Frances’ Mind Meld

Posted on February 3, 2014 by iraheilveil

Frances as a teenager in front of grandpa’s store

Nearly ten years ago, moments before my mother took her last breath, her eyes looked deeply into mine, we locked gazes, and I felt her passing the contents of her soul from her body to mine. I did not feel torment, chaos, or even a sense of peace. It just happened, in the space of a single breath. It was, perhaps, less of a feeling than a knowing, though no words were spoken.

Perhaps it was just my imagination– some need to feel as though my mother died peacefully, that she could let go because now I could carry whatever weighed her down. But if it were just imagination, the timing was rather extraordinary. I felt the knowing, and she was gone.

I don’t talk to too many people about this experience, especially my in-laws in the Midwest, who wouldn’t say it out loud but would think that someone ought to tighten up those loose screws of mine. It wasn’t until I read about a very similar experience, most likely in a Stephen Levine book, that I learned that what I experienced had a name: it was called a “phowa moment.”

In some Buddhist traditions, “phowa” is viewed as the “transfer of consciousness at the moment of death.” The transfer occurs through the top of the head, sometimes helped along by a specially trained assistant, into a “Buddha-field of one’s choice,” according to Wiki. What exactly constitutes a Buddha-field is beyond me, but I suspect that I am not it. Then again, I always felt a bit like a Buddha in my mother’s eyes, so who knows?

Prior to my arrival at her house, my sister, brother and father lingered by her bedside, lovingly holding her hand, touching her forehead, and trying to console her as her heart gave out, her lungs filled with water, and she slowly drowned to death. They told me she had been horribly fitful; no surprise there as my mother was a fighter and would not give in to anyone or anything easily. By the time I arrived hours later she was much calmer, farther gone I suppose, her eyes scanning the room, locking gazes occasionally as she had always done. She could not speak and was generally unresponsive, so still technically comatose.

I have always been somewhat disappointed by the fact that, although I felt a clear knowing that some sort of transfer occurred, and I do believe that that transfer somehow led to a release on my mother’s part, I never experienced any knowledge of specific content. I wanted to know what went on inside her head, what her thoughts were, what her torments were. I wanted her spirit to be free from fear, to take her fears away, just as mothers take on their children’s pain. I wanted it to be something more familiar to me, something like a Vulcan mind meld, where I could hold inside of me the knowledge of someone else. But perhaps that is not how the soul works.

Regardless of the words we attach to it, my mother certainly appeared to be at peace when she died, and I will never know if the moment when somehow I felt a passing through of something essential I am calling “soul” played a part in her finding that peace. What I do know is that science tells us precious little about those moments, so what we are left with is a choice of what to believe. And there, I am comforted only by the knowledge that her life on earth contained much joy but also a lot of suffering, and I trust that suffering is no longer.

You Could Have Killed Us

Posted on January 28, 2014 by iraheilveil

Most people have a good idea what corporal punishment means in plain English, but behaviorists like to use words precisely. Punishment, to a behaviorist, is something that happens following a behavior that reduces the likelihood that the behavior will occur again. Punishment comes in two main flavors: positive and negative. Positive punishment is when you add something to a situation, like a slap on the butt, an electric shock or a spray of a noxious substance on someone’s face. Negative punishment is when you take something away, like a favorite toy, a trip to Disneyland, or the cell phone your wife was using to text the pool guy. It is considered punishment as long as it reduces the behavior that came before it.

Corporal of course means having to do with one’s corpus, or body, so by definition when most people think about corporal punishment they are thinking about the positive kind, at least in behavioral terms. Positive and negative have always been tricky words in behaviorism, because they don’t translate well into common parlance; most non-behaviorists like to think of corporal punishment as negative and taking bad things away from people who misuse them as acceptable, if not positive. I am sure I am not alone in thinking that behaviorists long ago should have substituted the words “additive” and “subtractive” for positive and negative, but it is too late and too far into the game.

