Monthly Archives: December 2008

ANNOUNCING THE LIFE GROWTH BLOG

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Some time early in the new year I will be rolling out the Life Growth Blog. It will be devoted to addressing human rights and hopefully provide a forum for you to write in and talk about what you feel are some of the injustices you and or others are dealing with.



In my lifetime I have seen the poison hands of injustice damage and in some cases destroy the lives of far too many good and decent people, including me. And while I am willing and ready to write about the injustices done to me (there has been a plethora of them over the past two years or so) this blog is for you too.


While I cannot save and rescue everyone, while I cannot right every wrong or straighten every distorted and dysfunctional bend in our culture, I can do my best to add my voice to the mix on behalf of others.


On this day in my country’s history, there are laws that seek to protect the rights of the disabled, people who are gay, lesbian, black, Latino, Asian, etc. But too often the laws lack bite, lack the necessary mechanisms to right the injustices they were meant to confront and address. I am firm believer that injustice brought into the light will ultimately perish.


I have worked in the field of brain injury for more than 13 years, and I have seen good programs go bad, struggling programs do good, and, in some instances, people in leadership positions who have everything on their minds but the rights of those they serve, the survivors and their families. What people with brain injuries face is an example of what too many people with disabilities face.


Hopefully, in this coming year, the Life Growth Blog will shed some light onto these things, and perhaps be a voice for all. Even those who provide services deserve to get well. If they don’t, then they deserve to get out.


The blog address will be: http://lifegrowth1.blogspot.com/



(Please note numeric 1 after the word lifegrowth)


Happy New Year to you all.


Peter S. Kahrmann

12-31-8

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NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS? OKAY, SOME

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Of all the holidays New Year’s means the most to me. No, I do not go to parties or loud gatherings. Not interested. But I do like it as a time of reflection. What has the concluding year, in this case, 2008, been like, and what do I hope for in the new year, 2009? Well, for starters, I don’t want 2009 to be anything like 2008. This year has been packed with bullshit and betrayals. On more than one occasion I have made the decision to let something slide, although I am carefully rethinking each and every one of those decisions.


As for New Year’s resolutions? For me, first and foremost, protect my sobriety. I will celebrate seven years of sobriety this July and I know, or have learned, that anything I put before my sobriety I will lose. Part of protecting my sobriety means growing my sobriety which, in my case, will mean taking better care of myself physically. I want to get back into a physical conditioning ritual. Moreover, I want to write, write, write. And, of course, continue the weekly workshops I facilitate for brain injury survivors, their loved ones and professionals in the field.


I will also do everything in my power to support a wonderful woman I was onced married to who now battles a medical condition that wants to, if not take her life, make her as miserable as possible. She has the heart of a warrior and my money is on her, but that does not mean I will not seek to move mountains for her. If giving up a limb would mean the demise of the medical condition she faces, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Faster even.



I can tell you this, knowing what she is facing makes me far less patient with the bullshit in life. It makes me wish it was 35 years ago, a time when I would have simply tracked down the cowards that betrayed me this year and simply, well, you know, at least smacked’m. Fortunately for them, and for me, I am sober, and, blessedly, non-violent.



And so, for now, I will get well, resume life, love those in my life with all my heart and all my might, and simply discard those that bring pain, dishonesty and bullshit into my life. Not a bad way of losing weight and increasing my spiritual fitness.



Anyway, stay safe all. Be well in this new year, remember to live.

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A SIMPLE TRUTH

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Like any year, 2008 has had its up and downs. One of the ups for me has been this blog. The growth in readership has been staggering. I’ll show you. The last three months of 2007 recorded 261 visitors for October, 245 in November and 394 in December. This year the numbers for the same three months look like this: 1,245 visitors in October, 1,716 in November and 1,245 and counting in December. The blog now has on or about 1,000 regular readers from around the world. That, may I say, is humbling.

Thanking you all for visiting this blog, which of course I do from the bottom of my heart, falls far short of how much it means to me knowing that you think enough of what I write to make me a regular part of your reading life. While I am blessed with many friends in my personal every day life, there is some special about my connection to all of you. Perhaps it is because when I write, I am closest to me. Something like that. While a small minority of those who read this blog are people I know, the huge majority are people I have never met and many are from around the world.

This blog has been visited by readers from places like Great Britain, Austria, Canada, Saudi Arabia (hi Jackie!), Italy, Sudan, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Kosovo, Czech Republic, Sweden, Mexico, Australia, Hong Kong, the United States and others. Amazing.

