Monthly Archives: July 2006

The Man with the Beautiful Voice

Lillian B. Rubin is a psychotherapist who believes that psychotherapy is not quite so scientific as its practitioners sometimes claim. She writes:

In reality,… psychotherapy is a cross between science and art in which science holds sway over thought, art over practice.It can lay claim to science only if science is defined most broadly — an endeavor that proceeds from a theoretical model to the generation of hypotheses that can be tested in practice. But given that the “testing” is done by therapists who work unobserved behind closed doors, women and men who bring with them their own problems and their own unique ways of seeing and hearing, the tests are not and never can be the controlled, systematic, and rigorous inquiries that science requires.

Thus Rubin wrote this book. The Man with the Beautiful Voice: And More Stories from the Other Side of the Couch (Boston: Beacon, 2003) presents case studies of six of Rubin’s patients. Except these are too well-written and thoughtful to be mere case studies. Instead, Rubin’s work rises to the level of documentary non-fiction: she honestly records her real-life experiences, combining the art and science of psychotherapy with the deep humanity of a good writer.

In my favorite chapter, “Watching and Waiting,” a “quintessentially yuppie” couple comes to Rubin for counseling. Valerie opens right up and tells Rubin about herself, and about her perception of the problems she and Richard are having. But Richard is cool and almost unflappable. This continues for weeks, until Rubin finally tells the couple that because they’re not getting anywhere — because Richard is unwilling to participate in therapy fully — it’s time for them all to take a break from the therapy.

I was sure this was going to be another story about how upper middle class white men can block off their emotions and hide themselves away. But then the plot takes an extraordinarily surprising turn. I don’t want to spoil the surprise for you, but before she’s done Rubin has to push the boundaries of professional standards for couples counseling, while Richard and Valerie have to push far beyond what they thought were the boundaries of their relationship.

But this book has more than just good stories. Some of Rubin’s stories raise profound issues, like whether or not forgiveness is always possible. In one chapter, “To Live or To Die,” a young man talks about how his father hit him, and then says he cannot forgive his father:

“If you really want to know, I don’t give a damn whether he lived or died. And don’t tell me I should feel sorry for him because he was nuts. Forget it! I don’t want to hear any of that forgiveness crap…. See this scar,” he said, pointing to the gash on his face, his voice tight with rage, “he gave me this….”

…I [continues Rubin], who have written about the tyranny of the belief, preached so insistently by our twin gods, religion and psychology, that only in forgiveness will we find healing. In fact, some things are unforgivable, high among them parents who seriously abuse the children they’re supposed to love and protect….

The plot of this chapter is suspenseful and tragic. But good stories need more than a good plot: good stories need some meaty thinking about big issues, like whether or not forgiveness is possible or even a good thing.

Rubin writes good nonfiction stories about real people facing real problems. One of two of the chapters are a little trite, but generally she manages to transcend the jargon and limited moral and philosophical compass of most writing on psychotherapy. Believe it or not, this would make good beach reading (better yet, I got my remaindered copy at the Harvard Bookstore in Harvard Square for $4.99, which is cheaper than a Stephen King or Danielle Steele novel).

The Daily Scribe

Shawn Anthony of the blog LoFi Tribe and a leadership collective have officially launched a portal for religious blogs this week called The Daily Scribe. The Scribe aims to feature well-written religion blogs from a variety of religious traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, Paganism, and more. The Scribe features short excerpts of every post from each member blog — if an excerpt catches your interest, you can follow the link to read the full post. Soon to come: a podcast featuring several religion bloggers discussing a single topic. (Full disclosure: my blog is one of the member blogs on Scribe.)

The Scribe also features one blog each week. This week, it’s Jonny Baker’s blog — I’ve been reading and admiring Baker’s online writings about alternative worship for some years, and was pleased to discover he now has a blog. I’m hoping the the Scribe will lead me to more pleasant discoveries in the world of religious blogging.

Daily Scribe still adding blogs, but so far I see a definite bias towards a liberal religious attitude — members of the leadership collective are affiliated with the Religious Society of Friends, the Unite Church of Christ, emergent Christianity, and the Unitarian Universalist Association. All in all, if you’re interested in liberal religion, this is a site worth taking a look at.

Traffic

I left Ferry Beach Conference Center at quarter past one. By quarter to three, I hit rush hour traffic, just before the junction of Interstate 95 and Interstate 93. Traffic was heavy and slow from there all the way around Boston. By five o’clock, when I was well south of Boston on Route 24, the traffic finally thinned out a little. I made it home just before six; it should have been a three hour drive.

