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.

We had months of almost no rain until mid-October. Now, the storms of November are upon us–including lots of rain and tree-bending winds. That’s our prayer–trees bending, not breaking. We’ve moved the vehicle out of the path of falling limbs and started the debate over which end of the house to sleep in tonight. Our closest “neighbors” are a row of Douglas firs 100+ feet tall that are, at the moment, whipping against the night sky like manic dancers in the mosh pit–and we hope their roots are holding firmly on the earth as any one of them could crash across the yard and into the south side of the house. (Assume this did NOT happen–unless I write about it in the next blog posting–or unless this is the last blog posting!)

I have just returned from an annual retreat with a circle of women friends and we naturally started by reviewing where we were last year and where we are now–both in our private and more public lives and thoughts. I dug out the volume of the journal where I serve as scribe to our circles, writing down the statements of how we arrive to each other and our intentions as we depart. Last year we were full of the election elation–this year we are full of questions about how to support the need for deep societal shift–whether it comes from the White House or Congress or from diverse populist movements… We are disturbed to witness the unrelenting polarization around political process, certainly here in the US, and also in so many other places in the world. And we found ourselves asking how to practice effectiveness under these circumstances–and how to influence the parameters of our lives for greater common good.

One thing that continues to intrigue and frustrate us is the question of how to bring people with widely divergent points of view into a dialogues where we have the opportunity to influence each other in positive ways. I am ruminating on this when at 10:15 PM the lights go out. Not a flicker of warning, just an instantaneous plunge into darkness without a single friendly LED glowing anywhere in the house. We brush our teeth by candlelight and head for bed—nothing else to do.  Winds howl in gusts up to 70+ MPH until the early morning hours and when I wake at dawn I know that somewhere out there are crews of line workers trying to put the grid back together.

At the entrance to our neighborhood a large alder tree has fallen across the road and is hanging on the low swoop of power lines. The men say it’s going to be several hours—maybe the day, go home, make a fire. We do.

This is our image of ourselves as Americans—and perhaps this is true in other countries as well—that we are the kind of people who will go out in the storm and do what needs to be done to sustain the community. We believe that ordinary men and women will put everything they have into their work, pull alongside each other for common good. This collective self-image reminds me of the lines in one of my favorite Marge Piercy poems, “To Be of Use,”

“I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.”

That is how I think of the men at the end of the road, straining in the mud and muck to move things forward… and I am guessing out there in the wind and rain they are not fighting over health care policy—just counting on the utility company to cover them if they get hurt. They are not debating the efficacy of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, though they may have sons or daughters in the military. They are not debating the agenda of the Global Climate Summit next month, though they may be comparing the strength of storms and wind now versus their early years on the job. And if religion comes into the conversation, it may be a muttered half-prayer, “Sweet Jesus, don’t let that limb buck up in my face!” as they fell the tree the rest of the way to earth and off the lines. And that’s the point—they are working together, whatever their differences. They have a clearly defined task, role, and responsibility. They have the skills needed to be doing what they are doing, and the appreciation of the rest of us who don’t have those skills.

They are not doing silly things–like only restoring electricity to the households that agree with them politically or religiously–and they probably don’t agree with each other about these things: they are getting the work done and moving onto the next piece of work that requires their skill and effort. I have a cousin who sends me far right-wing and fundamentalist statements and this is the point I try to make with him: that on in the dark and stormy night of these times there are things we must pull together and do whether or not we agree on anything else. And his point back seems to be that if we don’t agree on faith and politics there is nothing else we can work together on. I don’t want this to be true!

As I live through a week of unrelenting stormy weather, I am wondering if we will finally pull together as a human tribe only when the earth is blowing back so hard we cannot ignore any longer ignore our collective and immediate peril. And the irony is, I believe this is already happening–and I am eager to live into this urgency for exactly the kind of energy it has the potential to release in us. I want to join the line crew–to be able to contribute my strength while I still have it to offer and before our planetary ship is sunk beyond repair. And it is the time of year I start to think about all this again–because the story is raging outside my door. No–that’s not a typo, it is the story that is raging as strongly as the wind. My story is rooted as firmly as the neighboring trees in the belief that in spite of all the violence we do to each other, there is an ancient and universal sense of ethics that resides in the human mind. It is this taproot I am counting on to hold us in the thrashing storms, and though limbs of confidence may be torn off by the daily news, by the stupidly and slowness of our response to crises, I continue to base my life actions on the presence of this ethic.

