What My Father Sees

The power of attention to transform your life

Hello friends.
One of my earliest memories is hanging out in my parents’ bedroom at the age of three or so. I can picture their pair of bedside lamps, dark green glazed figures of water birds. My dad was teaching me to memorize “A Bird Came Down The Walk,” by Emily Dickinson. A poem I still have by heart.

It wasn’t until I had my own kids that I started to marvel at how he actually did that. It was some alchemy of his pure joy in the words, Emily Dickinson’s moment by moment precision and beauty, a sensibility and sensitivity I inherited, and my desire to bask in his approval.

Mom, Dad and me in 1981 or so.

My father, Rodger Kamenetz, is a poet, a retired professor of English and creative writing, a resident of the Bywater district of New Orleans, a dream worker who talks to clients weekly about their dreams, a banger-out of Dylan songs on the piano, a doting grandpa, and a revered figure in certain circles primarily for his 1994 bestseller The Jew In the Lotus, which has been called “by far the most influential text on Buddhism and Judaism.”

He’s written a book that captures all of these strands of his life somehow, and I wanted to talk to him about it. Interviewing your own family member is weird, and I’m also including some of the thoughts and subtext that were present for me in the conversation.

Behind the paywall, some more personal parts of the conversation, and my dad’s special blessing practice that I do daily.

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Zoom event next week, Nov. 11!

Seeing Into The Life of Things

Anya : What does it mean to see into the life of things?

Rodger: So, seeing into, for me, means, taking time when we encounter people, things, people, animals, plants, to feel the life in them, and feel it as a life in me.

That connection, finding the affinity between myself and these moments that present themselves to us… when we do that, time slows down, and we begin to sense the aliveness in the world.

All objects potentially have a life in them, but we have to enter into a relationship with them that allows that to happen.

I mean, I stole the title from Wordsworth, so, you know, he talked about this, and his way of talking about it is probably more succinct, which is, he says,

“With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony and the deep power of joy ee see into the life of things.”

I think what he’s saying is that it requires a shift in consciousness to see into, instead of just seeing.

And, when we do that, we enter into that receptivity… I call it the great opening.

The world, instead of being a bunch of dead objects around us that are there to be manipulated, or possessed, or owned, becomes a world of relationship.

You know, the book is really cool because you’re bringing together all of these different ways of modes of being, or interacting, or modes of inspiration that you’ve sort of pursued throughout your life. It’s poetry, meditation, blessings, dreams, and nature.

[I always knew my dad as someone who revered poetry, but he definitely wasn’t a person to make gratitude lists when we were growing up. And the level of attention he pays to flowers and insects now is totally new.].

Yeah.

How did you come to realize that you were going to craft a book that brought all of those things together?

I mean, at the street level, I got a phone call from an editor at Monkfish, who asked me if I would like to write a book. But I had long thought about this. At the center of the book, almost literally, is the experience working with dreams over the past almost 20 years, and what I’ve learned.

Of course, I wrote a book, The History of Last Night’s Dream, but that was really early, and I’ve really gained so many hours with people’s dreams, and in my own dreams [since then].

I felt a strong desire to set that down, what I’ve learned about this idea that I formulated of the sacred encounter in dreams, I mean, the language comes from Auden, but the idea is that we can look at our dreams in so many different ways…

We think of dreams in a pejorative way generally in our culture, as imaginary. We don’t even have a good word that’s positive around imagination.

Imaginary has a connotation of unreal. And what if that’s wrong, and imagination is the most real thing about us? Manifested in the fact that every night we dream in these extraordinary images that have great depths of feeling and it’s spontaneous.

I’ve come to realize the power of imagination in perception, which is related to this idea of seeing into imagination to our sense perception, we begin to see into or participate in our images.

…I learned a lot about the power of images in memory, first, from the practice of counting blessings, remembering moments from the previous day that have this quality of engagement.

And also a lot from Wordsworth, who I view as not just a poet, but really, our pioneer introspective psychologist, and…spiritual teacher that we need right now because of his relationship to the natural world.

