Love Rules

YOU CAN’T SAY, “YOU CAN’T PLAY.” (Vivian Gussin Paley, 1993)

It is true that I never had an opportunity to attend kindergarten. In fact, I never attended a school stratified by age until I was a teenager.

I grew up and learned within a family structure—at home and at school.

As the youngest of a farm family of six children, and the youngest by a few years, I was always included in the family activities. My brothers and sisters just took me along. It seemed natural to me.

Only once in my early life, as I recall, was I excluded from play. I believe I was told that there was one too many people in the sand box, and that that one was me. I did not understand.

This kind of thing did not happen in my home. It also did not happen at Sanborn Hill School. Everybody played—boys, girls, first graders and eighth graders, fast and slow.

Apparently this is not true in most kindergartens. As described by the author, children frequently told other children that they could not play. Some children were excluded from a lot of games and activities. It occurred to this veteran teacher that such exclusion seemed too harsh and not acceptable.

She made a rule that you can’t say, “You can’t play.”

Before installing the rule, the teacher discussed the rule with not only her class, but several other classes up to fifth grade. The children did not think it would work.

Here is the scary part: Older elementary students thought it might work for the little kids because they were nicer, but it wouldn’t work for the older kids.

My first conclusion is that children know that it is not nice to exclude people because you don’t like them or because they are not your friends.

My second conclusion is that children believe that they, themselves, are not nice—even though they were nice when they were small. There is a kind of fatalistic attitude of moral decline that the children see as outside of their control.

Parents, teachers, grandparents, this is our job. Children need the gift of rules. People need the gift of rules at any age. The big question becomes who shall make these rules?

Not children and not old people who act like children.

Vivian Gussin Paley’s experiment with this rule in her kindergarten class went well. Children loved it. Many continued the rule into adulthood.

There was a relief from the tyranny of exclusion, not only for those excluded, but for those who felt they had an obligation to exclude non-friends from activities with their friends—a palpable feeling of relief is how I heard the author describe the classroom after the rule came to be.

We can study and postulate social theory, but I think it is quite simple: Love feels good.

We all want to be good, kind, nice people. We just don’t know how. We don’t know the rules, or we are too weak to enforce them upon ourselves. True freedom in the form of individual agency depends upon a socially responsible ethic.

So, like me or not, “Do you want to play?”

Repelling Love

To this day, Nancy still claims 1999 as the year she received her best Christmas present, ever—so good, in fact, it is unimaginable to replace her. She is Goldberry’s Serenity Dreamer, a registered yellow Labrador Retriever. The only registered dog either of us ever had, she is the most wonderful pet and friend.

But, she is old and her health is failing. Her eyesight has dimmed, her hearing is almost gone, and many parts of her body are susceptible to infection and other inflammation. She can no longer keep up with this old man in field, forest, or desert, but we are committed to keeping her as comfortable as possible as long as she still finds enjoyment in life, which she does.

Replacing her is not really conceivable. It took us about ten years after Cheese, our English Setter mix, died before we bought Serenity. We cannot imagine going through this process, again.

Reminder: This blog series is dedicated to love, the various kinds of love beyond the romantic and erotic that support personal growth and healing, especially the healing of invisible wounds from Combat PTSD.
You may be wondering what this has to do with Combat PTSD. The answer in “Funny” New Guys..

Audey Murphy became the most decorated American in WWII when he was still a teenager. He also had a baby face, so he could play his younger self in the movie of his life story, TO HELL AND BACK. In that story, two new replacements arrive while the platoon is engaged with the German enemy. They are immediately shunned.

The point is emphasized when one brings in a backpack stove he found. One of the veterans grabs it away, takes it outside the farm house, and buries it. It had belonged to his friend who had been killed that morning.

Audey shuns them, too, telling one who volunteers for a patrol, “We don’t need you.”

In Vietnam, we called them FNGs (“Funny” New Guys). Yes, they were shunned partly because unseasoned warriors do stupid things. But the emotional reason is simpler. Nobody wants new friends because nobody wants to see one more friend die.

It is a simple, subconscious decision about love that goes something like this: You get to love people. People die. It hurts more when the people who die are people you love. Solution? Don’t love anymore people.

Loving anyone or anything makes one vulnerable, and to feel vulnerable is dangerous to anyone with Post Traumatic Stress symptoms. Our brains don’t like vulnerability. If we fight it, some kind of rage ensues. If we succumb to it, we sink into depression. So, we avoid love and other vulnerable activities.

It takes a lot of resilience to love a dog.

It takes more to love a person because people are more likely to bite.

