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