When I started driving today, I was determined to pay attention and remember whatwhat goes through my mind when I’m driving. Within minutes, I had forgotten that determination. When I drive, it almost seems as if there’s nothing to remember but the bare facts: I started at such-and-such a time, traffic was heavy, I arrived at such-and-such a time. It’s almost as if memory and higher awareness shut down for those five hours I was driving today. Not such a pleasant thought, given how many hours I spend driving.

Eagle Island

The weather hadn’t cooperated all week: fog, wind, rain storm. Some of us had hoped to paddle out to Eagle Island, but the weather had made it impossible.

Tonight at dinner, I realized that finally the weather was perfect: calm, no big swells coming into Saco Bay from the Atlantic, no chance of fog. I asked around, and Rebecca, who is from Arizona, said she’d be willing to paddle out with me. Just as we were about to carry the canoe down to the beach, Jon came walking along. He’s been waiting for the weather to break all week.

“We’re going out on the bay,” I said to him. He looked at his wife. “Go,” she said, “if you don’t, you’ll be miserable.” He ran and grabbed his kayak, and walked down with us.

We walked way down the beach to meet the low tide. We waded out, floating the canoe until the water was up over our ankles, then jumped in and started paddling.

About halfway out, a big fish jumped completely out of the water, and fell back in with a splash. It must have been four to six feet long. As we paddled along, Jon laughed and said, “I needed this.”

The water started getting darker. The sand ended, and the bottom dropped away to deep rocks. We passed a few lobster buoys. The island was getting closer: dark jagged rocks, long points or spurs exposed by the low tide, little specks of birds perched here and there, the highest part of the island covered with green (nettles and grasses) above the reach of the highest tides.

We got close enough to see rafts of eider swimming and diving around the island. They flew away when we got too close. Jon saw a seal slip into the water from off one of the rocky points.

Great Black-backed Gulls seemed to control most of the island, with a few Herring Gulls and Double-crested Cormorants. We could hear the keening cries of the baby gulls, saying, Feed us.

We slipped around one of the points of the island, out from the lee side. Low swells from the Atlantic slowly raised and lowered our boats. It’s a lonely, rugged little island.

The sun was getting low. We didn’t have time to go all the way around the island, so we turned around. “What a magical place,” I said.

On the way back, a Common Tern dove down close to our boats, pulled back four feet above the water, hovered for thirty seconds, and flew low over our heads. “Wow,” said Jon. “Amazing. Imagine being able to see that.”

The setting sun was off our starboard bow. Further to the right, thunderheads were building up over Casco Bay, the next bay to the north. We talked about other outdoor trips we had gone on, until at last we rode some waves in to the beach.

Rebecca and I put the canoe on my car, and Jon dumped the water out of his kayak. We looked at each other. “That was great.”

Water

With the heavy rains last night, everything in the woods was soaked. We had planned an activity where the third and fourth graders would be crawling around on the ground, but it was too wet for that.

As we walked over to the Grove, we passed a running stream of water that had been a dry ditch yesterday. I said: Let’s clean out some of these sticks so the water flows better. Some of the active boys jumped down and started pulling out sticks and even small logs. The girls and other boys weren’t far behind. We dropped sticks and and watched how fast they raced downstream.

I asked: Where does the water go? “Down there!” Let’s follow it and see. They all ran off downstream, stopping to clean out a few more snags. “It flows into this hole!” That’s called a culvert. “It keeps going over here!” We ran over to a ditch by the side of the main road. The children discovered that the water seemed to disappear under the road.

We carefully crossed the road to see if we could follow the water down to the ocean, but there was no water on the ditch on the other side of the road. We crossed back over to look again. Where does the water go? The children imagined all kinds of things that might happen to the water. But what really happens to the water? Who could we ask? The children thought about that, and one of the children who has returned year after year said, “We could talk to the guy who runs the campsite.” So we walked over to the garage, where we found Ed.

I said, Ed, the children want to know where the water goes. Ed explained that it runs into a sewer under the road, and then is pumped up to the sewage treatment plant where they process the water to make it clean. “They take all the poop out of it!” “Yes,” said Ed, “and at the end the water is so clean that you can drink it.” That was a novel concept to the children, and we talked about that for a while. Then it was time to follow the water upstream, to see where it came from. “Thank you, Ed!”