Just responding to, like, the three different things that you said, the first is it almost feels like you’re finding a source of riches that most people don’t see as being valuable at all. It’s really striking, I think, because dreams are so forgotten and ignored in the mainstream.

[This is true for me; I don’t have this relationship with my dreams].

Right, I had a dream just the other day. Mom and I were in a mental institution. There were buildings, institutional buildings. My first job was at Spring Grove State Mental Hospital.

And, I looked up, and there were these green hills in the distance, and people were moving, and I said to Mom, we don’t have to stay here, we can just leave. And we did. We walked towards these hills .

The reason we neglect dreams, or we say, oh, I don’t understand poetry, or the poetic, is because we live in mental institutions, that is, in fixed ideas.

You know, [William] Blake called them mind-forged manacles, and so it’s all around us, it could be the next person I meet, but it’s… I’m not looking in this prospective way, the larger possibility, so…

I think that images open us up to that, just a simple image of green hills and people moving, that’s enough to move me out of all my instituted mental instructions.

After the paywall, I tell my dad what “delulu” means, and we talk about finding the slowness in the every day, at our different stages of life.

It’s interesting when you talk about denigrating the imaginary, because to me, I feel like we’ve actually split the concept, because “creativity” and “innovation” are very valorized, because that’s where you’re going to think of things that are valuable, useful.

Imagination is like a fantasy, and you know the word delulu?

No.

Delulu is Internet slang for delusional, but in a sort of playful way, like you have a crush on someone, and you’re delulu.

Cute. Yeah, well, I think we are very ambivalent about the dream. You know, we’ll say, it’s only a dream.

And then we’ll say, as Martin Luther King did, I have a dream.

One is the highest aspiration we could possibly have, that’s our dream, and the other is a delusion or a delulu. But, I view the fact of dreaming as extraordinary, because if I were designing human beings, I might not have remembered to install dreaming into the project.

And, paying attention to your dreams is paying attention to this process that’s always ongoing in you, of creativity, of creation. We are manifesting within ourselves this ongoing creation. So, acknowledging it is simply honoring this mysterious process going on in all of us.

And, ignoring our dreams is just it’s the same as the way we ignore people, we ignore the little bugs I’m always paying attention to.

We’re too busy, and we have some kind of mission that we’re on, and because of that mission, we don’t notice the very thing that maybe would give us the most richness.

The other day, I was walking down Burgundy Street, you know, where I live. It was twilight. I had a mission, because I was on my way to meet somebody at Bud Rip’s taco night.

And, there was this tall guy with blonde hair standing against his bicycle in the street, reciting a poem that he’d written.

And I just stopped, and just sort of felt, wow. My heart opened.
It turned out, actually, he and his girlfriend were the people I was supposed to meet!

The gift of being able to be a little slower, do you think of that as just part of your stage in life?

[This was a loaded question for me; I’m a little jealous of my dad’s ability to take things slow at this point in his life, where I feel overwhelmed and rushed a lot of the time. Also, as he’ll tell you, he wasn’t patient like this when I was a kid.]

No. I regard it as an affliction. The speediness. It’s trauma-born, but it is an affliction.

And perhaps you share this, I think you do. I have a pretty fast sensibility. I move fast, I talk fast, I walk fast. And I’m able to assimilate a lot of information quickly, but that in itself, I’m just realizing that there’s a kind of impatience behind that, and I see it as an affliction, so I’ve come to realize that this whole move towards paying attention to living things, is a remedy or a response to that.

Yeah, but when you were younger, you were commuting 100 miles back and forth [from New Orleans to LSU in Baton Rouge], and you had two kids to take care of, and you had work, and meetings, and writing, like, you actually had more to do.

I understand that that’s what I thought, that that was my mental institution.

Yeah.

But, I wonder about it. Is that true? Is that the only way it could have unfolded? Or was it that… that sense of…things to do that drove me was actually a disguise. Acting out of hurrying, of rushing.

