combination, often fail quite spectacularly... and often for the same reasons they had initial success. The laws of evolution hold fast here: cultures, like species, that cannot change as fast as the environment around them fail and die, or migrate out, supplanting, conflicting with, and/or integrating with the cultures they find in their new residence.

I was just talking to a friend about relatively minor climactic changes that were largely responsible for the French Revolution and the subsequent Reign of Terror. Two years of no growing season due to a mini ice age (only two years!) immediately prior to and concurrent with the rumblings of large scale social change pushed the masses into full scale revolt.

Let them eat cake? How shall we arrange it on the platter around your head?

It simply does not matter what kind of climate change we are talking about, or what we name it: it will take very little change, in relatively short durations, in climactic terms to change the face of human society beyond recognition. How do we charge this kind of change with evolution as opposed to devolution?



One Strength of the Species

One strength of the species is the manner in which it adapts to changing surroundings, threats, landscapes and climates. This has been key to the survival of the species. Part of this mechanism lies in refusing to adapt beyond any phenomena immediately felt and perceived to be 'at hand'. Humans are gifted, and cursed, by this evolutionary adaptation.

They are gifted in some ways at making quick "getaways" and flights or fights to stay alive, but they cannot manage, biologically and mentally, to change behavior and approaches to the landscapes that have not arrived yet, in the future, somewhere else, no matter how predictable.

Failures in almost all world political systems are something of a proof of that... ie: the collapse of capitalist systems due to the dismantling of safeguards put in place during the last global crisis in capitalized systems is indicative of a species that is unable to respond to crises that cannot be "felt" in the here and now, no matter how predictable. Can this phenomenon, perhaps encoded, be used to our benefit?



The True True Creation Myth

Oh come on now... we all know humans were birthed in a stream of the effluent of Kharpi, that most peculiar of the warlords of HarHar! Why else would we wear spikes on our sunday shoes? Why else would the fish in the nether spots resemble Katharine of Aragon?

It is high time these scientists and the hopelessly lost bible creationists realize that without the Yarmalooks of Treeza, our skyscrapers would be the size of your dog biscuits. Its time to reclaim the history of humankind, as we sprung from the adam's apple of the saints of pleebahahahaha.... everyone in my advanced reading group has come to that conclusion and the trees answered yes yes... "you are the children of the toilet brush and the descendents of the toe nails of Koookash! Rejoice!" The truth is now known here-abouts and also in the thundering water closets of your aunt Silvie.

So, with that in mind: Remember we shall all someday be taken up into the tundra of Blooobeefun... that day when we have reached our perfect toe nails and no longer need to stand in line for the Twittertwatter. Hallelujah! All the great mysteries are solved. No need to think or diet. Let's have some bangers!

Why Would You Choose Me to Be Your Coach?

Over the twenty-five years I've worked in the human service, counseling and life coaching field I've discovered my innate understanding of the multi-faceted nature of human personality and human relationships. This seems to me to be more of a gift than a learned skill… or at least less learned in a purely academic manner.

That is not to say that the application of that gift is automatically useful to me or anyone else who has it… that is where developing and practicing skills comes in.

I can confidently say that the work I have done in recognizing and establishing professional boundaries between my needs and the needs of those I serve has resulted in a level of expertise that is flexible and compassionate, but also respectful of the maintenance of the kinds of boundaries that are the most useful in the effective, affecting, productive, goal-focused coaching relationship. As I have often stated: my goal is to help my clients become their own coaches.


What personal attributes and perspectives do I rely on to keep my coaching relationships healthy and moving forward?

• Self awareness of the nature, extent and limits of the gifts that brought me into coaching in the first place.


• An understanding that coaching cannot be seen as a way to exert control over others or bring others over “to my side”.


• Good supportive family and friends that offer outlets for human relationship outside of client relationships.


• Willingness to always be in a state of learning. Each client brings an inner textbook of norms, talents, gifts and processes.


• A willingness to eschew what has worked in the past for what can and will work in the future.


• An ability to disconnect my own process from expectations of others’ process.
  

What makes me a great choice as a coach?

• I am empathic by nature, but have married empathy with various learned and practiced interaction and interviewing skills that make what I know on an empathic level more apparent and useful to progress forward in others.


