Mar 03 2009
Meaning and the Middle of America
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
Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.
There once was a girl, wearing a cloak of womanhood, who spent long days alone in a beautiful tower-top room. From her windows she could see out to the South, and to the East, the rooftops of the nearest few houses of the tiny village in which she lived. And better still, through the web of the treetops she could gaze at the sky, and the sun and moon of the universe of which she is. The child of a goddess and a mortal man, this girl struggled mightily with how to wield her immense immortal powers to help save the lives of those in harms way while the towers of her father’s land fell.
Cloak wrapped tightly around her she, a bit reluctantly, left the quiet embrace of her room and braved the chaos, grit and wreckage to arrive at a gathering. There, other children of gods and mortals broke bread and drank long draughts from the cup of their collective connections. They laughed with delight as they filled in the holes wrought by mere mortal memories for one another. They sighed with bliss, basking in the glow of their god-given powers, growing stronger and lighter to carry as they touched around the rim of their circle. One proclaimed, “This is the moment we have been waiting for, for a very long time.” This day. These times. What will we make of it, together?
Back in her tower retreat, the girl gathered herself. She was grateful for the eyes she was born with, that could see both the distance and depths of the heavens as well as the details of each life that passed before her. For the hands that both create words and images that evoke and sweep dust bunnies out of the corners. And for the company of co-journers who await her and her powers always just a few steps from the tower.
Your comments about middle America echo strongly here in Canada. Each day the news brings word of hundreds of jobs lost: U.S. Steel closing in Hamilton, ON; GM Motors closing its Canadian plants: we are indeed linked, our two countries.
In February I facilitated for two weeks in New Orleans, with 58 women from 14 countries. In the group with me as we toured the Lower Ninth Ward, still almost untouched from Katrina’s destruction three and a half years later, were women from India and Pakistan who had been close to the tsunami. They were speechless at the lack of - not even restoration - but basic cleanup this far after the event. They kept saying “but this is the abundant United States of America!” Their implications are clear.
So - stories need telling all over - and telling and telling. Then telling again. I love your statement, Christina - “as the people learn so the leaders will learn…” thanks for naming ways to make meaning with story again and again.