Two corporal punishment incidents in which I was personally involved occurred when I was in college and when I was in my late forties and taking flying lessons. The flying incident occurred when my septuagenarian instructor slapped my hand sharply as I reached for the mixture control instead of the carburetor heat in a little Cessna 150. We were on the deadly base-to-final turn in the pattern and a power reduction at that altitude and in that attitude could have led to the infamous “graveyard spiral.” “You could have killed us,” he said after the slap. He was absolutely right, and I thought twice whenever I reached for the mixture control.

When I was in college my fencing instructor, sans helmet, was demonstrating to each of us a particular technique that required our foils extended toward his face. “Whatever you do, don’t lunge at me,” he warned. When he reached me, I extended my weapon and instinctively started to lunge. Before I knew it, he whipped the side of my knee over my pants with his foil, which stung like hell and left a welt that lasted a week. Without his helmet on, I inadvertently could have taken out an eye or ruptured his carotid, and frankly I deserved the punishment.

I can think of a couple more instances of corporal punishment I endured, and I don’t believe I was worse for the wear. Research tells us that the improvements in kids’ behavior following “positive punishment” tend to be short-lived and have some adverse side effects (such as teaching them to be physically aggressive), so before you post angry and misguided comments, please note that I am not a fan of corporal punishment as a disciplinary method for children. In fact, perhaps one reason it might have been effective for me as an adult is that I wasn’t immunized against it as a child (although threatened with the belt on many occasions, it was never used). Also, injuries were minor (the bruises were chiefly to my ego), and my behavior, though not intended to hurt anyone, rationally warranted the punishment. The fact that both instances mentioned above could simply have been designed to save the lives of the punishers is not lost on me, but that doesn’t mean that I did not reap some benefit.

What makes good teachers great?

Posted on January 21, 2014 by iraheilveil

PJ O’Rourke once wrote that corporal punishment should be reintroduced into schools, but used on teachers. I might agree, but for the fact that I have had some incredibly good teachers over the years.

I once heard that you can teach a good teacher to be a better teacher, but you can’t teach a bad teacher to be a good teacher. From supervising and consulting with special education teachers to working alongside them, to having been a student of teachers and a teacher of students myself, I have come to believe that what makes teachers good is that they start off with simply being a good human being. That is to say, they are kind, receptive, curious, not terribly judgmental or jaded, and enthusiastic. I don’t believe that good teachers need to be very smart, or even that emotionally stable, although that latter quality certainly helps. I also don’t believe that being a good human being necessarily makes one a good teacher– only that it is the source from which all else springs.

Good teachers, I believe, have in common the ability to listen, and active listening, as it is so often called among psychologists, is quite a skill. It is the sine qua non of understanding, and understanding is the foundation of intimacy. Intimacy may seem an odd word when it comes to teaching, because it implies a two-way street, and that aspect of learning isn’t always clear. In an age in which much learning takes place while passively watching online videos, it is hard to say that there is much intimacy going on. But there is even a sort of intimacy that can be created digitally, or as we used to say, over the airwaves.

Vin Scully has said that when he broadcasts he imagines that he is talking to one person. Listening to Vin Scully broadcast Dodgers games feels as though you are engaging a warm, charming friend. The best online video experiences, in which my attention is most riveted, occurs when I feel as though the presenter somehow knows me, is somehow interested in me. That is perhaps one reason why the phrase “death by PowerPoint” has become so popular among presenters. Bullet points on a screen may as well be bullets pointed at the audience.

But when I look back at the teachers from whom I learned the most, one of them in particular stood in front of his statistics students and practically read from his lecture notes. The fact that Charlie Moore was a sweet, kind and unpretentious man peeked through his dry monotone and that was what made you want to listen and learn what he had to say. And after class, any student could stop him in the hallway and he would give you his full attention, making you feel as if he truly cared about what you had to say. That kind of kindness, that kind of intimacy, is what makes a good teacher great.

Richard Margoluis and Doing Good Things

Posted on January 14, 2014 by iraheilveil

There is a story that the American academic Maurice Friedman tells about Martin Buber, the great Austrian existential psychologist/philosopher. Friedman was officiating a debate between Buber and the iconic humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers, when someone in the audience asked them both whether people were “basically good or evil.” Predictably, Rogers responded that he thought that people were basically good, but Buber, also predictably, said that people were “basically good and evil, or not good and evil.”