I came across this quote via a writing student coming to December’s The Self as the Source of the Story seminar and it expresses what I believe: “There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives at every border we cross.” (Michael Ondaatje, Desidero)

I enter the winter and my island time at home after an incredibly busy year savoring that presence of others inside myself– noticing the ways that I am touched and changed by everyone who has crossed my path or walked even a few steps of life journey alongside me. I am trusting that others find me inside of them–and that eventually we will understand the mystery of our containment of each other.

I would welcome your thoughts and stories about how you are reaching out to people of divergence and how you are noticing the presence of divergent people residing in your own mind and heart and daily life. Let’s light that fire of sharing.

Written by candlelight on a far northern night.

Blessings, Christina

Dear Storycatchers, I have missed you–missed writing to you and hearing back from you as we make our ways through busy days. The new book, which pulled me off this blogging schedule, co-authored with Ann Linnea, is at Berrett-Koehler Publishers in San Francisco–in fact, on this Saturday morning I am writing from the lobby of Hotel Rex, a few blocks from the B-K offices.

Yesterday Ann and I went through a process they call “Authors’ Day.” We met the folks who will be working with us in final editing, production, marketing, and publicity. At noon, all the staff in the building that day, including Steve Piersanti, President of the company, came to lunch where we talked about The Circle Way, A Leader in Every Chair, and then invited the group of just over 20 staff and guests to push back from the board table and form an oval of chairs. We used the Basic Circle Guidelines from our PeerSpirit website to set up a round of circle process and folks responded to an interesting question passing a beautiful glass disk hand to hand. We talked about the impact of hearing every voice in the room, and then had 20 minutes of dialogue about the book.

The question we used was offered by Fran Korten, editor of Yes! Magazine, when she presented at a conference on women and leadership May 1. As a great fan and avid reader of Yes! I was glad to meet Fran, give her a copy of Storycatcher, and carry on the profound work of her questions–so here they are for you to raise in your lives as well:

• What did you notice on the fringe of society 15 years ago that is now in the center?
• What do you notice on the fringe now that you hope will move to the center in the next 15 years?
• What are you willing to do to contribute to that happening?

I jumped up and said: circle, and the power of circles, especially as an empowerment process for women. And here is a brief rendition of that story.

In 1994 Ann and I had just moved to Whidbey and started PeerSpirit, Inc. I was writing a book called Calling the Circle, the First and Future Culture. It was under contract to Bantam and when I submitted the manuscript there was deafening silence from my editor. Finally I phoned and asked what was going on… She told me they had no idea how to support this title. I bought back the rights and found a tiny press in Oregon, Swan Raven & Company, to bring out the first edition of the book. It sold 15,000 copies and connected us with a circle of colleagues with whom we are still in touch.

In 1997, I got a call from an agent who wanted to represent the book to larger presses. He sold it back to my Bantam editor and I rewrote Calling the Circle in the edition that has been available since 1998. Unfortunately, the circle concept was still so edgy that the book was categorized as “ritual/psychology” and most often shelved in the witchcraft/occult section of the bookstore–not exactly mainstream! Meanwhile, we kept doing our work, expanding our outreach, and through training other facilitators, consultants, and leaders in many fields, kept working to normalize and bring circle to center as a alternative group process. When Amazon and the Internet, and our e-store capacity came along the book could be more easily found.

In 2000, through our association with business visionary, Margaret Wheatley, PeerSpirit Circle started going global in the From the Four Directions and Art of Hosting networks, and now, Berrett-Koehler, a business book company, recognizes circle practice as mainstream enough to bring The Circle Way into the heart of their business group process offerings. So, yesterday was quite a day–as we were carrying this subtext through all the meetings. We were carrying the story under the project; carrying fifteen years of work to help a far-out, woo-woo, women howling at the moon, men drumming in the woods, touchy-feely, get it out of here(!) concept into the board rooms and staff meetings and committee meetings and nursing staff debriefs, and conflict resolution meetings where we and many others have benefited from another way to speak and listen.

In our Berrett-Koehler circle, we addressed the second question: What do you notice on the fringe today that you want to see move to the center in the next 15 years? It’s a very interesting form of strategic planning: for a company involved in both setting and responding to business trends, and also for any person wanting to redesign their lives in the current conditions of the world around us. Try these questions on yourself as a journal writing exercise, with your family and friends after dinner, in the next circle where you need of a conversation starter–and here on this blog.

When I look back, the first question creates a sense of acomplishment and perspective regarding what I’ve been up to all these years in journal writing, circle, and storycatching. When I look around, the second question gives me a way to map current societal trends (what’s moving toward deeper integration, such as sustainability; what’s moving out of the way, such as excessive consumption). When I assess how to focus my own passion, willingness, and skills, the third question helps me set trajectory.