The energy of the book is very gentle. I noted that when you were talking about, you know, describing the time with [my nephew], and kind of, like, taking your time with him, cracking the eggs, going slow, I know a lot of parents feel like they wish that they could take that time. [I certainly do!]

But how do we find the slowness in the everyday?

I mean, you’re in the book too, about watching the leaves move with Elvy.

Yeah, she asked a question one morning at breakfast that really, really surprised me and really stopped me.

Well, she has a wonderful poetic sensibility, you know…but the point is.you attuned to it, and shared it, and then the exchange was so beautiful back and forth, and so, yeah, it’s harder, I get it, you know, it is harder to raise children, to have a career, to have a family life.

But I feel, It doesn’t take that long. It only takes maybe an extra 5 seconds to stop.

And just thinking, like what do I feel… I’m talking to someone, what do I feel when I look in their face? In other words, it doesn’t have to be, like, a major commitment of time, but it does have to be a major commitment to seeking the blessing in everyday life.

And committing to it, and remembering to do it, you know?

Well, I think the other… the other way of looking at it, too, is, what is the productivity for, you know?

Right.

What do you want to have? Well, you want to have a life where you have leisure. What are you going to do with your leisure time? Hopefully enjoy yourself. How are you going to enjoy yourself? Hopefully by paying attention to the things that are around you that are pleasant.

Right, so do it now.

Yeah.

You can do it now. I’m suggesting that we could add a few extra moments in each encounter to remember to feel the encounter. So when I go into the coffee shop, I always take time, or the drugstore, or really, wherever I do transactional things, I always try to engage the people as humans, not just functionaries. And when you do that, your life gets richer.

And also, it feels better. It feels good to connect. And we can do that. It doesn’t take a lot of extra time.

I know. I see you doing that, and I think it’s great, and I think that’s an example that might motivate some people, because it’s about being empathetic and being respectful of other people. [I find it easier to commit to this practice for the sake of more present with my loved ones, or even being kind to strangers, rather than for my own sake].

You know, I talk in the book about the word empathy, I’m glad you brought it up. It’s also in the news, because there’s some folks saying they don’t like it, or whatever, which is kind of weird. But it’s related to this idea of seeing into, because it… originally, the German that was being translated was feeling-into, Einfühlung.

It’s, like, In-feeling.

And so, originally, it was the idea that, if I’m looking at a painting, I can feel into the hills and the movements of the shapes.

I feel it inside myself, and in there, it’s hard to tell which is which. Is it coming from me, or is it coming from it?

Same with dancing, you’re watching a dance, and you feel the muscles in your body moving, even though you’re just sitting there. So this idea of feeling into, which originally was aesthetic in the German case, got extended to empathy.

It got translated as empathy, and if I apply to each human being, if I look at every person I meet and say, really, there’s something good in them.

You might say there’s something God in them.

If you can find that point and if you can feed it back to the person, then that’s blessing. You’re blessing the other person.

I get that from Rabbi Nachman’s teaching. Every encounter might be sacred, every encounter might be significant. At least we have to hold that possibility.

Right. And there’s so many parables about that, about the angel that’s disguised.

The angel that’s disguised. That’s a good way of putting it. In in the dream experience, the angel is always disguised and takes very many different human shapes and forms, and then we get to see our reaction.

You know, I’ve had people dream, like,

“A homeless man came into my house, he came in with the mailman, and he’s moving around, and I’m getting really uptight, like, what’s this guy doing? And he just, like, comes right up to me with a pistol right to my throat. He was giving me terror.”

If you read the dream at the banner level, it’s, don’t let strangers in your house.

At the depth level, it’s…you’re trying to protect yourself at all times from anything scary. And you’re on a starvation diet when it comes to that feeling.

Mmm.

Because we need all our feelings.

I’m mentioning it because one of the things I hope for with the book is that it’ll give a response to the anxiety that’s being provoked. And the rage.

Those two afflictive emotions or reactions.