It is always disturbing when we discover that our heroes, people who we think of as essentially good, do evil things. Equally disturbing, or perhaps more puzzling, is to discover how people we categorize as evil do good things. The classic example is the Nazi commanders who spent daytime hours sending people into gas chambers then went home, greeted their wives lovingly and read bedtime stories to their adoring and adored children. We want to simplify evil, make it less banal, and attribute it to someone else.

The literature on just what makes people choose to do good deeds is vast, and given the breadth of the topic it is of course extremely complex, especially because altruism (as it is often pointed out in the literature) runs counter to evolution. One small piece of the puzzle probably has to do with the people with whom we associate. One of the reasons I enjoyed my years as a psychologist and behavior analyst had to do with the fact that I spent most of my time being around people whose lives were devoted to helping others. Being around people who struggle to do good serves as ballast in a world in which there is so much pain.

One of those people is Richard Margoluis, who I met last year along with his wife and beautiful children while stopped at a hardware store on the way to the village of Paxixil in Guatemala. Richard was the founder of PAVA, an acronym for Programa de Ayuda a los Vecinos del Altiplano, which began over 25 years ago as a relief mission for those impacted by the horrible civil war here. Richard, who is originally from Miami, now lives with his family in Costa Rica, where he runs another non-profit and his wife, who has a doctorate in biology, runs a school she started in a remote area.

There is a quality that I sensed in Richard that I believe is shared with others who devote most of their lives to helping others. It is a fundamental humility, born I suspect of the knowledge of one’s self, how the enemy (to quote the great American philosopher Charles Schulz) is within ourselves.

I do not believe that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, as the saying goes. I do believe that those in positions of power by definition are capable of doing great good and great harm, and that both good and evil intention reside closely in all of us. Knowing ourselves may not prevent us from making the destructive choice, but making the dialogue between the good and evil intentions within us as conscious as possible is certainly one important link in the chain that leads us to taking the road to righteousness. The alternative is to believe that somehow we are only capable of good or evil, and that kind of blindness increases the likelihood of finding ourselves on a regrettable path.

To Part the Air

Posted on January 6, 2014 by iraheilveil

Screen Shot 2014-01-01 at 3.00.38 PM There is a scene in the recent movie, “The Way, Way Back” in which the 14-year-old lead character discovers a bicycle in the garage of his mother’s new boyfriend’s summer cottage where he has been trapped for what promises to be a torturous summer. With a spectacular blast of background music he breaks out of the garage on the diminutive bike and rides away with a new sense of freedom.

The scene struck a deep chord for me, because it brought back memories of my childhood, when, each day after school in order to escape the constant shouting and threatening in my family, I would ride as far away as I could on my bike until I became just a bit lost, and then eventually find my way home. I remember never really wanting to go home, and trying to calculate ways to run away, but as a young child I of course didn’t have the wherewithal.

I remember the sense of freedom I had when riding my bike, the sense of movement and the rush of air over my face, and even a more acute sense of smell. When I left Queens at age 10 my family moved to Framingham, Massachusetts, where we lived on a suburban street on a small hill. At that age the hill wasn’t so small, and I distinctly remember getting on my bike at the top of the hill, raising both hands in the air, and closing my eyes as the bike picked up speed on the way down. I could even turn the corner at the bottom of the hill with no hands and no sight, just the sensation of the bike beneath me and the air blowing over my chest and face.

That thrill ended when one day I took the turn at the bottom of the hill and hit a parked car. I was thrown first into the handles, which knocked the wind out of me, then tossed onto the trunk of the car to be stopped by the rear window. The car was dented, and I was bruised, but nothing else broke. That was probably my first memory of flying, albeit without wings.