• An ability, due to experience and hands on learning in the helping professions, to make quick assessments related to the nature of the processes and essential coping strategies that people, couples and families/groups use… and then to employ them in the manner in which I work with people to help them see, understand and employ them toward positive change.


• Good sense of humor used liberally and in appropriate doses


• A good solid understanding of the difference between my needs and my clients’ needs


• A refusal to be maneuvered into the role of the least favorite parent, or the voice of that parent, in my dealings with my clients. I routinely ask my clients to be a better parent to themselves than their parents may have been to them.


• The insistence that my work with people be centered on strengths, kindness and gentle persistence, and that it is their responsibility to take a tough stance against any persistent lack of follow through, once identified, not mine.
  
  

A RITUAL TO READ TO EACH OTHER by William Stafford

I think the following is a poem that explores and explodes ideas that to be accepted in a circle of friends, or any of the larger circles of social networks and society in general, one must stay a follower. It goes a long way, and beautifully, to reinforce the idea that to get anywhere together our circles of friends, family, country and associations are best served through having a circle that is made up of leaders. This poem is especially applicable to the current trend toward faceless internet social networks.



A Ritual to Read to Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

—William Stafford

New Ways of Being

I always found that new ways of being often unfold without a fully conscious input from us as we go forward; as if we recognize after the change has been in process for a while exactly what characterizes it. We just keep putting one foot in front of the other and suddenly the light goes on: "Oh yeah, that's who I have become!"

Four questions to ask yourself about recognizing and tracking inner change:

• What little things are you doing that are revised or new?

• Do they feel okay enough to keep around?

• How do you distinquish between what is forward motion and what is regression?

• Is regression sometimes a way forward?

Poem about Dreams and Family

In My Dream


In my dream my mother who has been dead fifteen years
helps me take the fish hooks out of my shirt

after I retrieve boxes and boxes of music
from the garage where I left them years ago.

In the dream the boxes are piled where
my father kept his tools, under a ladder

to the attic that was never there when I was a child.
It is the house where I grew up and the hooks are not easy

to dislodge, my mother says nothing, but the music is in good repair.
I am excited to find some singers I have forgotten

I owned. The dream comes after a week of dreams
in the middle of months of grey snowy weather

and one day, yesterday, when the sun
made us feel like mole-people emerging from our caves

finally into the frigid air.


*


Yesterday I talked
to a young man who has manage to fence in his beasts

but has friends who have succumbed once again to theirs
and without admitting to it he talks about the fear

of his sick tigers coming out to tear him up again.
He says that lately he has had many dreams too

and we speak of tomorrow, and spring, and building
walls against the return of monsters

and living even if they do return. I say: in my dream
my mother is kind as she unhooks me and does not even

tear my shirt. What does this all mean?


*

I wake
in the dark again, not long before the alarm and wonder

about all the people I work with who must stay angry at something
just to keep themselves from being swallowed by the grief

of it all, the wars, the torture, the little losses
every day at work set into the cloth of our unconscious

and in puzzles of bare trees outside the empty houses.


*

In another dream
I only now remember, there are the flowers my mother grew.

Roses.
None of this is easy, I tell the young man

but you might be able to do it.
We have coffee and laugh.


--- Bob Vance

Eulogy For My Father

Eulogy For My Father
Robert A. Vance 1923-2009

One of the things I learned in my years of work as a family counselor for a hospice organization is that each member of a family has an equally valid, and often very different, piece of the over-all story of the family member who has died. I learned that parts of the story that are difficult to tell and hear are as important as the parts that are full of the spirit of life that fills each and every one of us and is expressed in deeply spiritual and loving ways. We needn’t tell every part, but it is important to acknowledge the totality of all the pieces. Without all of the pieces we are left with a flat, paper doll, version of the person whom we have loved; not a living, breathing, complex and miraculous individual of whom there exists not a single duplicate in the entire universe.

Family legacies and stories are similarly complex and go back much further than any living memory. The birth of the good and the bad in our families precedes, by far, our very limited ability or willingness to recall.

I was born in the city where all of my sisters and I were raised because of the sudden death, one month before my birth, of my father’s father. At that time my Dad and Mom moved back to Mt. Clemens, Michigan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania due to my father’s overwhelming loyalty to his mother; loyalty that came from years of the kinds of family struggle that were typical during the Great Depression.

