Youth Counselor Mike Clark of the Powell House – he has been a counselor there for 18 years – wasted no time in making the RISSE refugee children (many on the soccer team) comfortable at the youth center where they will go on retreat at the end of May.
We brought them there to day to meet Mike and see where they will be eating, sleeping and playing for two days at the end of May. None of them have ever done anything like this before, and I know in my heart that this will do them much good. Ali felt it also, and so did Maria.
Mike showed them around and then suggested a few games as a way of breaking the ice. It sure did. In this game, one of the kids is the leader, making hand and other gestures that the other kids follow. A volunteer – in this case, Ali leaves the room while the kids get started and has three chances to guess who the leader is – the leader has to make his gestures out of sight of the volunteer.
The sound of the kid’s laughter and engagement was powerful to me, I had not ever really heard it before to that degree. These children have suffered greatly, and are habitually shy and wary. All of that was stripped away in minutes today, I can just imagine what a weekend will do.
Come and see. I’m putting up more photos and an album on Facebook.
I’m not sure I have the words to tell you how happy I was within minutes of bringing about a dozen of the refugee children from RISSE to the Powell House Youth Center, where counselor Mike Clark made them instantly welcome, and had them dancing and laughing and talking more joyously and openly in 15 minutes than I have seen them being all year.
Mike has been a counsel at this Quaker Youth (and adult) Retreat in Old Chatham, N.Y. for 18 years, and it was astonishing to see how skilled and sensitive and knowing he was with these children, who are habitually shy and cautious, and for many good reasons.
They just loved the place, as the video and photos will show. I’ve seen these kids in different settings, and I’ve never seen them open up so completely and quickly to anyone as they did to Mike and the Powell House.
They felt completely at home there, and it was a joy to see this empathetic and intuitive professional at ease. These children speak five different languages and have communicated with Ali and one another partly through a common understanding of soccer.
Mike showed them around the building – where they would sleep, eat, play and have some time to themselves. He told them there would be no cell phones, laptops or video games and other electronics during the May retreat – we just wanted them to see the Powell House today.
He asked them about their lives and stories, he showed them where they would eat, sleep, play and think. Then, he said, “let’s play some games. I have all day.” He was exceptionally generous with his time and his skills as a counselor.
“This is about people,” he said when the kids looked stricken that they couldn’t bring their cell phones, “we want to get to know you.” Some of the kids looked at him in disbelief, but by the time we left a couple of hours later, everyone was laughing and smiling and asking if they could come back sooner.
Ali and I were thrilled at how excited and relaxed the children were to be there. Honestly, this was my dream for them, Ali’s too, and Ali will have his own basement bedroom during the retreat. It’s important to him and the kids that he be around. I’ll spend a night as well.
By the time we left, the kids were playing chess, ping-pong, guitar and reading books in the library. It was good to hear they might have a couple of days away from social media and screens.
Ali has been driving this kids all over New York State for years to offer them support and community, and he said it would be wonderful to see some other teachers help. At this retreat, he said, he might even be able to sleep.
This is just what we wanted for them, a structured, safe and healing place to go with trained counselors to guide them and help them talk about their lives and selves. I felt better than ever about this retreat, and I thank you so much for helping make it possible.
Maria came also, she was just as pleased and excited as I was. And Red hung out in his usual easy and loving way. Two of the children are afraid of dogs, and we tried to work with them and Red. He’ll wear them down.
I gave the Powell House a second check today, I’ve paid $1,400 so far and expect to give them the remaining amount in the next few weeks, I have until May.
I have a personal history with the Powell House, a gorgeous mansion and woodland acres donated by the late Elsie Powell to the New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. I attended the Powell House when I needed a retreat, and so did my daughter Emma. I know what a special place it is, and they specialize in holding retreats for young people who need one.
Their mission statement is quite accurate: “It is a place to be safe and open, a time to rest and reflect, and a group in which to feel deep relationships. You bring yourself and not much else: a commitment to respect and be present for the other attenders, some clean clothes, a willingness to be open to the experiences that present themselves… It is a weekend to step back from the busy world and leave behind the stuff that clutters our lives. We sing, dance and slouch on the couch. We swim, sled and swing. We play games, learn names and share a massage. We sit, we run and we nap. In the midst of all that, we connect with ourselves and each other.”
They keep their promises, the Quakers have been helping refugees and immigrants for years. Even though I no longer live in New Jersey, I’m a member of the Montclair, N.J., Meeting, which I will always consider the center of my spiritual life.
