This declaration can apply to several things this spring–I’m finally taking time to blog again! We’ve gotten our new book, The Circle Way, A Leader in Every Chair, both into the office and out the door into the world, and I’ve fulfilled a long-standing promise to myself.  With great delighted I invite you to our business website to check out the new books, both our co-authored legacy work on circle and Ann’s legacy work on Keepers of the Trees. There will be other stories that follow from these book launching months, what I want to celebrate here is the promise I kept–from the time I wrote Storycatcher.

Only after Storycatcher was published and I was reading through the book did I realize I had told three versions of “the same story.” In three different actions, I described leaving something in the earth for the future to find. In Chapter 4, I tell about burying my journal during the Cuban Missile Crisis; then in Chapter 9, I talk about what it meant for a community to decide to bury The Dead Sea Scrolls; and in Chapter 10, I wrote about putting a letter under the kitchen counter during a remodel that will be decades before rediscovery. And the idea wouldn’t leave me alone. I have remained haunted by the question “What of my life do I leave for the future to find?”

Books. I think about my immense gratitude for the words that have been passed down and down that carry meaning both ancient and modern. I love stories like Thomas Cahill’s, How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe. In this book he speaks to how the monks and scribes of Ireland spent several centuries preserving the foundational texts of western philosophy and science hand copying and hiding them until Europe had restabilized politically and could house its own wisdom again. Sounds a bit like the destabilizing going on today in the US with its far-right flare ups…

So I began thinking about taking another banker’s box, as I had in 1962, and filling it with books and burying it again–this time “forever.” I bought a metal box at the thrift store, bought several rolls of cellophane wrap and aluminum foil and began wrapping books in layers of waterproofing, and then putting them into plastic bags taped shut with duct tape, and then placing these book bundles into the box which I then also taped shut with duct tape. I inscribed each book “deposited by the author, March 2010.” So there is now a collection of my writing, Ann’s writing, and a few things I thought might be of interest, including The Chronology of Human History–year by year from prehistory to 1990, buried in our yard.

A few days ago Ann and I took pick-axe and shovel, dug a hole and buried the box. Then the contractor who is designing a patio off the front of the house further buried it under the stair landing. Dirt–>box–>dirt–>cobble stones–>rebar mesh–>four inches of concrete–>stairs. It’s going to be a while before anyone is reading those copies! And in the climate of the region this is about as dry and safe a situation as I could devise. So, I’ve done it at last, and for the lasting. And I am surprised by my emotion, a tenderness walking by that spot. Here lies…

Here lies my life work–or at least the part of it that someone can find in a hundred or more years. They can read about journal writing and circle and story and the seven whispers of spiritual guidance. They can read about how much I loved nature and this place and the people of my life. And I can pray that they too will love nature and this place and the people of their lives. I can imagine someone eventually finding the box: I cannot imagine what life will be like at that time. I hope when they will sit down and unwrap this rusted container, they will find something legible that connects us across time.

Who I am will be immaterial by then. Like the craftsmen who, stone by stone, chiseled the walls of castles and cathedrals each brick providing the raw material for inspiration. That’s what I am: a craftsman who chipped some bricks into books in the Information Age. Whatever will be built from this, I truly do not know– I only dream. And for the rest of the time that I live here, I can step confidently down the new patio stairs knowing that something is under there– waiting.

What might you leave in the earth for the future to find?

Last December I wrote about my mother’s habit of anonymously giving away $20.00 bills to folks who look in need of a little windfall before the holidays.  (See blog entry December 1, 2008) This year she’s “reading for peace.”

My mother lives in Canada, and on November 11, called Remembrance Day in that country, there are ceremonies of patriotism and prayer honoring those men and women who have fought and died in wars. Early in the month she asked herself, “What contribution could I make toward the idea of enduring peace and no more wars?”

A friend had lent her a book of religious poetry that included sections on courage, war, and peace. My mother reports, “Many of the poems in that book were from the period of World War One, the time when Britain lost a whole generation of poets, artists and musicians. And many of the poems were heartbreaking calls for peace and prayers for help and guidance.  Reading them over and over brought me to feel they needed sharing, so I decided I would find a way to do just that.”

In the little town of Chemainus, British Columbia, up the block from where my mother is a member of a small congregation of the United Church of Canada, her minister, Fran, presided over the local ceremony. After the flags had been paraded by aging veterans and prayers said and taps played, my mother set up a music stand in the city park and proceeded to read poetry to anyone who cared to stop by and listen.