My grandfather was a jack-of-all-trades who built the home where I was raised and where he died. He was, in Alcoholics Anonymous parlance, one of the early “Friends of Bill”, and in spite of his constant battle with alcoholism, I believe his early death in his fifties from heart disease was a direct result of the nature of the disease of alcoholism. He had served in the trenches in France in WW1 and was apparently, as is common among men who suffer what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, very reluctant to speak about the horrors he had seen. He was not a very nice drunk.

My father and his mother, my grandmother, from what I can gather, were often forced to rely very heavily upon each other in order to survive even when Dad was very young. My father sold honey door-to-door from a wagon during the Depression to help the family get by. He was an only child. He went on to become the first person to attend college in a family that has roots in this country that go back to the Revolution and before. One of our earliest ancestors was among the Hessian German mercenary soldiers hired by the British to fight the Americans during the Revolutionary War. This ancestor was captured by George Washington’s troops during the battle that included Washington’s famous Delaware River crossing. He was subsequently made a prisoner-of-war in a camp where, I have learned, Thomas Jefferson probably visited. Jefferson was homesick for things European and found it among the Hessians there. Our ancestor, like many of those Hessians, switched sides to help the American cause because they were treated better as American prisoners-of-war than they had been by the Brits.

My mother likewise showed incredible strength and resourcefulness as a child growing up. She could pick up almost any string instrument and play it and made sure each one of us learned an instrument and/or sang in choirs. Sometimes I believe her near perfect pitch and love for music were among the big reasons she survived, rather spectacularly, her own father’s unsettled inner conflicts and his resulting cruelties. She survived as well due to the enduring strength and resourcefulness of her mother and her mother’s Iowa farmer father and mother, my great grandfather and grandmother. Among my earliest memories are the family visits to their farm south of Des Moines, and then again to the small house where my great grandparents lived after they left the farm and into which my sisters and I released a jar of captured fireflies that glowed off and on throughout the night. That same night my great grandparents were heard giggling in their bed.

That my father and mother found one another is one of those necessary and true miracles of two people who need exactly one another to become the best adults they could and who, by fortune and fate, heal each others’ childhood wounds by becoming each others’ greatest aspiration. They completed one another.

One of my parents’ goals in raising children was to be better at parenting than their parents had been. I believe they accomplished that goal. One of the goals that I believe I share with my sisters has been to be better at child-rearing than my mother and father were. I believe this has been a goal met as well. I challenge our succeeding generations with that same task: be better at raising your children than we have been. If you never have children then I challenge you to work in the world even better than your parents have. Don’t be satisfied with what was done before. I challenge you with this task in honor of my father’s and my mother’s legacy. It is what they wished for, for all of us. It is the way we can make the world better.

To finish I want to share something I sent out to my email list after my father died and a couple of the responses I received:

‘My father died yesterday. He had a stroke while opening holiday gifts at my sister's home in Pennsylvania. He was taken to an ICU unit at the local hospital where his condition deteriorated over the week. He died peacefully with people around him who loved him and who he loved, and with my sister Linda acting as midwife and shepherding him into whatever follows this life.

My father made an incredible life for himself after the early and unexpected death of his soul mate, my mother, in 1991. They met during WW2 when he was an Army Air Corps cadet expecting to be shipped overseas. They married a month after meeting. My grandmother, my mother's mother, routinely bragged about what a good looking couple they were. And boy, could they dance!

My father and mother went on to have four children and, in many ways, each of my parents served as healer for the other, deliverer, savior, good news, and best best friend.

In spite of a rough few years after her death that included serious, life threatening, health problems, as well as the death of his own mother in 1993, he went on in a way that could only be called inspirational... traveling the world, making friends every where he went through Elder Hostel, and cultivating an active respected role in his community and church. He lived on his own until the end and only recently began to tire of the harsh Northern Michigan winters.’

*

Grief is a necessarily solitary process I guess, since we all mourn a different loss when someone dies; one loses a friend, another loses and adversary; one loses a husband, the other a brother, the other a dad. Still, I think a man losing his father has some commonality of experience for all of us.

Kurt Colborn, Erie, Pennsylvania

*

My folks… …met right before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and went together only six months, married, and they had met at a dance club. And over the years they were really into dancing too: like the couple who dances together stays together. It worked for them!

