It has snowed here on Whidbey Island where I live. Snow, and particularly the sustained cold temperatures that keeps the snow on the ground and in the trees, is a rare occurrence here at 70 feet above sea level in the Puget Sound area around Seattle, WA. Yesterday there were essential errands as the weather approached. Today we are not going anywhere we couldn’t walk. We work half-heartedly at the computers, then celebrate by taking the dogs down to the beach to chase gulls. We tend a straggling hummingbird at the feeder (which means bringing the sugar water in at night, and getting up pre-dawn to set it out again for that first desperate feed of the morning). It feels good to be “saving a life”–even one tiny hummingbird’s– in this northern cycle of shortest days/longest nights: but the life I’m really about to save in the heart of winter is my own.

It’s been an strenuous and rewarding year of PeerSpirit work and travel and interaction with so many wonderful people. There have been conference speeches, and small seminars, and uncountable interactions by face, phone, and internet. And now, all my social energy is spent.  I need to be that hummingbird for awhile: to slow down my heart-rate and spend nights curled on a branch somewhere out of the wind, and wake up in the morning with nothing to do but get to that first cuppa tea.

And this is exactly the holiday/holy day gift my partner and I give each other: two weeks of retreat, rest, reading, wandering, letting go of the never-ending-list of things to do. We’ve been doing this for years, ever since her children got on the plane to visit their father at Christmas…and after they were grown, we discovered it’s the only time the business really lets us stop. So, we do.

The Holy Nights, from Winter Solstice to Epiphany, are a magical time to reflect at the hearth. I turn off the wi-fi in my laptop, write bounce-back messages for the email programs, dictate “we are closed… we are resting…” voicemail messages for the business and private phone lines. And then it’s up to me to have the discipline to truly turn aside from distraction and business and commitments and projects in progress and BE WITH… myself, my story, my life, my spirituality, my sense of mystery and ceremony. Inside, and outside–to follow intuition and instinct rather than obligation and task. Shhhhhhhh. Shhhhhhhhhh. The song of snow, the whisper of waves.

We spend long hours sitting by the fire, enjoying the Christmas tree, writing in my journal, reading novels. We walk in the woods and on the beach and don’t care when we get home. We develop little ceremonies within the days that rise spontaneously out of slowing down and noticing more. I try out new recipes and we linger at the table in long conversation.

Our declared retreat while others are plunging forward with holiday busyness has become a kind of local legend.  People smile and hug us at the grocery store in support. They tell us about a party or event with a friendly, “…You’d be invited, of course, but we know you won’t come… because you are holding that other space for us, that quiet. Thank you.”

Every year is a mystery: what will show up, how we’ll respond, how successful we will each be at the art of stopping. This is my last blog entry for 2008–I’ll be back on January 6th, Epiphany, the day of the arrival of the Wise Men and I’ll share whatever learning has come from this time. Whatever you celebrate at this time of year, may you have a few moments of utter calm, peace of mind, quieted heart, and deep, deep knowing who you are and how to proceed with the life you have chosen, and been chosen by.

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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!

Late Sunday night, two days before the US election, I wrote the following email–and sent it out bcc to about 150 contacts in my address book.  By noon on Monday I had heard from over 50% of those readers, and they had documented how many times they had passed it on into their lists… so it had reached 10,000 that I know of! So many people, in the US and around the world, are eager for the attack ads of the US political process to be over–and are looking for something positive to do.

Read this: share it; and let me know what you are doing! It’s still relevant in the days and months after the election. Its relevant whatever country you are in–differences try to divide us everywhere, and people can overcome them anywhere!

November 2, 2008 

My dear friends and family, 

A brief reflection and invitation– pass the content on as you see fit–let’s just start taking down the signs and leaning over the fences!

Friday afternoon (Halloween) I was standing on a street corner with about 15 other Obama supporters on each side of the stop light in Freeland watching the reaction of people driving by. Many smiles, some frowns, the occasional down-thumb. And then a big guy on a big motorcycle came by, very slowly passing right in front of us  shouting obscenities about the “f-king liberals” and the ruination of his America. It was quite a verbal assault, finished by a roar of his bike pipes and off he went.

It made me think, again, we have to stop this raging at each other. It seems to me that those on the right feel a sense of entitlement to rage, to lashing out when threatened–and I am sure there are those on the left who do the same. And all it does is widen the divide and increase fear.

Walking back to my truck a bit later, holding my Obama sign to my chest I could feel my heart swell with hope like I have not allowed myself in a long time. I sat in the truck cab and cried and asked myself, “How will I handle it if McCain snatches victory from the jaws of defeat?” And it gave me great empathy for those walking back to their vehicles clutching McCain signs to their chests.

So the next day, on my way to phone banks and canvassing undecided voters, when I saw the McCain people out at another corner down the highway I determined  to walk up to every person I see who is wearing a McCain button, holding a McCain sign, or has a McCain bumper-sticker, and extending my hand to shake theirs. “Hello, I’m your neighbor, Christina, in Freeland. Deep down, I believe we have similar values and dreams and come Wednesday, you can on me to include you in my vision of America… Can I count on you?”