We ran back to the stream, and followed it the other direction this time. “I know where streams start, they always start in a spring in the mountains.” Well, let’s see how far we can follow this stream.

We came to a place where the bottom of the stream was sand. The sand looked orange. The children and I pulled sand up off the bottom, but when we pulled it up the sand was white. That means the water is orange: why? “It’s the leaves, they make it orange.” “And the pine needles.”

The stream got wider and wider, and flowed more and more slowly. Soon there were interconnected puddles everywhere in the woods — in the same part of the woods where we had walked dry shod yesterday. I suggested that maybe the stream started with all the puddles. But the children weren’t yet sure. So we kept going deeper into the woods.

“We should go this way!” said one child. “No, this way!” said another child. I asked, Which way does water flow? “Up–” “No, it flows downhill.” So which way is uphill? We figured out which way was uphill, and went that way to see if we could tell where the water started flowing. There was water everywhere. If you slipped on a root, you’d get wet. All of us got our feet at least a little bit wet.

Finally we got to a place where there were no more puddles. But there was no stream, either. Finally the children figured out what was going on: The woods turn into a swamp when it rains, and the streams drain the water out of the stream. I told them that the streams were actually ditches that people had dug in order to drain the swamp.

We stood in a circle, and went over what we had figured out. At the end of that, one child said, “I think we should always learn like this — being outdoors, and not having someone just tell us.” I said that I believed that children could figure things out for themselves (with adult help and direction).

It was time to head back. I said I’d try to find a dryer path for us to follow back. But there was water everywhere. Eventually, we had to turn around and head back the way we came. We got a little wetter, and we were fifteen minutes late for lunch. But the children had learned a lot more about the woods, and water, and what happens when it rains, and where water goes. They’ve learned about the water cycle in school, but this time they really got to see it in action.

And this was completely unplanned: spontaneous programming, arising out of the interests of the children, and their interactions with their surrounding environment.

Alone in the woods

Today we had the 5/6th graders for nature and ecology in the hour just before lunch. “What are we going to do today?” “Can we do alone time again?” “Yeah, where we walk single file and you tap us on the shoulder.” “Yeah, and spread us out so we can’t see each other this time!” [See below for instructions of how we set up alone time two days ago.] Alone time wasn’t on our lesson plan for today, but since one of our primary learning goals is to have the children spend time alone in the woods, Lisa and I were actually very pleased that they asked to do more alone time.

So we said: Sure, we can do alone time again. Do you want to do it as long as half an hour? “Longer!” “Yeah, the whole hour!” Well, we can’t go that long because we have to be at lunch by noon. “OK, but be sure to spread us out so far that we can’t see each other.” Then a worried look: “What if something happens, though?” Well, Lisa and I will spread you out so you can just see each other.

We actually let them go a little longer than thirty minutes. Then I asked what they did with their alone time. Some of them couldn’t quite spend that whole time alone and six of the eleven children wound up hanging out with a nearby child: “We built a fort together,” said one pair. Of the ones who spent the whole time alone, some spent time just looking at what was around them: “I wound up in exactly the same spot as the last time, so I finished looking at the things I started looking at last time we had alone time.” One or two just sat and enjoyed being quiet: “I just sat there on the ground and didn’t really do anything.” I mentioned that being alone in the outdoors is one of my spiritual practices (just so they would know that it can be a legitimate spiritual practice).

Later today, one of the girls in that group made a point of stopping me and saying that she really liked being alone in the woods. Don’t let anyone tell you that kids today only want to play video games.

*****

Alone time (with a group of children)

Give these instructions before beginning: “We’re all going to keep walking single file along the trail. One at a time, the Sweep will indicate to each child that he/she is to sit down in the trail, until everyone is spread out along the trail. Then we’ll all sit in silence of a time. When the time is up, the Sweep will start walking slowly, slowly, and gradually we’ll rejoin in a single file line again.” Sweep circles back around to be at rear of line again. Have children sit in silence for one to five minutes (depending on age and group chemistry). Older children can spread out quite far. Younger children will be more comfortable if they are closer together.

More eco-teaching

Religious Education Week, Ferry Beach Conference Center

Today we had the fifth and sixth graders first. We played the “Foxes, Rabbits, and Leaves” game that we did yesterday with the third and fourth graders — I learned from yesterday’s mistakes, and the game went much more smoothly today. After half an hour of play, the children didn’t want to stop, but Lisa and I eneded that game anyway because we wanted to give them some alone time in the woods.

