Sometimes in the synchronicity of the Internet, something comes our way that speaks to what we area already pondering. The bulk of this entry comes from an acquaintance, Elias Amidon, a man I have read and heard about for many years and finally met this past March when he and his wife/life partner, Rabia, came to Whidbey, where I live. They are the authors of Earth Prayers, and Prayers for a Thousand Years, and beyond these wonderful anthologies, they are also profound witnesses for peace and story. A few years ago they guided walking peace pilgrimages in Southeast Asia, and this fall they are planning one through Iran. Of course with current conditions erupting, they are watching closely, and looking for the story under the story.

Meanwhile, as I emerge from the focus of our book writing, I look around in the work we are doing and the news we are reading and am asking the question: “How do I best pay attention to what is happening now?” This question leads me to seek the story in ordinary reality, and in mythic reality. I appreciated how Elias combined the news with the muse and invite you to read his “LETTER FROM THE ROAD, #36.” The boldfacing is my emphasis.

IRAN AND THE FEATHER OF THE SIMORGH

I would like to step back for a moment from the compelling drama occurring now in Iran to look at this drama with a long-view question in mind: What does it tell us about the evolution of human societies? What does the conflict in present-day Iran reveal about what is seeking to be born on a global scale in the way we humans relate to each other?

To aid us in this long-view, let us turn to a story that is told in Iran’s great national epic, the Shahnameh, written 1,000 years ago by Ferdowsi, the most beloved of all Persian poets.

The story goes like this: a baby was abandoned on a mountainside. His cries were heard by the Simorgh, the benevolent winged deity of vast powers, who raised the baby as her own. When the time came for the young man, now called Prince Zal, to rejoin the human world the Simorgh gifted the prince with three feathers which he was to use if he ever needed her help.

And so it happened upon returning to his kingdom that Prince Zal fell in love and married the beautiful Rudaba. When the time arrived for their first child to be born, Rudaba’s labor was prolonged and terrible. She was near death when Prince Zal summoned the Simorgh for help. The Simorgh appeared and instructed Zal to trace one of the feathers across Rudaba’s belly. He did so and thus saved Rudaba and the child, and the child grew up to become the greatest of all Persian heroes, Rostam—“the world brightening one.”

Rudaba’s Labor
I trust Ferdowsi will forgive me for suggesting that the story of the birth of Rostam may serve as a parable for what is occurring in Iran—and indeed throughout the world—in this period of human history.

Rudaba’s—and Iran’s—long labor will not come to an end until the cycle of human violence comes to an end—the cycle that reacts to violence and injustice with more violence and injustice. For thousands of years this cycle has recurred, preventing the birth of that which we long for: the possibility of living together in kindness, tolerance, and peace. This possibility is “the world brightening one.” It is humanity’s Rostam: no longer a singular male hero battling injustice, our Rostam is no less than the birth of the capacity to relate to one another with open minds and open hearts rather than from rigid positions.

The seas of people now marching in Iran are seeking to end the long agony of Rudaba’s labor. They are responding to the regime’s oppression not with violence but with nonviolent civil disobedience, and, in many cases, in silence. This kind of profound nonviolent action is the Simorgh’s feather being traced on Rudaba’s tormented belly. Its inherent gentleness is the only response that can release her from her long labor.

It takes enormous courage to face oppression with kindness, to put a flower in the muzzle of a gun. If Iranians can maintain this courage they will change the course of history, joining the recent nonviolent movements that have toppled dictatorships in places like the Philippines, Serbia, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Nepal, and elsewhere. A recent study has shown that of the 67 transitions from authoritarian regimes to more democratic governments over the past few decades, these changes “were catalyzed not through foreign invasion, and only rarely through armed revolt or voluntary elite-driven reforms, but overwhelmingly by democratic civil society organizations utilizing nonviolent action and other forms of civil resistance, such as strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, and mass protests.”  (Stephen Zunes)

The Simorgh’s feather: resilient and tender, its magical touch is the heart of the Golden Rule, the heart of the activism of Gandhi, King, and Mandela, and the heart of the teachings of all the great prophets of humanity. It is the refusal to react to violence with violence.

What Can We Do?
Two months ago during our journey through Iran we met a man named Ali working in a bazaar in the city of Shiraz. Ali was a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, intensely proud of Iran and its central place in human history.

“We have been an important part of the growth of civilization,” he said, “but now we are stranded. Our minds are stranded. We cannot communicate with or travel freely in the world. People think we are terrorists—look around you, do you see terrorists? We are stranded, and no one knows who we are.”

I think of Ali and wonder if he feels less stranded at the moment, with so much of the world’s attention turned toward the events in Iran. TV, radio, newspapers, the Internet, Twitter, Facebook—in countless thousands of ways people around the world are taking part in the touch of the Simorgh’s feather as we bear witness to the nonviolent actions in Iran.

Just as it is for every nonviolent movement, the role of the witness is crucial. “The whole world is watching!” we cry, calling forth the power of shame that is heaped upon the perpetrator when an injustice is witnessed. This shaming is a curious thing, since it gets its power from an innate ethic within us—the British were shamed by having the world witness them beating Gandhi’s salt marchers, just as America was shamed by the publication of the photos from Abu Ghraib. The ruling clerics in Iran know that when they are seen butchering protesters any claim the Islamic Revolution has of benevolence becomes a lie.