I see two factors in creating that. One is, obviously the politics of the spectacle, of the performative cruelty, the performative provocation that we’re barraged with every day.

And we have to react, either with anxiety or rage.

And then there’s the social media, which now they’ve hired a computer to force us to have these bad experiences over and over.

So, in the face of that, the French say to, reculer pour mieux sauter, to step back in order to take a leap.

We have to step back a little bit inside in our everyday lives, enriching our encounters, to give us resilience.

To face into the real crises that, you know, you’ve done so much work with, with the climate emotions.

We do need a resource. Of resilience, of feeling, of depth of feeling, in order to… then… Respond, and then form community.

Yeah, I mean, it is a deep resourcing, that’s kind of what I see throughout the book, and it’s fascinating to me because it’s almost completely the opposite of mindfulness in the sense of, like, Zen or Vipassana, the most common forms that people get taught, especially when it’s scientific, like mindfulness-based stress reduction, which is empty, empty, empty, empty.

And you’re not emptying, you’re, like, building palaces in your imagination.

Huh.

I don’t know if I’m building palaces, but I think I’m seeing the life that’s there, and it’s a wondrous thing, that there’s, like, words… and then it ultimately can lead to the sense of connectivity of a life which we need. You know, Wordsworth has this great way of saying it, and he’s talking about his childhood, after his mother died and he learned to commune with nature and find affinities between himself and nature. In all things, I saw one life and felt that it was joy.

If we can touch into that, we can’t constantly be there, but to touch into it, When we can, it helps us, I think, build community with all creatures.And, I think strengthen us to face into what what’s happening in the world.

So I like what you’re saying. You mentioned about it’s not like meditation or emptying, it’s like filling. I think that’s right. I’m valorizing imagination.

Distinguishing it from fantasy.

Distinguishing it, how?

Again, I’ll borrow Wordsworth, he had this period of depression in his life, but instead of calling it depression.

He called it impaired imagination.

The ego, the I, has a selfish, impaired imagination that constructs these mental institutions around itself.

that are full of opinions, and blame.

I like meditation, but I prefer contemplation. I value the imagination.

Suddenly having this experience of poems coming up that… as Robert Duncan said, the words were mine and not mine. That’s a big piece.

I want to talk about the development of your relationship with nature, because, of course, I remember mushroom hunting with you, and I remember the bird guides that we had, and sort of walking, being outside.

It seems to me that you’ve really gone through a lot of development and discovery in your experience, in your relationship, especially with insects and with flowers and plants, and… so I’m just curious how that got started, and how it’s grown for you.

The dream work was teaching me to pay attention to images. But it really happened, because when I was up there, in New York during the pandemic, and we were in our pod, I… the house we were staying in had a book by, E.O. Wilson. Biophilia.

It was a book that came out in the 80s.. But I really learned a lot from that book.

Biophilia means the love of living things, and his thesis was that, Genetically, we inherit, as humans, a love of living things. We prefer living things to dead things.

He believes it’s genetically encoded some way.

And it started a whole movement, like, for instance in a hospital, they found that if people can look out the window and see trees, they do much better in healing than if they’re looking at a concrete wall.

So, I think that gave me a kind of intellectual backdrop. The other thing was, because of the isolation of COVID. I remember going in your nearby park, and just gazing at, you know, hibiscus flowers, and I saw this fat bumblebee crawling out of the flower, and it was covered with pollen. I was just so drawn in to the life… around me, and the fact that it’s discoverable, if we only just take a moment. Maybe take the earphones off and, stop worrying about where I’m heading, and just, you know, just take time to engage.

Yeah. it just pushed you into paying more attention, and then the more you did… you did a naturalist certification, right?

I’m a little bit of a dropout…but…one of the things I kept feeling as we went to these natural spots was how ruined they were.

Yeah.

You know, we went out to the largest urban park, Jean Lafitte.