In high school in California I learned to drive, and that became the E-ticket to freedom. Driving up the winding Pacific Coast Highway on a chilly night, windows open, music blaring, the heater throwing warm air at my feet; this was the closest thing to ecstasy a 16-year-old virgin could experience. I worked odd jobs during high school just to pay for gas and I would drive my ‘65 Barracuda as far as I could in any direction until the gas was half gone, then turn around and see if I could make it home before I ran out.

Whenever I am stopped on the street by a stranger and asked what my favorite poem is, I tell them it is this one by Mark Strand:

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

When I walk

I part the air

and always

the air moves in

to fill the spaces

where my body’s been.

We all have reasons

for moving.

I move

to keep things whole.

Driven to Distraction

Posted on December 30, 2013 by iraheilveil

Distractibility has always been a sore spot for me. It is one of the three cardinal symptoms of attention deficit disorder (along with inattention and impulsivity), which I have been convinced is an apt description for one set of my struggles ever since I first learned about it in grad school.

Over the years I have developed a series of “procedures” designed to manage my distractibility, little games such as “touch next,” in which I touch a random object and pursue its completion, then touch another random object and do the same. Or a game I call “subvocal lists,” in which I silently repeat a small list of tasks until each one is finished. These little things and others are designed to facilitate forward movement rather than linger too long in the stultifying effects of distraction.

Distraction can be deadly, as recent experience with cell phones have demonstrated. The horrendous train crashes in Spain and Burbank were likely cell phone related, and in an issue of Flying magazine Jay Hopkins mentioned that the Colgan Air crash near Buffalo, the crash of American Flight 965 in Cali, Columbia and many other incidents and accidents were very likely also distraction-related. The Cali crash and other incidents led to the development of the “sterile cockpit” rule, which unfortunately isn’t always used. But for those of you who may not be familiar with this rule, it is designed to limit all conversations in the cockpit to only that which is essential during the takeoff and landing phases of flight. That typically translates to the first (and last) 10,000 feet above the ground. So for those of you on commercial flights, when they tell you to keep all your electronic equipment off during the takeoff and landing phases, they are doing that not because they are worried about the equipment interfering with their sensitive flight instruments, but because they want the passengers attentive in the event of an emergency during takeoff and landing. And they too, in the “front office,” are keeping things as sterile as they can.

The trio of symptoms that comprise ADD are interesting bedfellows. (The fourth symptom—hyperactivity, goes in and out of fashion as a cardinal symptom.) While the syndrome is named “attention deficit,” when you think about it, distractibility is not an attention deficit at all. In fact, it is an attention excess. Why the folks who dreamed up the name for this constellation called it what they did is a mystery to me; clearly it should have been named “attention regulation disorder,” because that is what it actually is. In fact, it is likely that the inattention found in ADD is actually a result of the underfunctioning of those parts of the brain responsible for filtering information (the reticular activating system: RAS). With a poorly functioning filter, the normal bombardment of sensations is experienced as distractibility. Impulsivity is the result of the inability to select just which information warrants acting upon and which is best filtered out.

By the way, the reason that stimulants, such as Ritalin and caffeine, appear to work so well for those with ADD is because stimulants enhance (stimulate) the RAS’ ability to filter information, resulting in an increased ability to focus on what is relevant.

I think I hear the phone ringing. I’ll be right back.

My First IEP

Posted on December 23, 2013 by iraheilveil

"The Others" by JakezDaniel Photo: “The Others” by JakezDaniel

I attended my first IEP in 1980.

For the unitiated, the initials stand for individualized educational plan, and it is the very first step parents go through when attempting to receive services for their child with special needs. Although the event occurred over 30 ago, on the off chance that anyone who was there is still alive I will not mention the name of the school district.

I am telling this story now, although I have told it privately many times since then, because it was a pivotal experience in what was to become almost a lifetime spent devoted to helping children. I was a naive, freshly minted psychologist, just out of graduate school. I was working at a day treatment center in Northridge, California, and one of my clients was due for his annual IEP, the real purpose of which was to determine his continued placement and funding for the upcoming year. My job at the IEP was to present the results of my assessment, which included considerable psychological testing, and make my recommendations to the team.