So many of us are in a process of reassessment, may these questions lead us into an ability to tell ourselves the story of how we have navigated the social conditions that surround our lives. As we tell the story of how we got here, we notice the synchronicities and choices that shape our lives. As we create the story of where we’re going, we shine a light on the path forward.

Let’s share responses and stories and see the range of what we notice–and what we are committed to bringing from the edge to the middle!

There have been a lot of tears in our house this past week: last Tuesday, March 24, our little corgi dog, Gwennie, died of cancer. She was diagnosed last September with an invasive tumor that started at the gum line and spread into her nasal cavity and up her snout.  She retained her beauty and her spirit while cancer grew on her nose and her breathing became more and more labored at night. When we got home from Oregon on the 23rd and went to get her at our dog-sitting friend’s, she didn’t bark and jump around as usual, just put her head in Ann’s hands. The tumor had spread into her eye, she seemed in terrible pain. We dosed her with doggy Ibuprofen, and held her for our last evening by the fire… our last evening as a household of four.

Now there are two people and one very lonely corgi left wandering around without this sparky personality who turns out to have been a much bigger “boss” of our daily schedule than any of us realized until she was gone.

Pet grief is a very personal and unique experience. There have been times when it did not seem so hard, as both the dog and I were ready to let go: with Gwennie–it’s huge. She was still young and vibrant, and had more entertaining eccentricities than any other dog I’ve known. She ran the compound: announcing people’s arrival and departures, telling Glory (her sister corgi) when it was time to walk and eat and run into the yard and get into their beds for the night… and she loved life with a capital “L.”

There are several lessons in this to share. One is surrendering to surprise. In my little book of spiritual practice, The Seven Whispers, I talk about three responses to surprise that help us practice spiritual surrender:

• Notice what is really happening.
• Work with what is really happening.
• Accept what is really happening.

For the past seven months this has been a mantra in our lives. On the day of Gwen’s biopsy when we dropped her off I thought, “what is, already is… we are just going to find out.” Then after her diagnosis, when the allopathic vet said it was not treatable, we went to the holistic vet and designed a regimen of diet and supplements that sustained her overall health and vitality while her body worked out its course with the disease. And finally, the last week of her life, we had to accept what was really happening and let her go. We surrendered–and we continue to surrender in the territory of loss and realigning daily patterns.

Another lesson from the past seven months is the reminder to live in the moment, to celebrate each day. The gift of being a dog is living wholeheartedly in the now.  For Gwennie, every day was “WOW–I’m up, what’s happening?” She’d sneeze out the night’s congestion and head into the day: let’s run in circles, let’s chase crows, let’s eat, let’s sleep. The gift of being human is being able to tell you this in words, to savor experience over and over again.

I say in Storycatcher, that story organizes life. Watching our other corgi, Glory, I appreciate again the power of story to help me cope. For Glory there is no explanation–just raw absence. We have other realms in which we move: Glory had Gwennie and the vacuum now is huge.

They were living in a partnership of dogness. Every day for the past nearly 8 years they sniffed the same pee-mail spots, chased the same waves, licked the same cook-pots, endured the same boredom waiting for the next walk.They moved in a twinned rhythm of awareness of each other’s presence and watched out for the things that concerned them with a level of coordination many of us should envy in our human relationships.

I don’t know what Glory’s experience is: I observe her lethargy and confusion and try to help when words are no help.  We three are reestablishing our household rhythms, some familiar, some new.   I believe Glory has the capacity to emerge with a renewed confidence in her role and responsibilities being the dog.

It is such privilege to be trusted with relationship across species: to have watched Gwennie rest her head in Ann’s hands–her gesture speaking the words she could not say: “know what to do for me.” Now, to work with Glory, her eyes on me, especially out in the yard, “may I go this far? no farther? Shall I bark at that neighbor or not?” Voice tone, hand signals, a recognized vocabulary of about 50 words creating the language and the tether between us. She’s learning. She’s curled at my feet under the writing desk, sighing heavily. I sigh too.

Good dog. Good grief. Little being. Big lessons. More coming.

The animal shall not be measured by man.  In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.  They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. ~Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928

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

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?

It’s the first of December as I write this–things are gearing up for the holidays in a very strange mixture of directives. The president who tried to order America after 9/11 to “get out there and shop,” is going out of office, the economy is in a shambles, people are nervous about money on many fronts, and we know the “yes we can!” energy of the new president is not a quick fix.

