On the day Kevin died, I took my dog for a walk in the woods...
Written by Jenya Chernoff
On the day Kevin died, I took my dog for a walk in the woods.
It felt like the most appropriate way to process: Kevin began that way with most people who made the journey to his farm. You’d arrive with your problem dog who had run out every other option, and Kevin would say, “Let’s walk.” Everyone I’ve met who also made that trek speaks reverently of that daily walk in the woods, the deep talk, the big fish dog stories told on that lush New England trail with its overgrown century-old stone walls, lost and shredded tug toys, and random training stations involving cable trolleys or sections of chain link fencing.
As it had with many others, the model blew my mind. It still does. It had made the quantum leap to a somatic view of behavior years before those ideas had entered the popular consciousness in the form of human PTSD therapy. It shifted the focus from moral or psychological evaluations to the body’s capacity to experience energy, how the nervous system processes input, and how to rewire it into the pro-social, cooperative expressions fundamental to a dog’s being.
It was in those woods that I saw for the first time what it looked like to have a complete, unequivocal love and acceptance of the dog. These hard-case dogs trusted Kevin no matter what bizarre, uncomfortable exercises he asked of them. They trusted him because of his complete trust in them. Kevin had total faith that the social template was always in there at the core; and he loved a dog’s wild nature enough not to fear it. No part of him was at odds with what they were, even at their worst. In nature, he would point out, we don’t talk about good or bad energy. If someone falls off a cliff we never say there was too much gravity. How many of us even truly have been able to embody that with other beings? To say and really feel, “Go ahead, let ‘er rip. Show me your darkest self. I will not judge you for it." Every part of myself knew this was the trainer, and the human, I want to be.
“On the day Kevin died, I took my dog for a walk in the woods.” I started to write this post about thirty-seven times in the last five months. And then the world turned sideways.
One day I walked on solid ground meditating on natural philosophy and how to best honor a mentor’s legacy; and then the gods sunk their hands deep into the fault-riddled bedrock of our world and threw the whole thing up into the air like confetti. I had no inspired “hot take” on any of it that I felt needed to be added to the hot take pileup, and in any case any perspective I thought I’d fished out of one week’s events always seemed to get washed out to sea again by the developments of the following week. The spring-into-summer of 2020 has been like being caught in the break of a wave, over and over: no solid ground to be found in the turmoil; and with each surge all we can do is kick and flail and wait for it to pass over us until we are able to find our feet and take stock of what’s left behind.
In the first days of the lockdown, as the rush of understanding washed over us that something enormous and unprecedented was happening, and as people scrambled to find new ways to reach out to each other, I naively imagined that maybe humans would align around the common danger of our New Big Predator and pull together in one big kumbaya. Boy, was I wrong. What happened instead was what happens in the body under the unrelenting accumulation of unresolved stress and energy with nowhere to go: it started to erupt along its fault lines.
What happens in the body is a microcosmic mirror of what happens in the planet, in wider systems; all systems of flow, animate and inanimate, move in the same ways and form the same structures. A lung is a leaf, is a tree, is a bolt of lightning, is a nervous system, is the branching of a river delta, is a synaptic cluster. Constructal law softens the line between the animate and the inanimate. Living things exist as ways for nonliving things to move more efficiently through space; the animate is simply a more specialized flow system for the inanimate. Immediate moment theory took this concept further to propose that emotional systems work the same way. Emotional charge exists to conduct information through time, and from one organism to the next.
The internet may be the greatest transmitter and amplifier of emotional charge our planet has ever known. We can now instantly transfer the nervous spike of our stored stress to thousands, millions of other emotional body-minds, anonymously, from afar. If emotional charge is a flow system, the technology we’ve created has vascularized it so completely that, in moments of rage and despair in the face of human ignorance, hate and brutality, I’ve wondered if we serve it more effectively than it serves us. I admit it’s been hard to have faith in the human social template when most of our interactions occur in this disembodied space where, in the absence of our living breathing selves, our demons battle one another in an echo chamber perfectly tuned to the frequency of our fears.
Kevin’s theory of emotion proposed a singular force of desire behind all things; a state of pure attraction, a desire to connect. Wanting invokes an inherent vulnerability, giving rise to its shadow, Fear—the collapse of desire. Fear has been the subject of a lot of discussion in this time. Much of the conversation is about what is and is not a reasonable fear; and what a reasonable reaction to fear looks like. And out of this disagreement, a chasm of seemingly unbridgeable animosity.
Today, on Kevin’s birthday, I wanted to reach back and feel again that human I wanted to be. That human that understands the darkest expressions in terms of a greater whole and a fundamental social desire to connect. To zoom out far enough to be able to see that, just as chaotic systems evolve into organized systems, this society’s deep inner trauma brought to the surface by the compression of the pandemic is ultimately the energy of evolution. That the cascade of rubble thrown in the air by the gods is what’s needed to free up the raw material for new systems to form.
Too much of the conversation has been about whether our hearts’ desires are reasonable. Annihilation of the old makes space for the formation of the new, and in that space I want to have a conversation about what a society with heart looks like.
“Heart knows no reason. Heart is persistent and dogged and wants what you want, and will fight to the death to get what you want. It’s serious. It’s not romantic…Heart does the work of evolution. Love does work.” — Kevin Behan, “The Intelligence of the Heart,” interview 2018