So what can we do, far from Iran? We can pay attention. We can be at the other end of the tweets and the YouTube videos. We can be the watching world as the Iranians marching in the streets silently confront the guns of the military. In this way we can act in solidarity with all Iranians—the protesters and the ruling clerics and the Ahmadinejad supporters and the military—helping all of us come to the aid of “the world brightening one” that is being born.

If you want to read more thoughts like this, you may register at Elias’ website: www.pathofthefriend.org and become more informed about their work.

At the end of the memoir class I was teaching last week, we had a conversation about placing stories into all the cracks in the world.  Certainly storycatching and “world brightening” have much in common. They are ways we pay attention: ways we bear witness. To be willing to know something, to hold the story as it is unfolding, even if it appears we cannot directly interact with the experience or the outcome, does contribute something in the world. I have to believe that my willingness to be somehow is sustaining to the people of Iran, of Iraq, of Zimbabwe, of Ohio and our own neighborhoods–all those places where pain is on the surface and the story is raw.

So, what in the world are you paying attention to? And how do you think that helps? Let’s tell each other those stories.

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Dear Storycatchers, I have missed you–missed writing to you and hearing back from you as we make our ways through busy days. The new book, which pulled me off this blogging schedule, co-authored with Ann Linnea, is at Berrett-Koehler Publishers in San Francisco–in fact, on this Saturday morning I am writing from the lobby of Hotel Rex, a few blocks from the B-K offices.

Yesterday Ann and I went through a process they call “Authors’ Day.” We met the folks who will be working with us in final editing, production, marketing, and publicity. At noon, all the staff in the building that day, including Steve Piersanti, President of the company, came to lunch where we talked about The Circle Way, A Leader in Every Chair, and then invited the group of just over 20 staff and guests to push back from the board table and form an oval of chairs. We used the Basic Circle Guidelines from our PeerSpirit website to set up a round of circle process and folks responded to an interesting question passing a beautiful glass disk hand to hand. We talked about the impact of hearing every voice in the room, and then had 20 minutes of dialogue about the book.

The question we used was offered by Fran Korten, editor of Yes! Magazine, when she presented at a conference on women and leadership May 1. As a great fan and avid reader of Yes! I was glad to meet Fran, give her a copy of Storycatcher, and carry on the profound work of her questions–so here they are for you to raise in your lives as well:

• What did you notice on the fringe of society 15 years ago that is now in the center?
• What do you notice on the fringe now that you hope will move to the center in the next 15 years?
• What are you willing to do to contribute to that happening?

I jumped up and said: circle, and the power of circles, especially as an empowerment process for women. And here is a brief rendition of that story.

In 1994 Ann and I had just moved to Whidbey and started PeerSpirit, Inc. I was writing a book called Calling the Circle, the First and Future Culture. It was under contract to Bantam and when I submitted the manuscript there was deafening silence from my editor. Finally I phoned and asked what was going on… She told me they had no idea how to support this title. I bought back the rights and found a tiny press in Oregon, Swan Raven & Company, to bring out the first edition of the book. It sold 15,000 copies and connected us with a circle of colleagues with whom we are still in touch.

In 1997, I got a call from an agent who wanted to represent the book to larger presses. He sold it back to my Bantam editor and I rewrote Calling the Circle in the edition that has been available since 1998. Unfortunately, the circle concept was still so edgy that the book was categorized as “ritual/psychology” and most often shelved in the witchcraft/occult section of the bookstore–not exactly mainstream! Meanwhile, we kept doing our work, expanding our outreach, and through training other facilitators, consultants, and leaders in many fields, kept working to normalize and bring circle to center as a alternative group process. When Amazon and the Internet, and our e-store capacity came along the book could be more easily found.

In 2000, through our association with business visionary, Margaret Wheatley, PeerSpirit Circle started going global in the From the Four Directions and Art of Hosting networks, and now, Berrett-Koehler, a business book company, recognizes circle practice as mainstream enough to bring The Circle Way into the heart of their business group process offerings. So, yesterday was quite a day–as we were carrying this subtext through all the meetings. We were carrying the story under the project; carrying fifteen years of work to help a far-out, woo-woo, women howling at the moon, men drumming in the woods, touchy-feely, get it out of here(!) concept into the board rooms and staff meetings and committee meetings and nursing staff debriefs, and conflict resolution meetings where we and many others have benefited from another way to speak and listen.

In our Berrett-Koehler circle, we addressed the second question: What do you notice on the fringe today that you want to see move to the center in the next 15 years? It’s a very interesting form of strategic planning: for a company involved in both setting and responding to business trends, and also for any person wanting to redesign their lives in the current conditions of the world around us. Try these questions on yourself as a journal writing exercise, with your family and friends after dinner, in the next circle where you need of a conversation starter–and here on this blog.

When I look back, the first question creates a sense of acomplishment and perspective regarding what I’ve been up to all these years in journal writing, circle, and storycatching. When I look around, the second question gives me a way to map current societal trends (what’s moving toward deeper integration, such as sustainability; what’s moving out of the way, such as excessive consumption). When I assess how to focus my own passion, willingness, and skills, the third question helps me set trajectory.