Then again, maybe not so amazing. Perhaps one of the gifts the web gives us is a glimpse into a very simple but often forgotten and distorted truth; we are all equal members of the human family. It does not matter where we come from; we all eat and breathe and want to be loved and want to love others; we all have dreams and hopes and all of us, all of us, deserve to be able to be who we are – safely and with dignity – in the world we live in.

I may well write another piece before this year is out. I’m not sure. Know that I am grateful to you all for your presence in this blog. I wish each and every one of you peace, love, friendship, good health, full healing, peace of mind and more in the year and years ahead.

Peter S. Kahrmann
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PEACE

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It is no coincidence that the majority of Christmas cards I’ve had the pleasure to retrieve from my mailbox this year have the word peace on them. In many respects, the word, peace, is my favorite word in the language. Not for its sound, mind you. I think the word Tuckahoe may be one of my favorites when it comes to a word’s audio reality.


With my country at war on two fronts, it makes sense peace is on the minds of many, in and out of my country.


Peace, real peace, comes in many forms. The human mind and body, relaxed and at ease. A society built on understanding and acceptance rather than judgment and harsh discipline. There is the peace that comes with the alleviation of hunger and suffering. There is the spiritual peace one feels when experiencing a sunrise or sunset. There is the peace one feels when holding hands with a loved one. There is something gentle and exquisite about hand holding. While I don’t think I’ve been as good at it as I would like to be, the wonder of it is not lost on me.


Then too there is something Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said: “True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.” It dawned on me, when I read that sentence of King’s, that there cannot be peace where there is injustice.


There is also the cautionary note sounded by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay Self Reliance. “A political victory, a rise in rents, the recovery of your sick, or return of your absent friend, or some other quite external event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.” While I am not sure that I entirely agree with him, I do agree that no one but you can bring you peace. It is in how you respond to and relate with the events in life, not so much the events themselves. Okay, maybe I do agree with Mr. Emerson. More thought required here.


I know that for me and quite a few others I know, this has been a brutal year. I have had been stabbed in the back by a nice array of slimy types, one or two so steeped in their own arrogance they don’t think I know it’s them that did the deed, and still others so oblivious to the fact their fellow human beings have feelings they are, I sadly suspect, beyond repair or redemption. Thankfully the repair and redemption parts are not for me to determine. Do I forgive them? Yes, of course I do. But do not for a moment think that forgiving them means I do not think they should be held accountable. They should be and they will be. Remember what King said about the presence of justice.

When I talked quite some time ago to Brother Gregory, a wonderful friend of mine, about my anger and hurt at being betrayed by some I trusted, he instantly right-sized me by saying, “Peter, people betrayed Jesus. What makes you think they won’t betray you?”


This has been a rather wandering and poorly written piece, and for that I apologize. I can attribute it to my still fighting off a fever but I think that would be a tad disingenuous on my part.


Here is what I can say, to all of you, including those that done me wrong,who read this blog. I do hope the day comes when peace, true peace, is your constant companion.



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A GLIMPSE OF WRITING THOUGHT

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Over the years I have, more than once, been asked, How do you write? I am generally successful in fighting of the urge to respond with, I’m inclined to use words, and instead respond with the more pedestrian and accurate response of, I don’t have any idea. I just do.

I still don’t know how I write other than to sit down and have at it. Sometimes what lands on the page is admittedly horrifying and I want to retreat in shame forever and hide under a mile high pile of blankets. And then, sometimes, the words come out and dance life onto the page and I am frankly never sure how much I have to do with it. A sentence will escape my hands and leap onto the page and damned if I know how it happened.

But I can, should you be interested, give you a glimpse into a moment that led me to reshape a recent blog piece, first called, Dancing with a Miracle, now called, Dancing with Miracles.

There was part of the piece that orginally read:

I’m in the sweet silence of falling snow
I’m dancing with a miracle

When I re-read the piece a few days later my mind locked onto these 13 words. The genesis of the piece in the first place was the magical silence experienced in a beautiful heavy snowfall. I then thought, if I am in the sweet silence of it, meaning standing in the sweet silence of the snowfall, then I am surrounded by miracles because each and every snow flake is, in and of itself, a miracle.

And so the line was changed to

I’m in the sweet silence of falling snow
Dancing with miracles

Of course the title of the piece was changed to Dancing with Miracles.

Anyway, there you have it, a tiny glimpse into some writing thought.

It dawns on me that there is an answer, of a sort, that I can give to the question How do you write? I try to stay open to and connected with all that is going on around me, experience all that is going on around me, because it is in the experience of life itself that the sentences are found, the phrases emerge, and the miracles, like each and every one of you, make themselves known.
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