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

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.

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