I also began discussions with the Powell House staff today to see if we can’t get some of the other RISSE students – the younger boys and girls to some youth retreats, as well as the girl’s basketball team there over the next year. They will love it there. It may be possible to get some financial aid for their programs, I’m gathering the forms. It would be much too expensive to fund-raise all of these visits through the Army of Good or me, so I will ask for help.
The individual retreats – the soccer team and the basketball team – are something I can handle, hopefully with your help and in the Fall. I hope to help them get to the Powell House for a week of camp in the summer.
This was a great joy for me, and for Ali. I’ll put up a video of one of the games they played, and photos of some of the things they did. I’ll also put up a photo album on Facebook. Thanks again. I almost started crying when I saw how happy these children were being there, how safe they felt, how right the Powell House is for them.
When American born children face trauma, tragedy and suffering, they are quite appropriate offered trauma, grieving, counseling and pediatric or psychiatric care. As I know well, and as our culture is learning, the effects of trauma can be devastating.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk is the country’s leading expert on development trauma (PTSD) in adults and children.
It occurs as a continual process, he has written, not just in isolated incidents. “No one can see it” means “it never happened” in our society, he has written. “No one beat me or raped me. What’s wrong with me? Our brains and bodies hold trauma all of our lives.
The RISSE refugee children come from different cultures. Trauma is rarely treated or discussed, these children rarely speak of their experiences, and every one has experience the most extreme kinds of trauma – war, genocide, conflict, flight, the loss of one or both parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, life in refugee camps, and the staggering challenging of adapting to so different a life in America, now quite often in the face of hostility and conflict.
At the Powell House Quaker Retreat in Old Chatham, N.Y., the Quakers and their trained counselors have been dealing with childhood issues like trauma for many years. This is why I’ve arranged for them to spend a weekend there in May, and asked for help in raising the $2,100 in fees.
I’m not asking for more money here today, I’ve already asked for help, and people can offer it or not, it is out of my hands.
I’m writing this because Maria and I and Red (the kids always want Red, he is their mascot and good luck charm) are going to the Powell House today to meet Ali and the ten children who are going to the May retreat (we did not have the funds for more at this time). ChrisDeRoller, one of the two counselors who will be running the youth retreat, will meet us there. Mike Clark can’t be there today.
I thought it would be a good idea for the kids to see the Powell House and meet some of the people there, this kind of experience is a first for them. And the Powell House is a focused place – no laptops, cell phones or video games for two days.
The kids serve themselves food, wash their own dishes, make their own beds, clean up their rooms, take care of the grounds. It will be different for them. I wanted them to be prepared for it.
I am hopeful about this trip, it could be the most meaning thing possible for them, it could be a life changer. We’ll have to see. I could be the first time many of them get to share and speak of the great disruption of their lives, the loss of their homes and many family members, their lives in poor and sometimes violent refugee camps.
Ali will be with them the whole weekend, I hope to drop in if invited for some of the sessions. There is a personal connection here. I converted to Quakerism when I was a teenager and my daughter and I attended several Powell House retreats. She joined the youth program there.
I’m bringing the camera, I’ll report back later. For me, an exciting and perhaps emotional trip, I hope it helps these lovely young people understand who they are and how trauma can shape their lives.
I don’t express my politics in arguments on Twitter or Facebook. I express them through my life, for better or worse..
In 1925, Frederick Lewis Donaldson gave a sermon in Westminster Abbey London, it was called “The Seven Social Sins,’ they were reprinted and often quoted by Gandhi.
For me, it is a political manifesto, though I would be shocked to hear it adopted by a politician. It expresses the values of the country I love, the one I wish to live in.
This list of social sins reminds me that my country is broken, and can be healed.
I’m recovering from pneumonia, and still taking several powerful medications, including steroids and antibiotics, still experiencing a wracking cough, and when Maria and I woke up together this Sunday morning, I could feel that we might want to make love, this passes between us by some secret pathway, we just know.
Having had no sex in my life for many years, and carrying all the scars and inhibitions of the traumatized child, I do not ever take love for granted now. Being loved is my daily miracle. In all of my life, I had no idea in my life what it might be like.
But the truth was, I did not think I would be able to make love to Maria this morning, between my coughing and headache and other post-pneumonia echoes.