And because of the saltwater intrusion during Katrina. the natural grasses all died out. And in an attempt to reforest it, they replanted cypress, but they wouldn’t grow. And the grass that you see there now is an artifact… a grass from California, and there are no insects in it. Because the insects here don’t recognize the grass.

So the more I got into it, I love the beauty that I was being shown, but the more heartbroken I felt. You know, it was a mixture.

Yeah, it’s been shown, it’s shown in surveys, and I’ve seen it myself, the more people spend time outside, and the better they know it, the sadder they are about what’s happening, because they know more about what’s happening.

Well, it’s a mix. I’m sadder, but I also see there’s so much resilience and life around me, and so much wonder about it. And also, by the way, nature kind of…I mean… I was out with B. on the land there, and I saw this beautiful, purple wasp. And it was picking up this other creature, and it was much heavier, and we just watched, and finally, it dropped it into a hole and followed it in. It was a Carolina leaf roller, which is some kind of cricket or something, and this Katydid wasp was gonna lay her eggs inside the paralyzed insect who would live and nourish the larvae.

That’s crazy.

That’s what wasps do. Right in my doorstep, I saw a potter wasp. They’re amazing, because they make little pots out of clay to put their eggs in. Well, she had her eggs behind our shutters, and she was picking up this green caterpillar, and bringing it in.

So, I don’t know what I’m really trying to say, except that the sadness… there is a sadness that you get from being sensitive with nature and realizing it’s being destroyed.

But then you also see that part of that is happening, there’s destructive forces in nature, also.

I don’t know. I feel like the destruction of nature is different because it’s part of a bigger pattern, and… I mean, some people do see it that way, but I think that…a lot of people feel like there’s something… going on, that’s a crime.

A crime against nature, as you might say.

Right, I think maybe it’s worth looking at them side by side and think… I don’t know the answer.

Yeah, I think that’s right. That’s great.

Darwin studied wasps, and he said, when you study wasps, it’s really hard to believe in a benevolent God.

So, what’s the main thing that you’re hoping that people get from the book, and how are they responding so far?

It’s early days, so, I mean, people seem to be enthusiastic, but because there’s kind of a kaleidoscopic, you know, there’s scientists, there’s Einstein, there’s…E.O. Wilson, there’s Wordsworth, there’s the Baal Shem Tov, there’s, Buddhist teachers. People are picking up on different things that they already know about and entering that way. What I hope is that people… I… there are practices, it’s a bit of a how-to book, and I give people practices, for instance.

You and I have been doing the counting blessings practice and integrating it into the morning prayer, which says, basically, thank you, thanks for giving me my soul back.

I think it’d be really great to see more people pick that up, and I hope that happens.

I hope people get interested in their dreams.

I hope people relate with empathy to each other and understand that every moment is an encounter that could become a connection and a relationship.

Doing all that… Maybe we begin to create You know, to foster community.

Which will help us… In the times we’re living in, with the challenges we’re facing.

So, we’ll see. I don’t know. It’s just a book. I mean, there’s a lot of books out there, but that’s my secret hope.

The Blessing Practice From Seeing Into The Life Of Things

THE BASIC BLESSING PRACTICE

The best time to do this practice is in the morning as soon after waking as you can. You recall three memories from yesterday you are grateful for.

1. Meditation: Sit quietly paying attention to how your body is, then watch your breath until you are feeling centered.

2. Memory: Close your eyes and count your blessings. Use a moment. Use a once. Visualize an encounter with a person from the previous day. Visualize a moment of love or kindness you received from a friend, a loved one or a stranger. A word or a gesture. A touch on the hand. Using all the senses, bring to mind these moments.

You can also focus on an encounter in nature, a sensual plea- sure. Feel gratitude for the taste of a blueberry, the sound of a warbler, the melody in the voice of a lover.

Try to find three such moments each morning.

SHARING THE BLESSING PRACTICE

After you’ve practiced for a while, think about sharing it with family and friends by forming a text chain. With my children, it’s a beautiful way to stay in touch and have a sense of their everyday lives. With friends and colleagues, it’s also a way of strengthening relationship.