My mother is 89 years old. While this statement may conjure an image of white-haired frailty, my mother is brown-haired, sturdy, dynamic, progressive, and daring. A young friend of hers, a ‘surrogate daughter’ about my own age, helped her make a flyer explaining what she’s doing, and on December 1st she went up the highway to the largest mall in the city of Nanaimo to stand under the clock tower and read poems for peace to the shoppers.  She emailed me her plans, “Kate will be coming with me to help me setup. She made a few suggestions, such as printing a flyer to hand out, doing a choral reading out of it with her and me alternating, etc.  However, I want it to appear unstaged and spontaneous and simple but I will not be alone.” We, her far-flung children, are glad she’s not alone.

Among other selections, she’s reading from the Peace Poem, a project from the United Nations sent out to all primary, secondary, and home schools throughout the world to submit two lines of poetry on peace. The resulting contributions from 38 countries were presented on the web and if printed runs 64-pages of verse. And she’s reading from the book Christmas in the Trenches, the story of the spontaneous Christmas Truce between ordinary foot soldiers in 1914.

She’s also sent out a letter to several of the area churches announcing, “If you care to include announcement of my reading in your bulletin I would be grateful to have people know where I am and stop by. I would also be willing to read to Sunday school classes or other occasions. This is a strictly personal activity of mine and should in no way be construed as an action of the Presbytery.”

And that’s the point: that she has the courage and creativity to come up with a strictly personal activity that challenges the status quo and empowers her voice in the world.

As Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, “Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.”

I believe world peace is achieved and sustained by each one of us taking responsibility for the quality of what happens within a five foot radius of our own bodies, in our own lives. If there is peace in my radius and yours and his and hers and theirs—then there is peace in all of ours.

And that is the greeting that makes the most sense to me every year when this season rolls around: Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.

What shall we each do this holiday season as a strictly personal activity that shakes up our complacency and models our ability to stretch out and mend the world within our reach?

I look forward to collecting ideas that we may share with each other.

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

Blog #3: September 22, 2008

Okay, enough politics– time for the long view! So how do I pull back far enough to get perspective? Well, for me, it’s a pretty far back into what I call “The story of the Story.” About six months ago I got deeply fascinated with the journey of humanity—the hike out of Africa those of us not currently living on the Mother Continent—have been on for about 100,000 years. 

I came across this information first in 2004 while researching chapter 3, “Tending our Fire,” in my book Storycatcher, Making Sense of our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story. Then, I was interested in how the brain is neurologically wired for language—and how Homo sapiens have always had a language center in the neocortex, and therefore have—it seems—always spoken.

Now, I’m interested in our capacity for survival, and how often survival is associated with someone making a wise (or lucky) decision at the right moment. When looking at the map of this hike, immense patience is required—for until the last eye-blink it’s all happened on foot—and some willingness to accept scientific speculation on how humanity jumped from one dead-end to a new beginning. However, the more we hear about global warming, environmental collapse, the possibilities for unceasing wars appear in the Middle East and elsewhere, and the more moronic the political debate rages in what is supposed to be the leading nation among nations—the more willing I am to look for signs that we have been at such choice points before and somehow made it through.

So imagine for a moment, that it is 60,000 years ago, give or take 10,000 and your ancestors are among a group walking up the green fields of the Sahara basin, following the Nile to the Levant—the crescent area bordering the Mediterranean sea. There they faced the chilling impact of the European ice-shelf and turn east, beach combing along the Saudi peninsula and onto the edge of India. Everything goes along well enough and about 40,000 years ago Mt. Toba explodes, creates such a global dust storm that in 6 years another Ice Age begins… and the human population crashes to about 10,000 survivors.

But during this hiatus, some folks get in grass boats and sail off to become the Australian and Polynesian peoples, some eventually head inland and become the Asian people, some learn how to head over the eastern steppes and become the European people. The messageis: we made it. And we continue to make it.

I’ve been talking about this story with incredibly diverse groups in the past few months—and universally  we arrive at a point of hope! It begins to dawn on audience after audience that the conditions we face right now—locally to globally—while seriously needing our attention, are not worse than conditions our ancestors have faced in the past. This IS the story of humanity! Our presence here is cyclical, like everything else.

So, right now I’m at the Western Women’s Conference of the United Church of Canada in eastern BC, and 350 women who on the outside don’t look so radical, and are on the inside great explorers of spirit, are experiencing a sense of how their faith journeys fit into this long, long story, and how they can actively preserve stories of values, belief, and strength in the generations surrounding them. We are having great fun with the idea–and my lovely 88 year old mother is among those in attendance.

Next week I’ll be taking another version of this message to a group of elected city officials… the story is changing–but it isn’t over!

(For some wonderful maps, information, and downloadable lectures and videos on all of this check out the following sites: www.nationalgeographic.com and www.bradshawfoundation.com.)