So many of us are in a process of reassessment, may these questions lead us into an ability to tell ourselves the story of how we have navigated the social conditions that surround our lives. As we tell the story of how we got here, we notice the synchronicities and choices that shape our lives. As we create the story of where we’re going, we shine a light on the path forward.

Let’s share responses and stories and see the range of what we notice–and what we are committed to bringing from the edge to the middle!

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

My friend Deb Lund, a well-known children’s author, is traveling on school visits throughout Japan these  weeks, and her companion is her 6th grade son, Kaj.  They are both keeping blogs of the journey–shared experiences through two generational eyes. It is beautiful to read these parallel and unique trains of thought and I invite you to check them out. Kaj is a voracious reader and has started his own blog to gather and share ideas for good books for the 12-year-old set. His blog is:http://portalreads.edublogs.org/ and his mother’s blog is: www.deblund.com/blog/.  I can tell Kaj is having a great time–his blog is not being kept up to date! Imagine that, a boy living in the present moment of his big adventure! However, he did tackle a huge piece of observation and reflection–their visit to the Peace Museum in Hiroshima.

Both mother and son are profoundly impacted. Each writes of it from their own ways of carrying story.

As a person who grew up very close to World War II, who was conceived near the day the US dropped the Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and sent 100,000+ people to their deaths in a few moments, I have carried this story in my life narrative. And sometimes I feel I carry it in my psychic DNA somehow–as my soul was called in at the moment when so many others were called out. That’s an exploration for another time… what strikes me now is the picture of Kaj staring at the  rusted, twisted tricycle of a little Japanese boy who was killed by the bomb.

These are important lessons in the middle track of childhood. I remember the somber lessons from my own childhood. I was haunted by the big red book of LIFE’s History of World War II, and far more than I think my parents knew I would pour over pictures of this history that was still shaking us throughout the 1950s. My parents sponsored refugees from Germany and Poland and the tiny house of our Indiana childhood would swell with strangers whose stories we could barely know through the barriers of language and culture.

When the movie “Shindler’s List” came out, one of the responses I had was gratitude to have been shown the fullness of that horror in one sweeping story. I sat frozen in my theater chair, barely able to blink. But I was middle-aged and had studied this era. I had thought about these atrocities and come up with ways to accommodate my prenatal darkness in the peaceful privileges of my life. The teenage daughter of a friend, who was at the time much more removed and ignorant of WWII’s horrific details, was taken to the movie by her German language teacher. She came home, went to her bedroom and wept and wept. I remember her mother called me quite worried and asked, “What shall I do?”

I said, “I think she’s all right. Her heart breaking at the cruelty of the world. She needs that stamina and empathy. She needs to know she can hold this story and hold her own…”

That is also my prayer for Kaj–that he can know the story of Hiroshima and hold his own path. As a boy who just finished Lord of the Rings, he is already a student of good and evil. As a child heading into the 21st century, he is already living in the turning point. He needs to know–and to find ways to think about it–and then to go out for sushi and explore temples and let the light and the darkness make their rivers in him.

That is also my prayer for myself and all of us in this Storycatcher network–that we let the light and the darkness make rivers within us and learn to swim them both.

It seems to be an incredibly intense time at the moment. Is this temporary or permanent? We don’t know. I  made two teaching/speaking trips to California in less than a week and participated in a conference here–moving around several thousand people at a time who are infused with excitation, exhaustion, anticipation, resignation– all the big words seem to be in play. People are having life crises, health crises, work crises (not to mention Mexico shutting down for 2 weeks and serving up a big reminder of not being in charge of much of anything anymore)…

It is three weeks until Ann’s and my new book on circle is due at the publisher’s–and it is being a struggle for me to be as regular as I usually like with this blog. If you don’t hear from me for awhile it means I’m editing chapters and weeding the garden without a moment to spare for extra writing. I’ll be back in June.

I’ll miss you–please take care, keep writing, and know we’ll be back in the story circle soon.

Blessings,

Christina

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

It’s the night after Easter weekend, and while we started off Friday evening enjoying an amazingly professional concert of sections of the Brahms Requiem performed by the local Methodist church choir and island musicians, my main spiritual practice these past weekend has been largely focused on gardening. We put in about 6 hours a day prepping garden beds for our household and neighborhood vegetable plots, cheering the peas that have come up under the Remay cloth and the spinach forming a straight line of green down the black soil, and turning in compost for receiving seeds that will be planted in the coming week–and if that isn’t a study in resurrection … Besides the hours in garden beds, we dug out a 20 year old fuchsia bush that had died in our colder-than-usual winter, and moved a lilac bush into its place, and then helped friends transplant several dozen ferns and open up space for fruit trees at the edge of their woods. Not too bad for an almost 63 year old, almost 60 year old, and an almost 11 year old dog. Putting in earth time.

There is a big difference between this year and last year in how a number of folks around here are looking at gardens and gardening. We are seeing it as an integral part of island life. Not to get too bucolic, this little neighborhood is fairly suburban in how it looks, it just happens to be hanging on a cliff edge. The infrastructure that sustains us is more rural and vulnerable than many suburban areas that are hooked into huge metropolitan grids: here little housing areas are developed around shared wells and each lot has its own septic system. It’s a climate that fosters flowers and spring is a marvelous season that lingers four months. Most of the island farmland has been parceled into smaller lots and developments and the era when Whidbey was a floating truck farm sending tons of vegetables to Seattle food markets has faded into vague history.