So we lined them up single file, and walked out into the woods. One by one, Lisa seated each child along the trail, so they were all spread out — within sight of one another, but too far away too talk. After about seven minutes of quiet time, Lisa and I circled around and picked the children up one by one, and we all walked back single file, in silence, to a comfortable place in the woods, where we sat in a circle.

I asked: What did you do with you time alone in the woods?

“I picked up a big stick and I hit it against a tree again and again until it broke.”

“I sat and meditated for a while, then I opened my eyes and looked around.”

“I let an inch worm crawl on me, but then I squished it by mistake so I buried it.”

“I picked up a big stick and hit it again a tree too.”

“I swatted mosquitoes. Oh, and I listened to a bird that was nearby.”

I said: I love to spend time outdoors, and I’ve done all those things myself.

One of our goals is to give each group plenty of unstructured time more or less alone in the woods. A big part of our goal is to help children feel comfortable outdoors, in a natural environment — we want kids to like Nature and the outdoors. If they feel some spiritual connection with Nature, great, but just liking it is enough at this point.

When things really soar

Here at the annual religious education conference at Ferry Beach Conference Center, I’m one of the adults leading the children’s program. Along with Lisa, I’m doing nature and ecology with the elementary age children. At the end of the morning today, we had the third and fourth graders for an hour. The plan was to play a game for half an hour that would teach about cycles of life, and then going out into the woods and giving the children some alone time. As can happen with children, we went astray from the plan.

The children were feeling active today. We started playing the game, called “Foxes and Rabbits,” and the children got so excited and were having so much fun I had trouble getting them to transition from one round to the next. I didn’t want them to descend from excitement into chaotic lack of structure, so I really worked hard to get them to stay focused. I was getting a little frustrated with them. Fortunately, they’re a cheerful group so they tried hard focus a little more even though they were getting a little frustrated with me. It was one of those teaching situations where the children were pulling in one direction, and I was pulling in slightly different direction.

But we were all having fun, in spite of the frustration. I looked at my watch and fifty minutes had gone by — we had to wrap things up pretty quickly. So I asked the children to sit in a circle, and we talked about the game. And they came up with some wonderful insights about the cycle of life, about what might happen if humans destroy part of the web of life, about birth and death, just a wonderful free-for-all discussion. It was one of those times you sometimes get while teaching:– with the whole group, kids and adults, soaring together.

Fifty minutes of frustration for ten minutes of soaring. That’s the way it goes in teaching.

*****

If you’re curious, below are the rules to the game. It’s both simple and really quite complex, and part of the frustration we all experienced was my inability to explain the game quickly and concisely.

Game: “Foxes and Rabbits” adapted from Steve van Matre’s book Acclimatizing

Divide the group into Foxes, Rabbits, and Leaves. (If you have a group of ten, a good proportion would be 4 rabbits, 3 leaves, and 3 foxes.) Give the Rabbits tails (pieces of white cloth to stick into back pocket).

The Rabbits start out crouched down in the middle. The Foxes start out in a loose circle around the Rabbits. The Leaves stand (with their hands in the air so everyone knows they are Leaves) in a loose circle outside the Foxes.

Each round begins when a signal is given. During each round, the Rabbits try to “eat” (tag) the Leaves. The Foxes try to catch and “eat” the Rabbits (by pulling tail). The Leaves are are rooted in place and cannot move.

During each round, Rabbits are safe and cannot be tagged when they are frozen in a crouched position. However, the Rabbits may not move or “eat” Leaves unless they are standing up. Each Rabbit must get food in each round, or s/he will die from hunger. Each Fox, too, must get food in each round or s/he will die from hunger. A Fox may only catch ONE Rabbit each round.

The round should last no more than five minutes, or when all the Leaves are eaten. The Leader calls out “End of Round!”, all play stops, and then you tally up those who got eaten or who starved to death:

  • LEAVES:
  • If a Leaf is eaten by a Rabbit, in the next round she becomes a Rabbit.
  • (All other Leaves remain Leaves.)
  • RABBITS:
  • If a Rabbit is eaten by a Fox, in the next round she becomes a Fox.
  • If a Rabbit is does not manage to eat a Leaf during a round, he “dies” and becomes a Leaf.
  • (All other Rabbits remain Rabbits.)
  • FOXES:
  • If a Fox fails to catch a Rabbit within the round, he “dies” and becomes a Leaf.
  • (All other Foxes remain Foxes.)

Play three to five rounds (or more, if it’s going well).