How My Father, Robert, Listened ...

(found on Facebook)

One of the things my father was great at was "really hearing" me (and most others). Not only was he great at listening and understanding, but his understanding went beyond how most people understand: he "got" the meaning, the emotion behind the words, the yearnings and personal philosophy behind those words, the words as they were meant, and even sometimes the past experiences that made me say those words. I have never met anyone in my entire life who came close to him in this way.

I attribute this remarkable and unusual ability to his childhood: he often talked to grown-ups who cared about how he thought, what he thought about, his ruminations and his interests, and they asked a lot of questions. And then when he went to Farm and Wilderness Camps in the summer (a camp run by "lovey-dovey" Quakers), he learned to be non-judgmental, or at the very least, to keep asking questions and looking behind the scenes to get answers that would reveal a pretty good approximation of the truth, i.e. "as close as it gets". 

Who does that these days, an age of "a hurry to judgment", quick fixes, band aids, putting people in roles and hierarchies and if and when they resist, bully them until they submit to it, and self absorption to the point where it seems that most people only care what they themselves think, rather than caring about the truth (the truth has to involve what others think and experience if it is to be "the truth"). 

It means the world we live in is a world of "untruths", of made up or exaggerated stories and explanations.

That is the world I have been shocked by since 2013 when my father died (more explanation HERE and HERE). That world was largely "his world", past and present, or many of the people who surrounded him. He protected me from it when he was alive, thus the "full force" did not hit me until he died. Many, many nights I have cried over what he lived through (because I had to come face to face with those same people). He deserved so much better. It became obvious very fast to me that too many people around him did not listen to him, or really hear him, or even really care all that much about him. I saw it in more vague terms (more as an outsider), and then when it was thrust on me after he died, it became overbearingly obvious to me as if I was continuing his lesson of it. 

But he had also left me instructions in dealing with them: "don't be docile." 

In these people's lives he merely provided "a role" in their lives, and in that role, he was greatly taken advantage of (even professionally: his architecture for a house on the coast, for instance), selling his things, you name it. Some people did understand him, and I thank people like Moonlight Davis, Paola DiStephano, Richard Hooke, Ken Webb, the Traschens, and some of his older students who really sought him out and understood his true nature. 

So, here was my father, the great listener and empath, out to love, out to gently understand, out to create peace and beauty in the world, surrounded by people who never cared about him, who never listened to him or cared to understand what he was about, only to defend what they were doing in relation to him (which was not about doing right by others by a long shot). These were people with snap judgments, interested in "what he could give" them and their creature comforts, rather than what they could contribute to his life and to his memory. How awful! 

Serving as his daughter in his steed and as his trustee did not garner better behavior. I was treated much the same as he was. His compromises and being bullied to submit to their demands did not help me in my fight "not to be docile". I occasionally melted into docility and hopelessness (what I call "The Cinderella role" they wanted me to play), but I also heard his voice in my head enough to get police involved and begin a campaign of exposing, something he would never do. As with him, they used what ever power and control they could gain from the situation for them, in the utmost way they could use it. In living through what he lived through, I understood the all-night high-anxiety walks through the town that lasted off and on for years, the inability to sleep, getting up at the crack of dawn to keep the mental wheels from spinning and the desire to fix un-fixable things from driving him crazy, the long walks by himself to clear the air, the need for exercise and finding beauty in the natural world (i.e. the world without people in it, the world he photographed), the drawing inward towards projects, the sad voice over the telephone, the panic over whether he was going to be able to hang on to what he built, the call to help when he was being strong-armed and threatened, the confusion over being smeared (confusion because what could they possibly gain?). 

There were the town meetings where he was ever-polite, and knowledgeable, and explained things in patient detail, but where others with less knowledge shouted over him. And there was even the sadness he had over seeing a woman whom he regarded as family never acknowledge or appreciate the work he had done for her (even selling it to get something else she wanted more, and using the hard work he had done for her to gain personal profit). 

In fact, too much of what he accomplished in his life was either sold, given away, claimed as theirs, destroyed or taken for granted. This will probably always bother me. So to keep it in perspective, it is my duty to show what he accomplished so that it doesn't just get forgotten or end up in someone's next garage sale or attic or distant unsure memory.

I also understand that he was hurt much more over what these people did to him than I could ever be, thus my tears over understanding the extent of what he lived through. Why the emotional brutality, when he also was a soldier in World War II where he lost his entire unit? Why couldn't you all be kind to someone like that? Why couldn't you appreciate it instead of using it for your own self gain?

I was never close to them in the way he was, where they could rattle my resolve to the core or effect my life to the extent that they effected his life. Who he had in his life would certainly effect me, but I have a happy marriage and I was able to pinpoint ways he and I were doing things that weren't working, and "go into the new" -- i.e. less brutal lessons. 