The island itself was formed about 12-10,000 years ago when retreating glaciers created a huge river delta of debris that spewed out from the melt, then froze and compressed down into dense layers, then melted, then froze and compressed again–and when you try to put in a garden you come to understand this process rock by rock, clay by clay, sand by sand. Despite the glacial till, we do get things to grow here and more and more people are augmenting the grocery store with the garden bed.

One of the reasons we are having such a strenuous garden start-up is that we have joined with three other neighborhood households in collective gardening in the sunny back yard of one of the bigger lots. This is our second season: we have the fence in, the bunnies out, the beds tilled and early planting begun. We have jumped over the idea of strict property rights and everyone needing to do it themselves into an experiment in sharing ground, work, expertise, and food. The family with the shadiest lot is starting to raise chickens that will become part of the exchange.

There are many tangible and fairly immediate benefits to this experience and there is an underlying shift in our perceptions about what it means to live together. We talk about things: ask each other how we’re doing. All of us are hard working folks dependent on making a living to sustain our families. We are creating a safety net for whatever comes. Growing food together, and listening to each other’s anecdotes about daily life lessens our fear and increases our confidence. It is one of the signs of readiness I believe is coming up everywhere in America this spring, and hopefully sprouting all over the world: a resilience in our community efforts to take care of each other and the natural world.To me, this seems like the only agenda there: taking care of each other and everything else.

Somewhere out there grunting in the rain, shoveling around the rocky soil I composed this letter to President Obama. He and Michelle are gardening this spring–I hope they are actually getting their fingernails dirty, not just posing for the occasional photo-op. And now they have a puppy who will want to roll in the lettuce patch. All these things humanize their lives and connect them a bit more to the ordinary lives the rest of us lead.

I hope you are inspired to find your own ways toward increased community resilience, and to communicate with the leaders who need to be assured of our populist wisdom, willingness, and determination. Speak up, bend down, plant and rant.

Dear Sir,
Attached to this letter is the most disturbing article about your current policy challenges that I have read since your inauguration. Bill Moyers is the most integral voice of true liberalism, realism, and statesmanship that I know. To be the President you promised us you would be, you must listen to his voice, and include perspectives like Moyers’ in your thought process!

It is my deepest hope that you understand your job is to retool the global economy for planetary sustainability and survival of the human species. Right now, in an attempt to get the economy stabilized enough to make this shift, I call what you are doing “feeding the lions.” This is a dangerous task: for while feeding the lions, you must not let your mind be eaten by their voracious agenda.

You said you offered “change we can believe in:” I am believing in your ability to name the full scope of that change and to invigorate our willingness to step into a hugely different world than the one that has been sold to us. I also believe we are ready. I notice how we are taking leadership at the local level in tens of thousands of ways—preparing our communities to hold together in this challenge. The collective mindset of America knows the old way is over. We elected you to lead us through the largest correction of course in human history. Yes, we can—can you?
Sincerely,

Christina Baldwin

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

There have been a lot of tears in our house this past week: last Tuesday, March 24, our little corgi dog, Gwennie, died of cancer. She was diagnosed last September with an invasive tumor that started at the gum line and spread into her nasal cavity and up her snout.  She retained her beauty and her spirit while cancer grew on her nose and her breathing became more and more labored at night. When we got home from Oregon on the 23rd and went to get her at our dog-sitting friend’s, she didn’t bark and jump around as usual, just put her head in Ann’s hands. The tumor had spread into her eye, she seemed in terrible pain. We dosed her with doggy Ibuprofen, and held her for our last evening by the fire… our last evening as a household of four.

Now there are two people and one very lonely corgi left wandering around without this sparky personality who turns out to have been a much bigger “boss” of our daily schedule than any of us realized until she was gone.

Pet grief is a very personal and unique experience. There have been times when it did not seem so hard, as both the dog and I were ready to let go: with Gwennie–it’s huge. She was still young and vibrant, and had more entertaining eccentricities than any other dog I’ve known. She ran the compound: announcing people’s arrival and departures, telling Glory (her sister corgi) when it was time to walk and eat and run into the yard and get into their beds for the night… and she loved life with a capital “L.”

There are several lessons in this to share. One is surrendering to surprise. In my little book of spiritual practice, The Seven Whispers, I talk about three responses to surprise that help us practice spiritual surrender:

• Notice what is really happening.
• Work with what is really happening.
• Accept what is really happening.

For the past seven months this has been a mantra in our lives. On the day of Gwen’s biopsy when we dropped her off I thought, “what is, already is… we are just going to find out.” Then after her diagnosis, when the allopathic vet said it was not treatable, we went to the holistic vet and designed a regimen of diet and supplements that sustained her overall health and vitality while her body worked out its course with the disease. And finally, the last week of her life, we had to accept what was really happening and let her go. We surrendered–and we continue to surrender in the territory of loss and realigning daily patterns.

Another lesson from the past seven months is the reminder to live in the moment, to celebrate each day. The gift of being a dog is living wholeheartedly in the now.  For Gwennie, every day was “WOW–I’m up, what’s happening?” She’d sneeze out the night’s congestion and head into the day: let’s run in circles, let’s chase crows, let’s eat, let’s sleep. The gift of being human is being able to tell you this in words, to savor experience over and over again.