In fact, I often want to make love and worry that I might one day not be able to – I keep reading this often happens to older men. I sometimes dream that I will wake up one morning, and it will have happened to me. When you have lived nearly 60 years without love, and then find it, then the very idea of life and consciousness is altered.
Older people are not supposed to talk about their sex lives, they are not expected to have any sex lives.
All the more reason to talk about it. As it happened, we did make love, being open does not mean sharing all the details, but I was once again relieved and in awe of what love with another human really means.
Even a decade ago, I was beginning to parrot the old talk I was hearing – at our age, etc., etc. – I had give up on love and happiness, I did not expect to experience either again in my lifetime. It felt like the first death. It was the first death.
But the spirit can be resurrected, even if the body cannot.
There are not many good words for it, even for a writer, but I see love – and its first cousin, happiness – as a matter of trust, safety, openness and the fusing of one soul to another. It’s a leap of faith. A great risk, a great reward.
After I make love, I feel different, grounded, connected to the world in a particular way. I feel alive, and known and for at least a few moments, safe and open.
For most of my life, I would never permit myself to be naked in front of any other person, including my wife. I thought others might find it disgusting or repellent, something common among former bed-wetters and traumatized children. And you will never see my wearing shorts.
Sometimes, I walk naked around the house for a few minutes in the morning, and I absolutely revel in seeing that Maria loves me for just the way I look and am, for what is inside of me, not outside of me. She is always delighted when she sees me walking around naked, as if there are some mystical Google glasses than transform me into some handsome young man.
Her delight tells me a I am loved, and I will never take that for granted again.
Making love makes me happy, and making love with someone I love makes us happy together. I feel connected in a powerful and particular way. No games, no uncertainty, no pretense. The giving of one’s self to another.
One day I may not be able to make love in familiar ways, but you know what? I will always find a way. Love is bigger than the body or any single part of it.
For people, love, when it is real, is a spiritual thing, not an animal thing. I don’t make love for release, but for just the opposite – the most joyous kind of connection.
I know many older people who are sensual, wise and experienced in human connection. For us, unless we perhaps are the President, or those other awful men, love is not about impulse or release or instinct. It is not about dominance or pride, it is humbling, not arrogant, the complete submission of the self, the release of ego and fear.
After we make love, Maria and I simply hold one another, and most often fall into a deep sleep, a rest so deep and rich it only comes after love’s release from water and lament.
it is an affirmation of the heart and soul, the mystical pathway that connects us to other people and binds us in affirming and nourishing way. Happiness for me is about spectral moments, flashes of the glory of the world.
This morning, I was reading the always compelling and stimulating weekly blog Brain Pickings by Maria Popova – I recommend it very highly for those who like to think about things other than the news – and one of her topics this week is happiness.
Popova quotes a number of writers and poets about the meaning of happiness – Whitman, Emily Browning, Camus – and I spent some beautiful minutes thinking about what happiness is.
“What is happiness, anyhow?,” asked Whitman. “Is this one of its hours, or the like of it? – so impalpable – a mere breath, an evanescent tinge? I am not sure – so let me give myself the benefit of the doubt.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote of love “that it is well to fly towards the light, even where there may be some fluttering and bruising of wings against the window panes, is it not?”
The philosopher Albert Camus wrote that “there is no love of life without despair of life.” I believe this is true and important. Just as light follows darkness and Spring follows winter, pure love is revealed after loneliness, sadness, disappointment and despair. Love is nature’s antidote to life, I believe.
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness,” wrote Mary Oliver in one of her poems, “it took my years to understand that this, too, was a gift.”
She also asked, “tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” In my mind, I answered her back. I want to love and be loved, I said. I was breathing a little, I realized, and calling it a life.
Camus also write that being happy was a moral obligation. Happiness, he said, was like committing a crime. “You should never admit to it.
Gandhi wrote that “happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”
The Dalai Lama also speaks often about happiness, he said the purpose of life is to be happy. The people who lead us and bring us their “news,” are not ever happy, and they offer us nothing but darkness and despair.
I have come to embrace the idea of happiness as a moral obligation. I find that happiness is contagious, if I am happy the people around me are happy. If I am happy, I can make other people happy. If I am happy, I am generous, drawn to do good.
We all have a fundamental right to be happy, and for me, happiness comes in moments, in flashes, in feelings, in connections.
I would hate to be happy all of the time. I would hate – I did hate – being happy none of the time. It is immoral to live a life of misery without love or meaning.
I won’t ever take love or happiness for granted again.