There were about 8 people at the meeting, including the district’s special ed director, a school psychologist representing the school district, a special ed teacher, the parents, myself, and a few others. After a few other speakers, it was my turn to make my report. I did so, fairly calmly, even though it was my first time. (Although public speaking is the most common phobia, I don’t have a problem with it. It’s private speaking that terrifies me.)

After my presentation, the school district psychologist was called upon to comment. He proceeded to rip into my report, pointing out all the things I did wrong, telling everyone that my data made no sense, that because all my methods were suspicious it could not be trusted to reflect anything having to do with the child, and that it should be completely disregarded.

For some reason I wasn’t offended, but mostly puzzled by his comments. I had received a ridiculous amount of training in testing, and thought I was pretty good at it.

The meeting was long, and the director called for a break. We all went out to the hallway, and the psychologist who tore my report apart asked if I would take a walk with him. We walked a ways down the hall until there was no one in earshot, and he said to me, “There are two things I would like to say to you.”

“Okay.”

“The first thing is that we are not having this conversation. It is important that you understand that.” It was not the first time I had heard that sentence, and usually it preceded something intriguing, so I agreed. “The second thing I want to tell you is that that was a damn good report you presented, one of the best I ever read.” That was puzzling to me, so I just nodded, wanting to hear more. He went on to tell me that I did an excellent job, and really wanted me to know that. He added, with kindness in his eyes, “You have to understand, I have a wife and three children. I need this job.”

He didn’t have to say anything else. I knew what he meant, that the political reality of working for the school district required that he lie to keep his job. He had to make the child look as though he didn’t need the intensive services we were giving him, so that the child would come back to the district and ultimately cost them less money.

The school psychologist was trapped, or at least he perceived his reality that way, and I sympathized with him. I understood that that was the world he was working in, and I felt sorry for him. I would not want to work in a job that required me to lie or to compromise my values, and I don’t think he liked it either.

In the years that followed, I attended scores of IEPs, and hated nearly every one of them. I concocted elaborate strategies to avoid them, because with rare exceptions they were kangaroo courts. I preferred instead to encourage parents to hire professional advocates, and tried to work behind the scenes to negotiate the best solutions, solutions that always put the child first, and also recognized the difficult positions school administrators were placed in by their superintendents. Sometimes, those twains never met, but more often the compassionate understanding of the needs of both sides typically went a long way to help children get the services they needed.

The public school special education system in the US is badly broken, and it has been ever since I began working in it. Children are still routinely denied “free, appropriate” education (in the words of the law), while school district administrators still fear the loss of their jobs for telling the truth. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and its precursors were noble if inadequate attempts at fixing it, but recent legislative changes denuded it further, now making it more difficult than it has been in decades for children to get the education that they deserve. Yet, persistent, diligent, compassionate effort can and often does work, as it does in nearly every sphere of life.

Lieutenant Kennedy’s Last Words

Posted on December 16, 2013 by iraheilveil

Within the next few years, it is estimated that there will be about 7000 drones flying in U.S. airspace. Many of these will be military, but eventually many more of them will serve a variety of commercial and research purposes. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, plans to use drones to hasten delivery direct to your door. Not sure how they are going to ring your doorbell, but I’m sure that will get solved.

Things go bump in the night, as they say, and to a pilotless drone in which there is no one who can look out the window, it is always night. The “big sky” theory, which states that things are unlikely to bump into each other because of just how much space there is out there, has never been very accurate. Whether the solution lies in designated “drone airways” or any other number of regulatory schemes, more stuff out there increases the danger in the sky and, when they crash, on the ground as well.