I say in Storycatcher, that story organizes life. Watching our other corgi, Glory, I appreciate again the power of story to help me cope. For Glory there is no explanation–just raw absence. We have other realms in which we move: Glory had Gwennie and the vacuum now is huge.

They were living in a partnership of dogness. Every day for the past nearly 8 years they sniffed the same pee-mail spots, chased the same waves, licked the same cook-pots, endured the same boredom waiting for the next walk.They moved in a twinned rhythm of awareness of each other’s presence and watched out for the things that concerned them with a level of coordination many of us should envy in our human relationships.

I don’t know what Glory’s experience is: I observe her lethargy and confusion and try to help when words are no help.  We three are reestablishing our household rhythms, some familiar, some new.   I believe Glory has the capacity to emerge with a renewed confidence in her role and responsibilities being the dog.

It is such privilege to be trusted with relationship across species: to have watched Gwennie rest her head in Ann’s hands–her gesture speaking the words she could not say: “know what to do for me.” Now, to work with Glory, her eyes on me, especially out in the yard, “may I go this far? no farther? Shall I bark at that neighbor or not?” Voice tone, hand signals, a recognized vocabulary of about 50 words creating the language and the tether between us. She’s learning. She’s curled at my feet under the writing desk, sighing heavily. I sigh too.

Good dog. Good grief. Little being. Big lessons. More coming.

The animal shall not be measured by man.  In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.  They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. ~Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

This past weekend, over the Spring Equinox in the northlands, Ann Linnea and I were offering our sweet spirited seminar that combines the love of nature and journal writing. This session, Spirit and the Pen in Nature, was held at Menucha Center, a large estate turned to use for many good purposes by the First Presbyterian Church of Portland which has owned and managed the property in the past several decades.

Menucha is located at the entrance of the Columbia River Gorge on a high cliff overlooking miles of basalt canyons and a string of magnificent waterfalls that shoot off the ledge of the Mt. Hood drainage and into the Columbia River and from there to the sea. One of these, Multnomah Falls, is a dramatic 611 foot plunge, the fourth highest waterfall in the United States, and quite a tourist attraction, being accessible both from Interstate 84 and the scenic Columbia River Gorge Highway built in the early 1900s and only 30 miles from the city of Portland.

So here we are in the middle of our journal writing and nature appreciating and we have designed into the center of the seminar a solo day in nature: time and space to move around in this magnificent landscape in the attitude of pilgrimage. It was Saturday, the first day of Spring–yes our landscape would be shared with other people, with a stop at the espresso stand, with getting in and out of cars–and the invitation remained: to move as a pilgrim, to practice an inner attitude of listening to the voice of nature, to the open heart, the observer’s eye, and the greening mind into the water-tracked forest. Be back at our retreat house by 5:00–everything else: you decide.

Ann and I headed up and around Multnomah Falls, a 5.4 mile loop with 1700 foot elevation gain that would take us about four hours of walking, stopping, photo taking, marveling at the depth of green, the trees that had fallen in winter storms, the creeks and waterfalls roaring through the rock face, and the lifedeathlifedeath cycle of the forest.

And here was our big surprise: people. This is not an easy trail. There are many switch backs getting folks up to and down from the ridge line. It was rocky and muddy and the weather switched from cool filtered sunshine to clouds to pouring rain in the course of the day. And yet, we passed at least a hundred people from babies to other 60 year olds, folks walking their dogs, children and many college-aged young people. And diversity: Hispanic, Asian, East Indian, Middle Eastern, African-American, and Caucasian folks all enjoying the same magic of nature–though each in our own ways.

It gave me great hope: that young people want to be in the woods, not just in the computer game version of the woods, that young families are bringing their children out to take part in nature adventures, that couples where the women are in saris or scarved in Muslim attire are walking in the gorge of the American west. And we are all smiling, nodding in passing, saying hello, holding each other’s cameras for those look-where-we-are photos. Could world peace be this easy? Could nature stitch together what religion and politics have torn apart? Well, it’s the first day of spring–and anything is possible.

In the midst of the rain, at the end of our hike, we passed a family coming down from a 2-mile loop up to the top of the falls and back. A baby in arms, and two little girls, the oldest about five. They were soaked! The little girl and I looked at each other: her hair plastered to her face, wet hoodie, wet sneakers, she was practically skipping through the storm. Here came a huge grin, and she announced to me, “Wow, isn’t this place awesome?!” Now, that’s a true child of the Pacific Northwet! I wanted to pick her up and hug her, and I want to save the natural world for her to be hiking in when she is sixty!

Taking a hike in the natural world is a great way to savor the beauties of life without needing to spend any money! And maybe that is part of what got people out of the city and into the forest–the bounty of Nature. There is so much given us to enjoy–all we need is to discover what’s next. Here come the songbirds, and the snowdrops and then the daffodils.

May you have a week full of new eyes.

Christina

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

We were out in the garden prepping the ground for planting the early peas and spinach–something we can do in March in the Northwest (though it did snow a bit Sunday and it’s been blowing ever since sun/rain/sun/rain, etc.). Anyway, I was troweling around and found half a potato from last fall, a small Yukon Gold, shovel cut and undiscovered. I gave it a glance and tossed it over the garden fence and into the field next door. As soon as the little tuber left my hand I had the thought, “That is the gesture of someone who can still go to the grocery store and buy more food.” And I wondered if I would ever be hungry enough that I’d be grateful to find half a potato and maybe even contribute it to the making of Stone Soup.