We are unnaturally loyal to our friends, but we shun most new people. It’s an old habit. For self protection, we repel love—in part because we know it hurts to lose it.

Recovery requires a partner. Care to dance?

Teaching Love

My students have always been my greatest teachers. Here is how I learned something about love from a student teacher.

It was a familiar discussion among student teachers and supervisors, that of classroom discipline. When this young lady read my letter of recommendation, she said that she hoped they wouldn’t think she was too nice. It is common to see a conflict between being nice and being strict. (My former students may understand.)

That conflict is a mirage, an illusion of landscape created by the beliefs of the mind.

“For those whom the Lord loves he disciplines….” (Hebrews 12:6)

Here I learned the conflict—within our definitions of discipline. Originally it meant, “to teach.” That has been corrupted to mean to punish.

That is a naughty definition, but it does serve to help us learn about teaching and love, for too many of us see teaching as telling which is analogous to discipline as punishment. I find the resolution in leadership.

This soon-to-be teacher is clearly a nice person. That is readily apparent to those around her as she treats others with quiet respect. The concern she expressed is that being nice and discipline are somehow mutually exclusive.

She is a lovely person, caring deeply for and respecting her students. Her concern is that school administrators may see this as weakness which may lead to lack of discipline in her classroom. I see her respect as a strength, as a model of her self-discipline, as love in practice.

How do we get a marshmallow into a piggy bank? In a way, it is like asking how many counselors does it take to change a person. Only one, of course, but the person has to want to change.

A marshmallow is similar to a balloon, and I used to demonstrate how to get a small water balloon into a gallon jug. I simply encouraged the gallon jug to want the balloon inside. I did that by dropping a burning match inside, heating the air, and then placing the balloon on top. As the air cooled (I might help it with a cold water bath), the balloon would be sucked inside. For fun, you might try to figure out how I got the balloon back out.

We cannot teach by shoving facts inside. We must educate (meaning to draw out). We do this by lighting the fire inside. Not the fire of ire, but the fire of inquiry. Actually, the fire is already there, as natural as breathing for young people. We only need to fan it from time to time. We do that by showing our fire, our sense of wonder for our subject (aka, our discipline).

For a person dedicated to being nice, teaching others to be nice is a challenge. It means constantly questioning personal and professional decisions. It means holding a tongue that feels like lashing out. It means expecting respect from others by showing them respect, first.

That is discipline. That is teaching by example. It is leadership. Yes, it will mean being strict on some classroom rules. It will sometimes mean punishment. But it is not inconsistent with being nice. It is love, and it is a wonderful thing to teach our young people, our future parents, leaders, and teachers. It is what this young student teacher taught this old teacher, and she did it by living the discipline of her personal conviction.

Wouldn’t you like her teaching your children and grandchildren?

Undying Love

She was in her ninety-seventh year and fading like her eyesight and her insight, but she still recognized me, my brothers and sisters, and many of her grandchildren, although she got some names confused. She mixed up faces, calling a great granddaughter by her mother’s name. Only some of that was age.

Sixty years ago, I sometimes thought my name was Rodney Butch Erv. It is a product of large family size.

Her family was huge, and she could still report on the pride and problems of many of them, keeping track of about a hundred of us. But this year, that faded, too.

She still remembered my wife, Nancy, but not always her name. She would ask if she were with me.

“No, Mom, she’s in Arizona, working.”

“That’s far away.”

And she would look far away, out the big window of her assisted living facility, and watch. She would describe what she saw, and I would think it was real—at least in her mind. But, sometimes it was only an artifact of an aging brain.

She lifted her hands and studied them in something like mild horror.

“Something is wrong,” she told me. “They don’t work right, anymore. I’m falling apart.”

“I know, Mom.”

She held my hand. Arizona is so far from Wisconsin, and I said goodbye every time I left, for about four years I think. Then, one day, I would drop in and she would recognize me, ask about her (Nancy), and report on the family.

Sometimes she held my hand. One day she studied me, tearing up a bit.

“I just love you so much,” she told me.

“I love you, too, Mom”

Brave Love

“Love is the absence of judgment.” (Dalai Lama)

I am compelled to judge, and therein lies the rub. It is the vulnerability inherent in our human condition. A vulnerability that is exponentially increased by trauma.

Reminder: This blog series is dedicated to love, the various kinds of love beyond the romantic and erotic that support personal growth and healing, especially the healing of invisible wounds from Combat PTSD.

There was one incident in the flat, swampy area of Vietnam, a place unfamiliar to me with people also unfamiliar—and two dead VC. I saw a man, without a shirt, wading the ditch in front of me and I sighted my M-16 on his back. I hesitated. He lived. Another man beside me recognized him as American and intervened.