Here on Whidbey Island, local merchants are pleading for loyalty with slogans of “Shop the Rock!” and at the same time the island newspaper is stuffed with bargain ads designed to get folks on the ferry and headed into the mainland malls. I do shop the Rock, and I don’t shop it much… In the over-abundance of my family’s lives, there’s not much anyone needs from Auntie Christina. And now that the “children” of my extended family are all in their 20s and early 30s, it’s understood that I’m giving my holiday money to charities and causes that I care about–for myself, and for them.

And, since the shopping season is starting in earnest I want to retell the story of my mother’s creative giving at this time of year because it is so simple and so direct. She, too, decided not to keep sending gifts to the grandchildren. (It gets harder and harder for an 85+ year old woman to imagine what the college and post-college generation might actually like to receive!) She set aside her holiday giving budget divided into $20.00 bills deposited in plain white envelopes with this message typed on the front: “This gift comes to you totally without strings, to be used however it benefits you… and if someday you find yourself with more than enough, take this idea and pass it on.” 

For the month of December, my mother carries these envelopes around in her purse and looks for opportunities to give the money away. She sees a haggard looking mom and several children getting out of an old car at the grocery store and leaves an envelope on the windshield. She hugs a pensioner at church and slips the envelope in her coat pocket. She hands one to a cashier at the thrift store with instructions, “use this to pay for that person’s cart when they come up here…” By the end of December she has deposited $300 into her community in direct giving, in the truest spirit of the season.

This action is quintessential Connie: wanting to make a difference with whatever largesse she has, and wanting to keep it personal to have a bit of story to share with her grandchildren… and the confidence to know that her actions will become stories in the lives of others.

Merry Christmas, Mom, may the manger in your heart always be full.

On Thursday afternoon November 27, American Thanksgiving Day, 15 people started showing up at our house for the annual ritual of gratitude and feasting. The group is fairly stable now–all islanders and two friends from Vancouver BC who come down when they can. Actually, the two Canadian friends are the longest participants since they started coming in 1994 when we still had children in the house and they were the surrogate aunties. Then as we met newcomers to the island we added them in ones and twos and the gathering grew. We had to use both the elongated dining table and a card table this year–who knows, next year we could be having two full tables. We cook the turkey, stuffing, gravy, and everything else shows up from appetizers to apple pie!

For Ann and me it’s a way to come fully home, to enter our island time at the completion of another year’s work–which is mostly travel away to offer seminars and attend conferences. One of the things we are grateful for are the friends who hold this community life in place for us–some of them gathered around the table, and many more who make Whidbey their home, and our home. 

So, of course there is a sense of story that comes into the day: we bring magazines, scissors and glue into the living room and cut card stock into the size and shape of placemats. Everyone is invited to make a collage of what they are thankful for this year. Not everyone gets into this activity, it’s voluntary… and provides an activity of gathering and snacking.

Then, about an hour before the turkey is done, we pull chairs into a circle in front of the fireplace and with a talking piece do a round of check-in. There is a candle lit on the coffee table in the center between us, we are listening without interrupting as one-by-one each person has the opportunity to hold a small stone in his/her hand and then speak– either using the collage or their memories as prompt. I think the deepest significance for me, and perhaps for those gathered, is that we are at a full resting point: nothing intrudes. No football games, no cooking details–just us, having made it another cycle of seasons. We take some long slow breaths into this slowness and then the stories rise. A community service project, a bike ride across America for charity, surviving cancer, a car wreck, the challenge and blessing of meaningful work, the hopes we have for the next year, how the now grown children are doing and where they are this day. 

When we are done, we bless the food and recite our prayerful concerns for the wider world. Then the last minute scurrying begins. People put their collages around the table, candle lit, songs sung, we sit down together, and eat and talk for the next 2 hours… there’s only so much one can eat, but there’s a lot to share in stories and discussion. Some of us are family, good friends who see each other often, neighbors… and some are folks who only see each other this one time each November.

It always amazes me how willing people are to speak their authentic stories into a space where it will be honored, into the presence of this little tribe of listeners. For this I am most deeply grateful!

What are you most thankful for right now?

Tell me that story!

In the fall of 1938, my father went off to college of Salem Oregon, leaving his family in Montana–his first major venture into life beyond the farm, the small town, the honey business, and the small city of Great Falls where his parents sometimes wintered over as they worked to get all 8 of their children–spanning an 18 year spread in age–college-educated and into the world. My father, #7 of those 8 children, left for Willamette University and grew lonely for his far-flung family. Many of his older siblings were already married and raising families, and he wanted a way to help keep everyone in touch. 