All my adult life I’ve been a person who recycles and saves and shops at the thrift store and looks for bargains. It’s a game of hide-and-seek I play inside this huge consumer culture. In 1968-69, my first year out of college, I was paid $3600 working in the peace movement, and I saved $1000 and went to Europe. I rode my bicycle and buses and bought my first used car for $200 when I was 30–part of the advance upon selling my first book. The list goes on, and I won’t recite it here. Suffice it to say I have traded a lot of security in order to have a self-designed, self-employed life. I have no regrets about that: it was a choice. It’s still a choice and I have a very comfortable level of frugality. For me, frugality is grounded in belief that consuming less is necessary for right relationship with planetary resources. I choose it: I am not desperate about it. And then, as I tossed half a potato over the fence, I began wondering what conditions I will be asked to face in the coming months and years and how I will respond as frugality becomes a necessity. For surely, in the great rebalancing of humanity’s place in the world, frugality is our path forward.

A few entries ago (2/08/09 “Taking Stock) I wrote about the conversation I had with my Zimbabwean colleague who was heading home to a country in ruins–and yet felt rich in knowing that in his Shona culture there was always a place to run to, someone who would share their last potato. I have just heard more recent news from Kufunda Village, the learning centre and experimental village outside Harare. They haven’t had electricity for two months since their transformer blew up–so they decided to take themselves off the grid intentionally, to study other ways to power themselves. The big concern is getting water from their bore hole and running an electric stove where the community cooks communally–and offers hospitality to the groups that rent seminar space and guest houses from them. The country’s health care system has pretty completely ceased to function, so they are running a clinic of herbal medicines at the edge of the farm. (For a fuller understanding visit their site www.kufunda.org. If you have some money you want to give, you can do so online and support their preschool, the herb farm, their shift to sustainable power sources, and their human spirit.)

These people are my teachers about frugality and resilience! I think of them often these days, and the challenges they face living collaboratively under the social conditions that surround them. Jackie Cahi, the director and interface person between the village and the outside world writes: “…we have opened our space and our hearts and are hosting constantly - mostly the Tree of Life, which conducts healing circles.  This partnership is a perfect synergy for our healing place.  It is challenging without power to draw and heat water and to cook for large numbers each week.  But we are earning enough to keep going - to pay ourselves and to do some work in the communities.  It’s a good feeling. I say tentatively that we are growing….. stronger, wiser, braver, more powerful, and that we know and hold the ground on which we walk.”

I look up and down the street on which I live–thinking of the 25 homes that comprise my little neighborhood, and wonder how we would do if we had to be frugal together. If we had to keep the cook fires going and homes heated and share resources. I want to believe that the great majority of people have an innate spirit of cooperation and altruism in us: my life work is invested in making that story true.

To make that story true in my own life, I offer a tangible gesture–this year, I am committed to eating or feeding others with everything we grow in the garden–no more potato over the fence. I will practice developing a truly appreciative relationship to the food that comes my way and to steward the earth’s abundance within the community. In the midst of a summer teaching and consulting, I’ll be taking a class on safely canning vegetables, and I’m saving Mason jars from the thrift stores. I have marked off dates in my fall calendar that I’ll hold for the work of harvesting.

No way, am I ready to become a subsistence farmer, but my family and neighbors and I are practicing how to live a very local life. Meanwhile, we’re working on a new book, supporting the books and work already out there, and keeping an eye on the world.  Frugality continues to be my choice, my teacher, my connector between myself and conditions in wider world.

How are you changing? What is your tangible gesture?

I’m listening.

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

It’s been three weeks since we last “spoke” in this conversation. I’ve been traveling in Indianapolis, Indiana and Columbus, Ohio for the past 10 days on a teaching trip with Ann Linnea doing our PeerSpirit circle training. And it was heartrending to observe the level of financial pain. Houses with boarded up windows were evident everywhere we drove around Indianapolis, and the Columbus Dispatch  was running a front page series on getting through these times while the unemployment rate in Ohio rose to 8.8%.

In the midst of this, we’ve met wonderful people.  In an inner city Methodist Church the congregation and neighborhood are engaged in mutually supportive programs that evolve their sense of “beloved community.” Then we worked with a health care association and foundation whose wise leader said, “The more we work internally as an authentic community, the more we can extend authentic community.” Their entire staff had already been using PeerSpirit Circle Process and we were invited in to help deepen their practice. The last two days of the week we spent at The Ohio State University. I gave a speech on Story as Leadership, and then Ann and I did a day of story practice and circle training for over 100 people—making little “campfires” around tables of seven participants. In each of these settings it was wonderful to watch the confidence of their leadership spread around the rim, and to be present as they shared meaningful stories that expanded acquaintanceship.

This is humbling work, or at least work we offer humbly: to be invited into the heart of people’s lives and facilitate qualities of conversation that change how we hold together in these times. The responses to my previous entry, “Taking Stock” moved my heart for I see that many of us are taking the opportunity to reassess what most matters in our lives and to seek a spiritual layer within themselves and the way they carry the story. Do read these entries in their entirety, they are thoughtful and engaging.

