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.

I’m writing on the eve of Inauguration Day in America… and it feels like New Year’s Eve–again. It feels like we are collectively starting the year over, which is a good thing since the first two weeks of 2009 have sped by faster than I can track. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to step onto a rolling treadmill set for jogging speed and been shocked and stumbly at the attempt to join something already going faster than you are. I’ve caught myself doing that a few times–and after 2 weeks of slowing down to the pace of guidance, stepping back into my usual pace feels just like that.

However, I also feel blessed that my busyness is just that–busy, but not disasterous. Around western Washington thousands of people have been dealing with flood in the lowlands and avalanche in the highlands. And friends across the northern US and southern Canada have been so far below freezing that the Centigrade and Fahrenheit thermometers match up–minus 40.  My brother and sister-in-law got in their Pruis in MInneapolis and just started driving south. Colleen said she wasn’t going to stop until she could stick her arm out the window and feel warm air. I think they are in Alabama by now.

And then there is the rest of the world and how we spin along in our suffering places of famine and war. And every day, when I think I’m at some kind of whelming point, I go down on the beach with my beloved and dogs and am wrapped in the peace of wild things. Words drift off my mind, and there is just the end of the day beauty–even if it’s rainy or foggy or a slit of light as the sun falls behind the mountains. I am filled with profound gratitude for this moment of peace, for the place I live, and the privilege of my life. Please, God, hear my gratitude, and fill me with the ability to do this all justice–the earth, the work, the tending, letting fall apart what needs to fall apart; fiercely saving and savoring what needs to be saved and savored. Let me discern which is which.

And when I think I’ve got too much to do, too many people I’m trying to relate to effectively and with heart, a schedule for upcoming speeches and projects that I’m committed to, I catch the news out of the corner of my eye and think about this new President and all that waits his doing! How is he going to manage his new year’s commitments? How will he learn to sleep through the night in that big slave-built house, under the coverlet of his burdens? And I pray:  pray for him, for his family, for Joe Biden and his family. I pray for all those gathered around this administration, the cabinet and advisors. I pray for the US Congress to come into its courage now, it’s ability to take action. And this is a new form of pray–one I invite you to join in with me, in whatever way fits your spiritual life.

My prayer is not a statement of request, a petition. I do not say, “please watch over… please guide…” My prayer is a statement of accomplishment, a completion. I pour a cup of tea and with my dog I go sit on the front steps under the shelter of the roofline and look into the raw breath of the new day. From this vantage point  I say, “Thank you for protecting President Obama and all around him. Thank you for their wise and courageous decisions today. Thank you for bringing the American people into readiness for this leadership, and willingness to face a future that needs to be different. Thank you for making me ready. Thank you for imbuing me with courage to step into the unknown, to let go of old forms of security and reach boldly for that which is coming into being.”

These are my words–you have your own words. Whatever they are–may you step into your statements of accomplishment.  I will meet you there, in that place where we are headed; in that place where we already stand in the future looking back with profound satisfaction and gratitude at how we expended our lives at this time.

Let me know your prayers…

Wow, when one closes off the world, even partially, for a couple of weeks–reading a 1000 page novel (highly recommended by the way–Pillars of Earth by Ken Follett), trying out some new recipes, sitting by the fireplace in the evenings and watching the Christmas tree with nothing going on but a little mental reverie, and then opens the door again–the whoosh is intense! The week has sped by–and it’s not the whoosh I want to write first into the new year.

We stepped out of our two-week mid-winter rest last Saturday evening (January 3rd) by attending a concert at the local arts center and then a reception full of island friends. It was so sweet to be greeted a dozen times with words of welcome, “You’re back? You came out for this?  What did you not do this year?… I thought of you, as this was the year I spent the holidays in some kind of retreat because we were all snowed in and had to be quiet!”

The reception was potluck, of course, and candlelight and clusters of conversation moving from room to room. All we middle-agers stayed up late, “My goodness it’s 11:00PM…” We drove home in the dark, floated in the hot-tub, and slept in the next day. Sunday we took down the tree and began admitting how few holiday cards we were sending. We put away Christmas.

It’s a week later and the evidence left of our quiet time is two card tables in the living room where we are still working a few evenings more to catch up on our annual scrapbook. This is a project where we go back and review the year, collect photos and journal entries and write out the narrative of life experiences. It is an act of storycatching that always surprises me in the meaning it gathers over time.

“Maybe we don’t want to do this anymore,” I said on Solstice in my desire for totally unstructured time… “We don’t have to…Nobody looks at these but us.” And then we open the books of the years behind us and see what is there. On one level it’s a photo album: the children grow up, a grandchild is born, we look older, events both personal and professional are recorded. On one level it’s a chronology of community building: one by one and two by two and group by group, here come the people who surround our lives with love, collegiality, inspiration, outreach into the world–trips to offer circle training, consulting, vision quests, storycatching, writing (see www.peerspirit.com, our educational company website if you’re not familiar with all this). On one level it’s a shared journal of reflection on the meaning of our lives: quotes from our actual journals, strings of narrative thought, perspective over time, the chance to write things like “little did we know…” or “much to our surprise…” or “now we see…”

Of course, we want to keep doing this.

While it’s fresh, while the mess is still part of our decor, here’s the value of this record as I understand it now. First, it sends me into the pages of my own journal, starting with last winter’s volume, and the story I was carrying at that time. I had forgotten how grief-filled I was over the state of the world, how I was working with myself to attach to spirit in ways that would keep me going. Having shifted out of that space, it’s privately fascinating to watch myself work it through in the journal, to observe my process and learn from it the way I might learn from reading someone else’s writing. And then, as the work picked up and carried us forward in an astounding momentum of travel and commitment, I watched myself grow into the “yes” we had said. And when Ann had a car accident and my brother had cancer and a colleague died, and a book contract came through–I could see both the fresh and the reflective reactions to the chronology of events.

And the second benefit is sitting side by side with my partner who is having a similar experience. How often, as we are passing scissors and glue and blank pages back and forth, one says quietly to the other, “Can I interrupt you a minute, listen to this…” And that most private revealing occurs between us–how we held one another from near or far, how we individually perceived the same event with different emphases, what we wrote in the times we were apart. It is amazing to hear the voice that we each use to speak to ourselves when there is no other audience than our own hearts.

And something alchemical happens in how we can see the patterns we’ve just come from, and how we look into the path laid out before us in the coming months. We know the new year will be full of both plans and surprises–no one schedules in an accident, a health crisis, a flood, an economic crash, renewed activism, more gardening, less money, more need for community… And what we see from the volumes of the scrapbooks is that we always find ways to respond to life that make sense out of plan and surprise, that we are making in this record the raw elements of story. The building blocks, the things we count on.

How do you do this in your life?

And what are your thoughts as you enter the new year?