Balyn (Linda Balent), Boston Massachusetts

*

On occasions like this I am always reminded of the Serenity Prayer. I am sure you are aware of it.

It is good to note that he had a full and satisfying life. While opening a gift in this life he gifted himself with the ones to follow!! I am sure he leaves behind a grateful and loving family that misses him and will carry his legacy forward.


Chandra Chandrasekhar, Chennai, India

*

I understand how it feels when a parent dies.

I give you all of my heart and humanity for this transition.

It sounds like yr dad was a great man.

But, this is what I know.

You are a man filled with righteousness, justice, & compassion.

You are a man who has taken on the idea that you can make beauty by simple letters and trust.

You believe in beauty.

You believe in truth.

A son does not get this on his own.

It takes a great man to make a son who has the eyes for this sort of madness.

I go out in my yard tonight and say a hello and goodbye for your dad.

It is dark, I am sincere, I wish you well.

You are now free.

And more lonely.

Rob Hutton, Seattle, Washington

***

This poem was written to be read out loud during a Jewish memorial service for parents/relatives who have died .Yartzeit (Yart-zite) is the anniversary of the day that a loved one has died which is remembered each year. A Yartzeit candle is the candle someone lights once a year on that anniversary. One could call it a memorial candle. Hopefully, this poem brings the mind back to the love and good deeds that the deceased loved person has done in his/her life that live beyond the temporariness of life and geography and that reach to the next generation. –Diane Baum

One loving person

passes love on

father to son

sister & brother

mother to daughter

Like a stone thrown

in still water

rings ripple out

more and more

in widening circles

till they wash against shore

One loving person

doing good

it starts in the heart

begins to connect

from one's own place

in the neighborhood

and on to affect

the city the country

then out into space

One loving person

reaches out like a seed

and plants whole forests

from one good deed

One loving person

is a call

it echoes all

around the town

like a ringing bell

the sound travels outward

from listener to listener

from parent to child

to more children still

Like a candle for yartzeit

small but bright

throws its light

against the wall

down the hall

out the window

and into the night....

Diane Baum, Grand Rapids, Michigan

A Few Client Testimonials

The following are a few testimonials from some of the clients I have been proud to work with. I have been delighted by the progress they achieved and real genius they demonstrated in moving toward the goals they set with me.

In looking over these testimonials it occurs to me that initial goals and the eventual outcomes are often quite dissimilar, and some of the best work we have done involves little bits of grief and loss related to letting go of wants and desires when it becomes apparent that the true course one wishes to set has been hidden... but then, through coaching, these discoveries and their attendant losses yield and make way for the opportunities to set a truer course and pursue it as one might find and explore a new land... and one that feels more like home!

I am grateful to each one of these clients and my others for the opportunity to be trusted with some of their most precious treasure: the future and an innate hope in it.

*****

"When I started coaching with Bob, I was this shy little bird afraid to fly out of the nest on her own. Bob was able to hold a coaching space over the months in which I discovered that lacking self confidence was only a hideout for not doing certain things, and that I could stop it anytime I decided to. Bob’s patience, his clear, direct style of coaching, along with his natural empathy and enthusiasm allowed me to find the inspiration within me, to spread my wings and start flying.

Bob didn’t fix anything wrong with me, instead, he helped me discover what was lying within me , waiting to unfold. I feel whole and authentic, clearer than ever as to which directions I want to take in my life. "

- Claire Molinard

***

“Bob has always been a great support for me. He has a gentle style of coaching. He has helped shift my perspective many times always supporting me to keep moving forward. Even though I have wanted to quit he always knew how to re-motivate me. and clarify what I want”

-- Brandon Williams

***

“I liked Bob’s challenges and the thinking they often opened up for me. He was generous in spirit and with his time and I appreciated the extra support and interaction we had by e-mail. His compassion and humanity were very evident to me.”

-- Iris Arenson-Fuller

***

“Bob had the ability to keep me on track with a consistency in message and support. He brought a perspective outside the “forest” (“Can’t see the forest for the trees”). He gave me a place to detach from drama and observe process. Help with more objective analysis of my process. He is nonjudgmental.”

-- Mary Schimmel

***

“Bob brought a high level of personal concern and compassion while maintaining professional distance and critical thinking. He was insightful, thought provoking and supportive.”

-- Theo McCracken