One of the writing theories I love to work with is the idea that we make story at several levels simultaneously: the Story of the Day, the Story of the Times, and the Story of Meaning.   When the story line falls apart at one level, we have two other levels that can sustain us. As we collectively grapple with ongoing and increasing change in the Day Story and the Times Story, we will need to reach more and more deeply into the Meaning Story. Certainly by the responses and bloggish dialogue emerging here, we are engaged in puzzling together our personal and collective Meaning Stories.

To make Meaning Story, I will often write in the third person—still about my own life, or experience, but metaphorically, as though writing a fairy tale or fable.  Once there was a (wo)man who… And from there I let imagination and reality mingle until I find myself writing out the patterns that I’m living through and provide myself with a sense of stability and where to step next…

Once there was a woman who walked among the boarded up dreams of ordinary people. Her heart was saddened to see these signs of struggle and loss. “These are not the lives that should be broken,” she thought, for she had walked through other streets as well where the walls were gilded with promises of unending plenty. “And yet,” she strode on, “as the people learn so the leaders will learn. What is the lesson? What is the new story?” She rounded a corner, and there was a fire going in an old metal barrel. Some folks had made a band instruments out of trash–a string base, a garbage pail drum–a woman sang, children clapped and ran around each other making play out of the moment. Someone looked her way and smiled. The woman swallowed her nervousness at meeting strangers and smiled back, joined the song, and emptied her pockets looking for things to share. “Here, it begins again…” she thought. “We will find the way.”

These little tales don’t have to be long–they just need to reinforce the patterns we want to maintain for ourselves and those around us, and set one impression or image of guidance into the field of our imagination. Write a fairy tale… and we’ll go from there.

Blessings on this day, and on the folks who are shifting their dreams, and on the folks whose dreams have been shifted–ready or not.

Christina

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

A note of appreciation: I am so grateful for the quality of comment building on this blog–and thank many of you for writing in these past months. I read every comment, and  smile and greet the names I recognize:  friends, long ago students, and storycatchers coming in whose names are new. If you haven’t clicked into the comments, take time to do so–it’s a great community. I have an impulse to respond to each of you personally, and have decided I pretty much have to hold the boundary of how I spend my writing time. I can do this blog, and I can write the book under contract, and manage the business, and I can’t take on much individual response. Please know my heart says hello to each of you commenting, and each of you reading. Thank you.

I’ve been commuting back and forth all this past week between my house and our exquisite local retreat center, The AlderMarsh, where we teach when we’re home. I was guiding a small group of women writers through the complexities and magic of a circle that is gathered to have an experience together, while at the same time focusing on the depth of their own works-in-progress. Most of them stayed on-site, so I was the bringer in of news from the world–and it’s not an easy time for morning sound-bites. In conversations that plunged into depth and poked into many topics, we kept raising the question–So, what’s really happening?

This is the most recent example of being in small groups where we are seeking a deeper story that will prepare us for the conditions that are really coming our way. I cheer when President Obama calls for a cap on the CEO salaries of corporations in bail-out, and snarl at the idea that these people are so removed from the realities of the rest of us that they can even imagine taking millions in bonuses and buying private jets, but that’s just one layer of the problem: I believe we are finally facing the imperative to retool the global economy.

In a recent article written for Merrill Lynch, I highlighted these quotes from economic analysist David A. Rosenberg:

“We are witnessing epic changes in the ways in which people approach how they move around and how they allocate their budgets, especially with respect to discretionary spending and their attitudes toward debt.” …
Since WWII, (78 million boomers) ensured that even the most dire recessions were modest… Now, the baby boomers are done. … there is no pent up demand for discretionary items in the household budget. The average household owns nearly $40,000 of non-housing durable goods assets (i.e., the art, the third SUV, the fourth television set, etc.)… The boomers are not just satiated, they are over-saturated, and since one of the few booming segments of the economy are consignment stores, …these assets are being liquidated so the marginal household can trim its record debt and interest burden.”

Wow, I had no idea that buying my teaching wardrobe at Senior Thrift would kick off a national trend (and economic downturn!).  A year ago we paid off our mortgage and we live debt-free. We have plans if our income continues at current levels, and plans if it drops. We live in a community in conversation about local sustainability.

I’m sharing this because I believe the current financial crisis raises the need for conversations that ignite a passionate willingness to redesign our understanding of the material world so that we–people, businesses, communities, and countries– can establish a new equilibrium and move forward into the realities of the 21st century. I’m an English major, a Storycatcher. My last math class was 10th grade geometry. Yet I know wisdom resides in each of us. We can assess what is happening in the larger story and design our lives to survive and thrive.  We can build the path forward, story by story and insight by insight, and action by action.

This is my first entry on this issue. I invite us into conversation, here, as well as wherever you are living.

• What are you talking about? Hearing or reading about?
• Who are you talking and listening to?
• What stories inspire you? What scares you?
• How are you framing the facts so that you can hold them with confidence?