But, the "going into the new" was something I felt I did for both of us, as a path to answer our joint problems and issues, especially when I was around empaths. I was able to accomplish a lot in the way of both work and understanding for both of us with empaths in my life. Our paths were very, very similar before then, even down to education, making things, music, teaching, and criss-crossed a lot, until 2001, or so, when I met my future husband, and began the very slow journey of discovering what both my father and I were missing and needed to know (i.e. in order to get beyond "being effected", beyond being Cinderellas in someone else's play, and at "the truth"). 

My mistake was that the way my father behaved, in terms of really listening, really making it his first duty to understand from a compassionate point of view, to get all of the facts, to realize the emotions, normalized the experience for me at an early age. I thought I'd find a lot of people in the world, just like my father, who would hear me and care. Nope. If anything, I experienced too much of the opposite: people telling me what I experienced, what I felt, what my intentions were (to dominate me) without asking once for accuracy, talking over me, demanding from me what they wanted and expecting me to take orders at all times, or just being asses in trying to get their own way all of the time, every time. In other words, the opposite from the way my father treated me. 

But, he was also often treated this way too with the exception of his childhood. So he understood my dilemma.

The kind of people I wished he had quizzed were some of the domestic violence counselors I have met over the years. Then he would have been able to understand so much more, even down to why people want to make war or fight for civil rights. Then he would have been able to not only point me in the direction of not being docile, but he would have understood every step needed in the process on how to do it and what it takes.

And this is when I hope that "the spirit" of our dead loved ones truly linger, to see it all through, the blunders we make, and the successes we realize. 

With love

P.S. This is to say that true empaths really listen.

P.P.S. This is also to say that empaths also need to be awesome lie detectors and bullshit detectors. 

the role of Albert Bigelow in our lives

Albert Bigelow's obituary from The New York Times

with my father's handwriting in the corner

One time I asked my father (Robert F. Winne) who he liked and admired most from my mother's side of the family and he said without hesitation, "Bert Bigelow".

It is easy to see why my father would have a special place in his heart for my Uncle Bert. For one, my uncle did not judge people based on hearsay (and there were a lot of false stories circulating about my father in the family at that time). I saw my uncle quite a bit because he was the trustee of the school I attended, and some of my one-to-one conversations with him were about my father and how much they had in common. 

My parents were divorced at the time, so my father would often come to the school on his own to visit or on one of the drives for my school breaks and we would run into my uncle. My uncle took us out for lunch a couple of times and he and my father would have long talks about architecture (they were both architects with a similar philosophy, aka The New Urbanist Movement ... Uncle Bert, in fact, helped with a Massachusetts government sponsored project to build low-cost housing for veterans). Although my uncle had long since moved on to a life as a painter by that time, he was interested in my fathers perspectives about humane buildings and civic design, and indeed, Uncle Bert asked to see some of his projects and send materials in the mail. I have no idea whether written correspondences went beyond that, but I wouldn't be surprised. They seemed like kindred spirits.

In many ways, their lives followed similar paths and interests.

Uncle Bert served as a navy lieutenant commander aboard destroyer escorts in the Pacific during World War II. He became disgusted with war, and in the early 1950s became a Quaker (upon reading the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi).

My father went the same path (even with the reading of Gandhi) except he became a Quaker sooner, and served as a common soldier in the German theater and fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

Both also became active in causes. My father's causes were mostly civic (protesting in town halls), though he did join and support some national causes too ... whereas my uncle's causes were mostly national (protesting nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and being active in civil rights causes), though he did join and support some civic causes too. 

Uncle Bert can be seen in the PBS series about the Freedom Riders ... or you can hear his name mentioned in the Democratic National Convention in this video. He is also mentioned in Black History Month in this issue.

As for me? Although I saw him as a child at his house and my Great Grandmother's house on Cape Cod, it wasn't until highschool where I forged a meaningful deep connection with him. He sent letters and cards to me up until he died with the greeting, "Dear Twin". I think we may have been twins in more ways than one.  

He was a teetotaler (like I am) and major events at his house were alcohol-free. I remember talking with him about alcohol on a few occasions. He flatly said, "Alcohol is poison" as he was pouring juice into a glass from a punch bowl at a wedding. When I pressed on about the subject, he said it poisons the body, the spirit, the morals and the drive to do anything useful for humanity (keeps one stuck in narcissistic concerns). I have come to a similar viewpoint, at least where it concerns an active addiction. 

The obvious artist connection is there too (my art and music blog is here).      

And as with him, I look up to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and don't back down from injustices and immoral policies easily.

If I were to pick a member I admired the most from my family on my mother's side who I personally knew, it would be Albert Bigelow too.