Power demands judgment. I don’t mean only that power ought to require judgment, but that it necessarily does.

Vulnerability challenges judgment.

Rifle in hand, or the mathematics of an artillery fire direction center (or console of a drone), a person is left with the choice to shoot or not shoot. Always, that choice. A choice made in the split of an instant.

To hesitate may mean to die. To not hesitate oft means to kill. So we judge with the speed and absence of thought of our reptilian brain, perceptions shunted by our amygdala to action without thought. Because, to think is to risk death.

Primitive judgment is required in combat (and other dangerous situations such as a Boston marathon).

Mature judgment is required for the rest of life.

We are all compelled to judge. How, then, do we ever love?

If I could be in Madison, WI, this May, I would listen for clues from the Dalai Lama. I expect he can help us with this conundrum. I expect lots of wise people can.

It is a Post Traumatic Stress Dilemma. I will propose one hypothesis. Judgment has shades. We must judge our vulnerability. We must notice our surrounding, people and behaviors, and report suspicious perceptions. We must intervene, for the corollary is not necessarily true: Judgment is not the absence of love.

But, we need not pre-judge. We need not categorize all Vietnamese (fill in your own ethnic, religious, or political group) as our enemy. That is fear, not love.

We must not blame. We must not judge sick people as bad. Sure, we have the right and the compulsion to do so, but it is unhealthy. That is a form of judgment that excludes love from us.

We do that. Vulnerable people often choose isolation without love as the preferred alternative to vulnerability. Love with vulnerability or judgment without love, another Post Traumatic Stress Dilemma.

I leave you with this question. What is required of us to accept the vulnerability without judgment that allows love to touch us and us to touch love? What?

Hint: My answer is a single syllable.

Shadow Love

“Who am I now that I have killed?”

Then, one day, I could no longer feel the innocence, optimism, idealism, and moral certitude of youth—ever, again. Something inside me had died.

Reminder: This blog series is dedicated to love, the various kinds of love beyond the romantic and erotic that support personal growth and healing, especially the healing of invisible wounds from Combat PTSD.

I did not know this, of course, at a conscious level for another forty years. But here is a hard reality. The behavior of our lives is not simply a product of our conscious thoughts. We live our feelings.

The real question is not the one above, but, “Who can love me now that I have killed?”

We are hard to love. Combat Veterans become hard for others to love and I believe that is largely a response not to who we are or have become but to who we feel we are. We believe we have become unlovable, and so we act unlovable.

Add to this the involuntary actions of our fight/flight response to vulnerability, and we can see our own unlovable behaviors. The older we get, the harder it is to deny our vulnerability. We know trouble and pain. We know war and more war—a new one every ten years or so.

War on drugs, war on terror, war on liberty, war, war, war.

Sometimes the darkness we perceive is but our own shadow. Because we have turned our faces away from the light. We create our own darkness.

We see in others the tracks of shadows and we feel…we feel almost kinship. Here is a brother or sister. Our subconscious knows. We share each other’s shadows and feel less lonely. Almost worthy of love. Almost.

The problem becomes the shadow we share. What else do we share?

Not only are we hard to love, but we are not so good at loving, anymore.

Some of us, the lucky ones, have found someone who reminds us to turn around. There are people among us who perceive our shadows but are able to face the light. They have touched the great sadness of moral doubt and retained the ability to allow the light to shine through them. We see the light in their eyes, then through their eyes.

When one of them loves us, we begin to recover. Sometimes we even turn around.

Fearing Love

“I can tell you what it feels like to slip into the grips of a severe episode of combat PTSD, what we refer to as the wild ride or dinosaur dump.” (Erv Barnes, Loving Light blog)

Reminder: This blog series is dedicated to love, the various kinds of love beyond the romantic and erotic that support personal growth and healing, especially the healing of invisible wounds from Combat PTSD.

Lost in that dark swamp is a feeling opposite of love. It is the epitome of vulnerability.

Vulnerability is a trigger for PTSD symptoms and the wild ride of hormones and emotions that confuse, cloud, and enrage.

Maybe that is how hate gets named as the opposite of love. It is not. It is the consequence of the darkness.

Love is light. Darkness is opposite.

We fear darkness for in it we feel vulnerable, and the vulnerability triggers the fight/flight response.

Rage is our way out of darkness. It is an unholy way, a way we choose. Why?

The counterintuitive reason is this: We fear light more than darkness.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” (Marianne Williamson quote used by Nelson Mandela in his 1994 inaugural speech)

The answer lives in the vulnerability of love.

And the vulnerability of power love brings.

And the intimate question, “Who am I?”