He came up with the idea of a “Round Robin” letter that would circulate among his parents and the homes of all eight young and adult children. The idea was simple: there was an order of who you received the letter from, whom you sent it to, and you had the chance then, every few months, to read news of the whole family, take out your old letter, put in a new one, and send it on.

Of course each one was supposed to receive, read, write, and send within a week… but I remember as a child there were times the robin got buried on my parents big desk and with a shriek they’d find it a month later… and sometimes it seemed to disappear for such a long time that everyone in their Christmas cards would inquire as to its whereabouts. Then in the mail it came again: full of handwritten or typed pages, recent photos, news clippings, recipes and other bits of communication.

My father is 88 years old now and has only one older sister left alive, but the Robin continues around– and as one uncle after another has left for heaven, the responsibility for writing has passed to the next generation. So a few days ago, my cousin Don, age 70, my cousin Bill, age 67, myself age 62, and my father were all at dinner and listening to this history. We marveled, in the age of email and cell phones, that this packet of family material is still circulating–and our delight in this old fashioned idea of getting real mail. There was talk that many of our aunts/uncles/parents saved all the letters they wrote in the Robin–and what an interesting archive this is in itself. Now we want to find and collate what we can.

We are committed to the Robin’s continuance, to educating our children to its significance, and saving what we can of its history.

A few weeks ago, in the middle of September 2008, I was in Oregon at the annual retreat of the National League of Cities. I was part of a faculty of four on a 3-day session presenting to 120 elected officials. Using the Columbia River as background, the association had opted on a theme of “Lewis and Clark–Exploring the Frontiers of Leadership in Local Government. I was there to close the conference with a morning of Storycatching, looking at how story impacts leadership style, and the necessity of understanding the story of place in serving as a civic leader.

The opening keynoter was a man named Don Coyhis, a Mohican tribal leader involved in the Wellbriety Movement, a combination of the Twelve Step program and Medicine Wheel, restoring cultural health and freedom from addiction to the Native Nations. His presentation focused on the destruction of Indian culture through the kidnapping, forced housing, and re-education of generations of Native children in residential schools. It was a profound presentation, deeply moving and complex in its understanding of the devastation of cultural shattering and the work required to reinstate those patterns and restore health to the community. (See the website: http://www.whitebison.org for a look at their recovery focus.)

Listening to Don, I realized that what he’s focusing on in tribal communities, is also a need in white dominant culture. How often I find myself lamenting the loss of human values that seemed timeless a mere 50 years ago: regard for children, the elderly, the sense that social systems should care for the less fortunate, that people have a right to tolerance, etc. etc. “A healthy community,” said Coyhis, “is rooted in cultural and spiritual heritage. And when that rootedness is destroyed, the community roots itself in shame, anger, violence, hedonism.” How ironic that destroying Indian culture has in many ways contributed to destroying white culture: one group of people cannot harm another group without being harmed themselves: soul loss is mutual.

And then, the connection between Don’s story and my story went even deeper and more personal. listening to him, part of my family story in the first chapter of Storycatcher came flooding back into me: my grandfather’s first job in the tiny community of Fort Shaw, Montana, when he arrived there in 1911 was as a teacher in the Fort Shaw Indian School. A residential school, converted usage for a cavalry garrison, kidnapped children of the Blackfeet Nation. 

My father, now 88 and living near me, remembers his father talking about those times and how the students would runaway and start walking 100 miles home. “Dad said he used to have to saddle up his horse and buggy and chase after Indian children. He felt that having to physically recapture those kids and bring them back to the Fort was one of the worst actions of his entire life. He began to advocate for public education, and by 1913 helped close the school and open a local school district for the white children moving into the valley. The Indian children were then released to their tribes.”

In 1904, ten Native girls from Fort Shaw traveled to the World’s Fair in St. Louis and won the basketball tournament becoming world champions. In 2004, their descendants and the descendants of the white settler families, erected a monument at the ruins of the fort honoring them and acknowledging the existence of this archipelago of suffering. (See pages 13-14 in the book, for a fuller version of this story.) In September 2008, Don Coyhis and I stood in a soul connection beyond words at the end of his speech. I handed him the book. “My grandfather was part of that system,” I said. Tears filled my eyes. “I am deeply sorry.” In May 2009, Coyhis is leading a forgiveness movement at 100 school sites, reclaiming the souls of the children who died there and reunifying the lineage of the tribes. He has written Obama and McCain announcing the tribes’ intentions and inviting the US government to make a formal apology for this policy as has been done in Canada and Australia. 

There are so many stories right now about social justice and injustice and the need for generational healing. This is one I am going to watch, for the healing of Don’s tribe–and my own.