I’m up in London, Ontario as I write this. Ann Linnea and I just gave a speech on the ages of women’s wisdom. It was a lovely event, no podium, no power points, just an evening of conversation. As an extroverted storyteller who does this fairly often, I am comfortable in front of hundreds of people, but Ann, as an introverted storycatcher, finds the invitation to offer a speech daunting. She does it well, but it costs her a lot of energy. So when Brescia University College asked us both to speak, since both our books are well known to their intended audience (check out Ann’s classic, Deep Water Passage, A Spiritual Journey at Mid-life, on our company’s site: www.peerspirit.com) we wanted to design a way for both of us to be comfortable. We came up with a kitchen table–where so many rich conversations occur–and asked Brescia to arrange the stage that way with two lavaliere microphones, a pot of tea and two cups, a candle… Ann and I sat in chairs and talked through the topic of the evening, and then jumped down into the audience to open up the dialogue.  It went over so well, I think they will establish this arrangement as the new format for their annual Sophia Lecture series.

And as a gift at the end of the evening I got a new and intriguing story. One of the women told me that when her son was in First Grade, his teacher invited all the children to bring a treasure from their lives that they would be willing to part with and together they’d put all these things in a time capsule, marked and storied, and buried in the school yard–with the agreement they would dig them up at their tenth year high school reunion. The woman’s son, now in his mid-20’s, can hardly wait to return to their hometown for this reunion and the chance to dig up the box. 

The more I thought about this story the more I loved that teacher for her insight and farsight, and for trusting these children to keep a covenant with a future that they could not imagine at age six.

One of the chapters in my book, Storycatcher, starts off with my burying a box for the future to find when I hid my journal during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and at the end of the book I write about hiding some treasures and a letter in a gap under the counter when the kitchen was remodeled in 2004. I think there is a theme here: that most of what we know about the past, particularly the far, far, past, comes from people intentionally or inadvertently leaving treasures for the future to find. So, I invite you to think about what you might want the future to find from your life–not just the landfills full of plastic and styrofoam, but messages… maybe to yourself twenty years hence, maybe to your grandchildren, maybe to the seventh generation. 

I dug up my journal, buried only for a week in the midst of that crisis, but I’m leaving my letter under the counter, and sometimes I look for other ways and places to hide things that I will never see again but that I hope pass into the stream of time and the mystery of the never-ending story.

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS