On Thursday afternoon November 27, American Thanksgiving Day, 15 people started showing up at our house for the annual ritual of gratitude and feasting. The group is fairly stable now–all islanders and two friends from Vancouver BC who come down when they can. Actually, the two Canadian friends are the longest participants since they started coming in 1994 when we still had children in the house and they were the surrogate aunties. Then as we met newcomers to the island we added them in ones and twos and the gathering grew. We had to use both the elongated dining table and a card table this year–who knows, next year we could be having two full tables. We cook the turkey, stuffing, gravy, and everything else shows up from appetizers to apple pie!

For Ann and me it’s a way to come fully home, to enter our island time at the completion of another year’s work–which is mostly travel away to offer seminars and attend conferences. One of the things we are grateful for are the friends who hold this community life in place for us–some of them gathered around the table, and many more who make Whidbey their home, and our home. 

So, of course there is a sense of story that comes into the day: we bring magazines, scissors and glue into the living room and cut card stock into the size and shape of placemats. Everyone is invited to make a collage of what they are thankful for this year. Not everyone gets into this activity, it’s voluntary… and provides an activity of gathering and snacking.

Then, about an hour before the turkey is done, we pull chairs into a circle in front of the fireplace and with a talking piece do a round of check-in. There is a candle lit on the coffee table in the center between us, we are listening without interrupting as one-by-one each person has the opportunity to hold a small stone in his/her hand and then speak– either using the collage or their memories as prompt. I think the deepest significance for me, and perhaps for those gathered, is that we are at a full resting point: nothing intrudes. No football games, no cooking details–just us, having made it another cycle of seasons. We take some long slow breaths into this slowness and then the stories rise. A community service project, a bike ride across America for charity, surviving cancer, a car wreck, the challenge and blessing of meaningful work, the hopes we have for the next year, how the now grown children are doing and where they are this day. 

When we are done, we bless the food and recite our prayerful concerns for the wider world. Then the last minute scurrying begins. People put their collages around the table, candle lit, songs sung, we sit down together, and eat and talk for the next 2 hours… there’s only so much one can eat, but there’s a lot to share in stories and discussion. Some of us are family, good friends who see each other often, neighbors… and some are folks who only see each other this one time each November.

It always amazes me how willing people are to speak their authentic stories into a space where it will be honored, into the presence of this little tribe of listeners. For this I am most deeply grateful!

What are you most thankful for right now?

Tell me that story!

In the concluding chapter of my book, Storycatcher, I focused on the power of story to inform, inspire, and activate–especially on how story creates a sense of community, and that all communities create story. At the time I wrote this book (2004-2005), questions of hope and despair were huge in my mind. We were in the middle of the downward spiral of the Bush years that have led us to even greater downward spirals in the economic lives of ordinary people as well as nations, even greater environmental urgency, and 30+ other major local, national, and global crises. So why do I feel so much better?

I have hope. And it was not until that moment in Grant Park, in downtown Chicago two weeks ago, that I realized how bravely I had been carrying on with much of my heart encased in despair. That despair is falling away like an encasement of dried mud through which–all out of season as it is–a strong green shoot is pushing through. Something green is coming in November, in January, and in my American heart. As a public person, I don’t think it’s very useful to get up in front of people or lead seminars and focus in on despair. I have spoken and written with as much hope as I could muster for the human condition and our abilities to take the great leaps forward that are surely necessary for our survival, and the survival of the ecosphere in which we live and breathe and have our being. However, privately, I have endured much despair. And the election has lifted this despair: not just in me, but in so many people I am talking with, listening to, reading on the web and elsewhere.

We are discovering in ourselves a personal reattachment to hope, and the maturity to know that hope is not an emotion, hope is an action. Hope is doing something, and keeping on doing it. And it requires a vision to organize hope: that is what President-elect Obama provides me, a sense that an organizing principle is in place that can help bring the good deeds, hopeful stories, and desire to contribute to the common good to some kind of focal point. 

In this same chapter of Storycatcher, I paraphrase a Ray Bradbury fable about a time when people are full of dread for the state of the world and what the future might bring. Into the city one day, a young scientist comes to Central Park pulling a huge contraption. He announces to the gathering crowd that this is a Time Machine and if they like he will travel to the future and see what happens. Despite their fear, the people send him off to time travel. In a great rattling thrust the machine lifts off and disappears. Time passes.

One day the scientist comes rattling and chugging down out of the sky, lands in the park, and jumps out to deliver his news. The people assemble, cringing in trepidation, but the scientist looks remarkably cheerful. “Great news!” he tells them, “The future is much brighter than you think. There is peace and justice, enough food and water, people are living in cooperation and walk gently on the earth.” The people are stunned: this is not what they had expected. Something begins to stir in them–a sense of participation, a desire to do something to help make this happen. They set off to create the future that has been promised them.

This is exactly what I feel is happening in the US, and perhaps elsewhere, right now: something is stirring in millions of people. We are experiencing a sense of participation, a desire to do something to help make the world the kind of place inspired in us through the victory of Obama–which is really a victory of vision and values. A victory of restoration of hope. I know it’s going to be work. I know my income may plummet, that I may be caught in the larger story in ways that bring on hardship–but the story now has an organizing principle that aims toward common good. So, I find myself willing to face risks, to make sacrifices, to accept challenges–it’s a good way to spend the rest of my life.

