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While I have not spent time sitting down to further contemplate the amazing attachment-compassion article I posted the link to earlier (Attachment, Caregiving, and Altruism:  Boosting Attachment Security Increases Compassion and Helping), I haven’t stopped thinking about it.  Because ‘exploration’ really describes our entire LIFE actions, I believe it is the end-product of the quality of early attachment patterns that build our body-brain.  This article also clearly describes how our ability to feel compassion and empathy, and to ACT response-ably with the information we receive in relationship with all of life — and in some small way this post is about that compassion.

(I add a WARNING to this post that it contains descriptions that might be difficult for some people to read!)

Yesterday I received transportation to a doctor’s appointment for a bone density scan from a medical agency.  The driver, I will call him Fred, was a 73 year old man who talked about himself on that 75-mile round trip.

As I sat down to write this post I realized that for all the difficulties I have been describing recently about my inability to process verbal information when I am under stress/distress/duress, when I feel OK (as per the article noted above) I have a GIFTED ability to listen to what I will call ‘genuine people’ who are speaking from their heart.

After some of these kinds of conversations I later wonder why I didn’t respond with ‘this or that’, yet I realize that it is often another person’s NEED to simply speak and receive the listening I have to offer.

We were traveling in the medical transport van past the low-lying hills that crop up at the tail end of a line of higher mountains along the highway.  Perhaps there was something about Fred’s gazing along the rising hills that reminded him about what he spoke of next.

Fred told me that from childhood hunting had been an important part of his life.  He told me that among his many truck driving jobs he drove for a cement mixer company.  One day (I think about 20 years ago) as he was delivering a load out to a house in the desert he was gazing along the road to the right and then as he turned his head to the left he saw them coming.

Out of the desert shrubbery right at the edge of the highway appeared in a line five pure white puppies heading straight out in front of him.  He told me there was no possible way he could swerve that massive loaded truck to miss them, and sure enough, ‘thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk’ he heard the sound of each of them being crushed to death under the wheels of the truck he was driving.

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As the writers of the above article describe compassion, it was evident to me as this man who had been a complete stranger to me when he picked me up at my house for medical transport must have had the need to express to SOMEONE the fact that he has never hunted again since that day.  As he told me all of this tears were streaming down his face.  He said he sold his $8,000 gun collection to his son for $1,000, having kept for his own possible need only one handgun.

I wondered to myself if this man could ever possibly shoot another person even under the most extreme circumstances.  Then I thought perhaps he could do so if his beloved wife was threatened.  At the same time I marveled at Fred’s wide-open expression of absolute sorrow for his actions the day he killed those five pure white puppies.

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Now, my next image — not a pretty one at first glance but an important one to me nonetheless…..

I shed my town clothes as soon as I arrived home around noon yesterday and put on my work clothes to go outside and work on my adobe garden.  I am preparing an adobe walkway that runs along the western line of my back yard, along the new tall metal fence I just built where it runs along behind the big ‘berm’ I built to kill those ancient monster oleander bushes.

The desert soil here is now extremely dry and hard and cannot be dug into unless it is first thoroughly soaked with water.  In preparation for this next extension of my adobe work I laid the gray water hose from my outside-perched washing machine along the fence the other day and let that water do its work so I could follow with mine.

I am well aware that there are parts of my yard that I am digging into now that include soil that has never been dug into since time began making it millions of years ago.  Even though I live in a small town, there is something profound for me in knowing that.

As I dug into an area of dark red clay (normally hard as cement when dry) I began to find ‘stored’ frogs sleeping.  One by one as I dumped a load of soil off of my shovel and found these tiny guests in my yard I picked them up quickly and cupped them gently in my stiff black plastic work gloves so I could move them as fast as possible over to one of my damp, soft compost areas in my garden.

As I carried them each I talked to them, thanking them for being, and for being here.  I apologized for bothering them, and wished them a long happy winter sleeping now in a safer place where they will not be further disturbed by my digging.  (My compost areas are covered with layers of leaves I have raked up in town and hauled out here, and are being kept moist through a drip irrigation set-up I have carefully installed in each bed full of worms.)

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As I dug along the fence yesterday I began to hear myself telling me that the odds were pretty dang good that one of the times I stuck my shovel edge into that red clay I would sooner or later accidentally kill a frog.  I thought about Fred and his story about the five puppies.  I told myself to prepare myself for this possibility.

Five dug-up frogs later it happened, I am very sad to say.  I saw the little frogs movements within the dirt on the end of my shovel and yet again reached for its little body to save it.  Oh, dear! —

Now I only  tell you this because there is something here I believe is important (again, what opportunities all traumas offer us for learning something new in a new and different way — if we can).

That little frog a-wiggling its body was upside-down in the loosened dark red dirt on my shovel.  I could tell it was trying by flailing its little legs to right itself, to turn itself right-side up — to right itself, to restore its ‘normal orientation’.  So I reached to help it, gently moving the dirt from around its body — at the same time I realized — Oh, dear! — that the tiny little being was missing its head.

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Of course I will always feel bad when I think of this, just like Fred does about those puppies.  I wondered this morning about both Fred and myself, and about self-compassion and forgiveness — and about whether or not we can ever release ourselves from the feelings we have if we hurt another life in some way.

I don’t know.

But what came to me about the frog reminds me of the writings on healing our woundedness from trauma that Diana Fosha writes about in regards to attachment.  I remember that she says every living being knows exactly how to heal itself — given a possible chance.  She says that human attachment-related body-brain wiring remains in existence in us from before we were born — no matter how traumatized we were later by our earliest caregiver interactions of trauma, neglect and abuse.

Fosha says we all know HOW TO RIGHT OUR SELF INSTINCTIVELY in the same way we can all look at a picture hanging askew on a wall and INSTANTLY know which way to move it to RIGHT it — to make it RIGHT.

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One of the things that strikes me about the headless frog was that EVEN WITHOUT ITS HEAD its BODY absolutely knew that it was upside down.  Its body knew exactly what to do to make its body RIGHT by taking body actions to turn itself over.

Yes, this is all unsettling — and perhaps a bit preposterous in what I am concluding from my strange line of experience yesterday.  There seems to be something about the words Fred spoke to me yesterday — and something about his obvious caring emotional compassionate nonverbal expressions — that primed me for what happened as I dug in my backyard.

It seems very likely to me that we all know instinctively IN OUR BODY exactly what we need so that we can heal.  In our culture, what we learn IN OUR BRAIN-thoughts is probably likely to interfere with what we actually need to do for ourselves to heal.  How do we listen to our own BODY as it tells us what it remembers both about all that has happened to us AT THE SAME TIME it can tell us what it needs so that it can heal?

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I am going back out today to work some more on that walk way — at the same time I don’t really know how to miss harming another little friend-frog as I do so.  Digging just carries that risk — and I can not set aside the softness I feel for those frogs even though I am going to run the risk of a repeat from yesterday.  I will be as care-full as I can at the same time I know that living carries risk — for all of us.  And sometimes it carries healing.

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