But the danger in drones doesn’t lie solely in their dropping munitions or even bumping into things. Just about everyone in the vicinity of my age knows that JFK’s older brother, Joseph Kennedy, Jr., died as a war hero. But many people are unaware that he died as a result of a drone accident. He wasn’t the target of the drone, but rather the launcher. In the Second World War, the US Navy used radio controlled PB4Y airplanes as unmanned flying bombs (they were called “robots” then). A pilot would take off from the ground, set the course, and then bail out. A shadow aircraft would then guide it to its exact destination using the radio in the shadow airplane. Joe Jr. died when the experimental PB4Y he was flying exploded before he was able even to don his parachute. In an operation code-named “Aphrodite,” he and his co-pilot left an airfield in England heading for France, with the intention of destroying the Fortress of Mimoyecques. They successfully were able to transfer control of their airplane to the shadow airplane, and arm the explosives. Kennedy keyed the microphone and spoke the words “spade flush,” the code indicating that he had successfully armed the explosives. Those were his last words, as the explosives detonated prematurely and his airplane was blown to bits.

Ed Renehan, Jr., in his book “The Kennedys at War,” reprinted the contents of the secret telegram sent from General Spaatz to General Doolittle in August 2004 (Note that “PD” is “period” and “CMA” is “comma”):

ATTEMPTED FIRST APHRODITE ATTACK TWELVE AUGUST WITH ROBOT TAKING OFF FROM FERSFIELD AT ONE EIGHT ZERO FIVE HOURS PDROBOT EXPLODED IN THE AIR AT APPROXIMATELY TWO THOUSAND FEET EIGHT MILES SOUTHEAST OF HALESWORTH AT ONE EIGHT TWO ZERO HOURS PD WILFORD J. WILLY CMA SR GRADE LIEUTENANT AND JOSEPH P. KENNEDY SR GRADE LIEUTENANT CMA BOTH USNR CMA WERE KILLED PD COMMANDER SMITH CMA IN COMMAND OF THIS UNIT CMA IS MAKING FULL REPORT TO US NAVAL OPERATIONS PD A MORE DETAILED REPORT WILL BE FORWARDED TO YOU WHEN INTERROGATION IS COMPLETED

The U.S. Air Force publicly has acknowledged that its three principal drones have been involved in over 120 “mishaps,” undoubtedly military-speak for “unfortunate deaths.” That statistic leaves out drones operated by the other military branches and the CIA. The FAA is currently working on developing a regulatory scheme that will attempt to effectively keep drones from bumping into each other as well as commercial flights with people aboard. But concerns such as lost radio contact, or malfunctions that leave drones unable to be guided to safety, are much more difficult to address. Soon, I suspect, when you see something flying above, you best be prepared to duck.

Recalling a small Miracle

Posted on December 9, 2013 by iraheilveil

Some Sundays ago in Point Arena I decided to skip yoga and convinced my wife to go to church with me. Every decade or so this nice Jewish boy likes to get a dose of how the rest of the world operates, and I do appreciate “the message.” I had originally wanted to attend the Catholic mass, but I knew I had a better chance of enticing my wife– someone I would consider very spiritual but not religious, if I baited the hook with the likelihood of getting to sing some of the Methodist hymns she loved so much as a child. It worked.

The guest speaker gave a charming lecture, which he opened by asking anyone in the congregation of eleven septuagenarians and one young mother with a baby in her arms to raise their hands if they believed in miracles. I raised my hand, but I don’t know if I would have raised my hand had I not had a firsthand experience of a miracle. It was a small event, made eminently more credible by the fact that it was shared with my cousin Paul, who to this very day, nearly a half century later, remembers.

Three days after my beloved grandmother Gussie died, my cousin and I boarded a bus to go somewhere in Queens. We were both in our early teens, and we walked to the empty seats in the back of the bus so we could look out the large rear window. There was another bus right behind us, and there, clear as day, my cousin and I watched in silent awe as we saw our grandmother boarding the bus behind us. The two of us were speechless; we just sat there and watched her slowly walk from the sidewalk up the steps and onto the bus. Our bus then departed, and when we lost sight of her, my cousin and I just looked at each other. Eventually, one of us said, “did you see what I saw?” The other one of us, as I recall it, just nodded silently.

I recently picked up a 2004 book by Todd Michael called “The Twelve Conditions of a Miracle” at a library book sale. Michael dissects the parable of the loaves and fishes (the only parable that appears in all four gospels) in order to uncover the conditions for a miracle to occur. He goes to the original Greek of Matthew, rendering the translation in greater depth than is offered in the King James Version.