In Bradbury’s story, years pass, change happens, and while life is not perfect, the world is indeed in better and better shape. One day a curious young journalist goes off to find the scientist, now a very old man, and his Time Machine. He is retired, gardening, the machine a rusting hulk in the middle of his lawn. “Tell me about your journey into the future,” she asks.

The old man smiles, “My dear, I didn’t actually go anywhere,” he admits. “I just gave the people hope.”

President Obama has a much harder task: he has given us hope, and now he must lead a lot of actual work. What we make of this moment is not only his, but ours. I saw a button the other day, I may be ordering them for Inauguration Day gifts, that reads: “The most important position in any government is CITIZEN.”

Okay, I get it. Let’s go!

Wow. What a phenomenon to participate in the US election and to watch reaction to it at every level, from my own open heart, to the community level where people are clustered in coffee shops and store aisles and on emails talking, talking, listening to each other’s stories of what just happened. And then to watch and listen to the voices of ordinary people juxtaposed with television news pundits, to see clips of people celebrating around the world expanding this conversation and reaction.

And what is it we are watching? Well, at the Storycatcher level, we are watching America choose a new story.

We are watching US citizens say to ourselves that the old guard and the established interests have failed us, have betrayed us, have no further right to claim power. We are saying at the ballot box that we are courageous enough to jump out of our entrenched thinking and try something new—try someone new. We are saying that we will override all hesitance in order to have leadership that can frame the challenges before us and help us move through them. We are acknowledging the absolute necessity of having a leader who is capable of negotiating with all the conflicting interests that want to hold onto power and money, and to turn to the people over and over and help us create a story of who we are now, and what America is now.

A few years ago, when teaching in Europe, I asked my Danish colleague, Toke Moeller, who is a master invoker of questions if he would send me home with a good question to ask Americans. He looked thoughtful for a few seconds, then pronounced, “Ask each other–what else could America be?” 

Watching Barack Obama become President elect Obama, standing on the stage at Grant Park last Tuesday, I thought to myself–here is something else America can be: a country admitting its multi-racial, multi-ethnic roots, seeing our melting pot history in the face of a melting pot man who will bring us/US into the 21st century to join an interconnected, melting pot world. And now that he has made it into this question, we need to keep asking each other this and other questions in an ongoing dialogue of creative invention. What will America be now? How will we respond to the next crisis now? How do we discover our unity and recover from the polarity that has been drilled into us?

I don’t know–but I’m heading with excitement into a dialogue to find out! 

Late Sunday night, two days before the US election, I wrote the following email–and sent it out bcc to about 150 contacts in my address book.  By noon on Monday I had heard from over 50% of those readers, and they had documented how many times they had passed it on into their lists… so it had reached 10,000 that I know of! So many people, in the US and around the world, are eager for the attack ads of the US political process to be over–and are looking for something positive to do.

Read this: share it; and let me know what you are doing! It’s still relevant in the days and months after the election. Its relevant whatever country you are in–differences try to divide us everywhere, and people can overcome them anywhere!

November 2, 2008 

My dear friends and family, 

A brief reflection and invitation– pass the content on as you see fit–let’s just start taking down the signs and leaning over the fences!

Friday afternoon (Halloween) I was standing on a street corner with about 15 other Obama supporters on each side of the stop light in Freeland watching the reaction of people driving by. Many smiles, some frowns, the occasional down-thumb. And then a big guy on a big motorcycle came by, very slowly passing right in front of us  shouting obscenities about the “f-king liberals” and the ruination of his America. It was quite a verbal assault, finished by a roar of his bike pipes and off he went.

It made me think, again, we have to stop this raging at each other. It seems to me that those on the right feel a sense of entitlement to rage, to lashing out when threatened–and I am sure there are those on the left who do the same. And all it does is widen the divide and increase fear.

Walking back to my truck a bit later, holding my Obama sign to my chest I could feel my heart swell with hope like I have not allowed myself in a long time. I sat in the truck cab and cried and asked myself, “How will I handle it if McCain snatches victory from the jaws of defeat?” And it gave me great empathy for those walking back to their vehicles clutching McCain signs to their chests.

So the next day, on my way to phone banks and canvassing undecided voters, when I saw the McCain people out at another corner down the highway I determined  to walk up to every person I see who is wearing a McCain button, holding a McCain sign, or has a McCain bumper-sticker, and extending my hand to shake theirs. “Hello, I’m your neighbor, Christina, in Freeland. Deep down, I believe we have similar values and dreams and come Wednesday, you can on me to include you in my vision of America… Can I count on you?”

This is the question. And I invite you to start asking it–for Wednesday morning is just the beginning of an era of citizen involvement that must go on for the rest of our lives. This citizen involvement will have many facets as we learn how to communicate more and more effectively with our elected officials, and our new president. And it will be sustained at the local level. You can count on me… And I count on you.

And for the inspiration part: this song is a must see–just as this vote is a must believe!

http://nz.youtube.com/watch?v=oVi4rUzf-0Q

Love to you!

Christina