At the end of January I had a conversation with a member of the Kufunda Village community in Zimbabwe where we visited and taught in 2007. He had been on a respite travel time here and I asked him what it was like to be in the US during the Obama inauguration, and also what he was taking home to speak to his village. He said, “It is terribly hard in Zimbabwe right now. I am afraid to go home and see what inflation has done to us in the time I’ve been gone. And I also go home to say, ‘there are ways we Zimbabweans are still rich. Rich because in our country there is always someplace to run–people who will take us in, who will share their last potato. Here, I see that people don’t know who will help them. They close the doors of their houses and suffer alone. This must be so much harder.’ ”

Wise words from one of the “poorest” nations to one of the “richest.” My interpersonal work now is to participate in conversations where we break the remaining taboos of isolation and start the conversation and share the stories that will help us help each other in the necessary losses and unexpected gains of these times.  I still have extra potatoes–let’s talk.

Christina

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Last Tuesday, Inauguration Day, I don’t think very much work got done in America–and from what I hear from Canadian and European friends, a lot of people took time off  in other countries as well to watch Barack Obama become President of the US. We went to the local library to watch a video-stream on big-screen, and to sit among neighbors and be emotional together in public. Parents came in with kids, the Friends of the Library served coffee and cinnamon rolls, and it was a ceremonial moment. We cheered when the folks on the Mall cheered, stood when the national anthem played, and listened carefully to his first words to us from this high office of authority.

That night we joined about 300 Island folks to dance in the Freeland Hall. This wonderful community building has served to hold so many local functions from birthday parties and weddings to town hall gatherings, to canning the harvest, and wakes for the unchurched locals–I dare say this was its first “Inaugural Ball.” Potluck, of course. Someone’s son set up a sound system, and soon this high spirited crowd of mostly white folks were dancing to various decades of music under a projected CNN feed repeating the Inaugural moments. Children ran across the stage, playing in the video stream, their dancing, laughing bodies becoming part of the imagery. How different their America is, how different it will be, from the America of my childhood.

There are several thoughts from this moment that seem important to note–for this is a day of huge change in our national story.

First, the presumptions of my childhood are truly and (I pray) irrevocably over. Growing up in the Midwest of 1950’s and early 1960’s, America was presented to me as a white country with barely acknowledged minorities (none of whom were evident in suburban Minneapolis where the diversity in my entire school was the presence of two Jewish sisters). Media and advertising imagery was white, and all the people around us were white, and everyone in our school-books was white. Though my parents were sincerely liberal, the reality of other American subcultures was beyond my protected grasp…. and within the privileged cocoon of my skin and the places I have lived, the diversifying of the US has remained to some degree elusive in my consciousness–until now.

Today white Americans saw America as it actually is: wonderfully multi-ethnic and multi-dimensional. We are invited to truly understand that white people are part of the mix, but not the dominators we have sadly tried to be. The crowd at Grant Park on November 4th, the nearly 2 million people on the Mall on January 20th, this is us, the US, now. I almost feel in need of being welcomed into this new country. And it has changed my sense of relationship and dialogue with all those strangers around me: how we see each other within this diversity, now that we are led by a man of diversity, is a wide-open story. I am eager to notice what shifts in the coming months and years.

Secondly, the thought went through me that my generational impact is starting to wind down. I was born in 1946, the first year of the Baby Boomers. The eventual 75 million of us have been a huge cultural wave–reinventing fashion, music, arts, social norms, and liberation and consciousness-raising movements as we pushed forward decade by decade. And now, after just two passes through the Presidency, our generational leadership is replaced by this vibrant young man.  Two thirds of the people in Freeland Hall raised their hands when asked who was older than Obama: he is not young enough to be my son: not old enough to be my brother, the other end of the Boomer spectrum.

For the children and the grey-haired, our local party was over by 10:00 PM. The balls went on in Washington, and Michelle and Barack were out ’til 1:00 AM on a weeknight. Then he got up after 6 hours sleep and headed into work to try to make a functioning country again out of the mess we’re in.

Little work got done on Tuesday, and a lot of work has been getting done ever since! Every day there is a list of actions taken to correct our course, to restart America’s presence in the 21st century. It’s not possible to wipe out the past 8 years and the profound damage done in our name to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, the folks who used to live in New Orleans, the young soldiers who used to have arms and legs, those who rest in the bloodied ground… It’s not possible to comprehend the shift from a $237 billion budget surplus in January 2000 to a $1 trillion budget deficit in January 2009. And yet the pervading mood  is a sense that truly an old story is over and a new one has begun. (Newsweek Magazine gave GWB an 81% shame rating as he left office: and Obama had a 68% approval rating at the end of his first week. The lady at the drugstore said today, “I didn’t vote for him… but I have to say, I’m impressed.”) We are picking up the threads of a different narrative and going on from here

And when a new story is gelling, it’s important to avoid assumptions about how things are going to go, or to set the path too firmly because we don’t yet understand the full range of possibilities. The storyfield needs to stay open-ended, ambiguous, contributory. My job, as we enter Obama’s Presidency is to keep praying thankfulness for his/their safety, and to keep open to the mystery that is unfolding in the world around me, from the local to the global, to keep noticing what is mine to do next. That’s what he is doing: the next thing, and the next: and that is what I’m going to do as well. And I’m going to continue to ponder my expanding awareness about what America is, what she might become, and what we grayheads have to offer the new age we set in motion while Obama grew up, and went to school, and to Harvard, and to Chicago and to Washington.

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.