As the title states, Michael discerned 12 ingredients to a miracle stew. The vision of my grandmother did not have all 12 ingredients, but it clearly had the first. Michael talks about the need for a “vacuum,” a space which nature abhors and within which a miracle can occur. The loss of my grandmother, a source of kindness and warmth in a family filled with conflict and pain, left a gaping hole. In the story of loaves and fishes, it was the hunger of the masses that was the void. In the resurrection story, it may have been the loss of a loving and compassionate minister in a troubled world that created the vacuum leading to the vision of Jesus rising three days after his death.

I have often thought that what my cousin and I might have witnessed was simply a woman who looked a lot like our grandmother, and that our vision wasn’t a miracle at all. I don’t think either my cousin or I believe that, but after all a belief is just that. In their seminal book called “The Social Construction of Reality,” Berger and Luckmann posit, as the title suggests, that those beliefs that comprise that which we think are real are in essence just socially agreed upon constructions.

When most of us think about miracles, we think about good things that happen that are inexplicable by the laws of science we have come to believe. What is a miracle, then, but an event that somehow lives just outside the meandering border of the socially constructed rules of science?

Michael suggests that meditation is the most effective method for creating the condition of a vacuum. I am not sure that one needs to be in a vacuous state in order to experience a miracle, but it makes sense that however we come to a place of heightened receptivity, being in that place of openness to receive whatever the universe may bring our way leads to the greatest likelihood that we will experience the miraculous. Believing in miracles infuses that which lives just outside the border of belief with a precious sense of awe. And in my view, it is in that feeling of awe that we come closest to experiencing that ineffable construct that many of us refer to as God.

Note from Gagarin, Armenia

Posted on December 2, 2013 by iraheilveil

Last March, I was passing through the town of Gagarin, Armenia, obviously named after the Russian cosmonaut, and I stopped to take some photographs. Typically, as I roam the countryside with camera in hand onlookers greet me warily. I imagine that the locals see this pale-faced, camera-toting, oddly dressed person as some sort of CIA or KGB type out to pad his files with photographs of the locals. There is a popular saying in Armenia that “the KGB is still watching,” which may in fact be true, although technically the initials have changed.

But this time, through the voice of my Georgian taxi driver who was doubling as my translator, I was invited into one of the homes of some random on-looker, greeted with a warm cup of Armenian coffee, a shot of home-brewed alcohol, and a ridiculous amount of food that arrived magically from the quiet, near toothless woman who seemed just delighted to make total strangers feel at home.

I was told a story in Russian about how “in Soviet times” people were happier; they were working and could take a month off to holiday in Moscow or some distant city. Now they have to travel to Moscow just to try to find work, because there is little for them to do in the corrupt, post-Soviet Union independent oligarchical state of Armenia.

My translator told me that the spectacled, cigarette wielding man whose house we were invited into told him that perhaps this American “photographer” could write about the plight of the people in Gagarin, people who struggle to find dignity despite unemployment and abject poverty, about how they once were part of a community that manufactured clothing and served a purpose in the world.

I don’t understand really why I feel so at home in Armenia, but perhaps this tradition of hospitality has something to do with it. I am not Armenian, yet I feel called to the country in ways my intellect can’t fathom. In a country where the police will stop you randomly and argue until you reach a “settlement,” where there are two ways to do nearly everything (the official way and the way that gets you results), where winters can be bitter cold and poverty outside the capital is rampant, people still walk the streets arm in arm until all hours of the morning, and will invite you into their homes to eat and drink with their families. Somehow when I am here I feel as though I belong here, and when I am gone I miss it.

The reason that I am drawn to this place is a mystery. Maybe it is the same thing that once drew me to Ireland; the suffering that lies just beneath the surface, or maybe it’s just the cheap beer. I don’t know. But clearly, the culture of hospitality runs deep. It ‘s difficult not to feel welcome.

Clear For Takeoff

The Psychology of Flying

Author Archives: iraheilveil