This is the question. And I invite you to start asking it–for Wednesday morning is just the beginning of an era of citizen involvement that must go on for the rest of our lives. This citizen involvement will have many facets as we learn how to communicate more and more effectively with our elected officials, and our new president. And it will be sustained at the local level. You can count on me… And I count on you.

And for the inspiration part: this song is a must see–just as this vote is a must believe!

http://nz.youtube.com/watch?v=oVi4rUzf-0Q

Love to you!

Christina

I’m just back from Canada, had one day to do the laundry and say hello to the dogs, and then I drove down island to the retreat center that is our home ground, The AlderMarsh on Whidbey Island.  There I spent the day meeting with a core group from last year’s December session of “The Self as the Source of the Story” who had regathered for a week of writing and remembering. 

These writing seminars are so magic. I know it is a great synergy between how I hold the circle, the applicable writing skill development and content, and the longing in each participant for the ability to birth their own story. I have been teaching this seminar since some time in the late 1980s–I actually cannot remember when I started it–and it is a profound responsibility and honor to serve as a midwife to so many tales. 

So, eight made it back. And this time they trusted each other to peer facilitate, to set just enough structure in place so they could write, and enough ease in place so they could revel in the experience of being together. They’d been with each other 5 days when I rolled in this morning and the energy was incredible. They were riding in a spaciousness of love and acceptance and honor for each other’s journeys. As we sat down and checked-in, passing a stone around the rim and each one speaking to the week, I knew were in the heart of the world… the kind of space many people don’t know in their whole lives, where they can be fully themselves and fully accepted. The level of empowerment released in such an experience is amazing… and what a teaching for me, the usual teacher, to come into the end of their time together as an honored guest.

So they read to each other and to me the output of their writing. We critiqued and encouraged and sent them off to the work of living as writers. And the space is already booked for next year. And in a few weeks, I’ll be gathering with another new group heading into the journey of claiming themselves as the source of the story.

I’m up in London, Ontario as I write this. Ann Linnea and I just gave a speech on the ages of women’s wisdom. It was a lovely event, no podium, no power points, just an evening of conversation. As an extroverted storyteller who does this fairly often, I am comfortable in front of hundreds of people, but Ann, as an introverted storycatcher, finds the invitation to offer a speech daunting. She does it well, but it costs her a lot of energy. So when Brescia University College asked us both to speak, since both our books are well known to their intended audience (check out Ann’s classic, Deep Water Passage, A Spiritual Journey at Mid-life, on our company’s site: www.peerspirit.com) we wanted to design a way for both of us to be comfortable. We came up with a kitchen table–where so many rich conversations occur–and asked Brescia to arrange the stage that way with two lavaliere microphones, a pot of tea and two cups, a candle… Ann and I sat in chairs and talked through the topic of the evening, and then jumped down into the audience to open up the dialogue.  It went over so well, I think they will establish this arrangement as the new format for their annual Sophia Lecture series.

And as a gift at the end of the evening I got a new and intriguing story. One of the women told me that when her son was in First Grade, his teacher invited all the children to bring a treasure from their lives that they would be willing to part with and together they’d put all these things in a time capsule, marked and storied, and buried in the school yard–with the agreement they would dig them up at their tenth year high school reunion. The woman’s son, now in his mid-20’s, can hardly wait to return to their hometown for this reunion and the chance to dig up the box. 

The more I thought about this story the more I loved that teacher for her insight and farsight, and for trusting these children to keep a covenant with a future that they could not imagine at age six.

One of the chapters in my book, Storycatcher, starts off with my burying a box for the future to find when I hid my journal during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and at the end of the book I write about hiding some treasures and a letter in a gap under the counter when the kitchen was remodeled in 2004. I think there is a theme here: that most of what we know about the past, particularly the far, far, past, comes from people intentionally or inadvertently leaving treasures for the future to find. So, I invite you to think about what you might want the future to find from your life–not just the landfills full of plastic and styrofoam, but messages… maybe to yourself twenty years hence, maybe to your grandchildren, maybe to the seventh generation. 

I dug up my journal, buried only for a week in the midst of that crisis, but I’m leaving my letter under the counter, and sometimes I look for other ways and places to hide things that I will never see again but that I hope pass into the stream of time and the mystery of the never-ending story.

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.)

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. 

Monday morning—just about any Monday morning, but this one in September 2008 is a prime example of heading into another week of fear and anxiety. At least that is the invitation streaming into my inbox and coming over the news in dramatic announcements and making headlines on the front page of my neighbor’s newspaper—the one I glance at before he picks it up. The markets are falling, banks are bankrupt, there’s been a horrible train wreck in California, and a dog in Arizona dialed 9-1-1 and barked so frantically into the phone that medical help was dispatched and saved its owner’s life. And somehow American politics has turned into “American Idol.”

It takes me a while to notice that the sun is out, the breeze is soft, the late summer flowers still blooming in the yard, and the garden still producing squash and carrots. It takes a few breaths to look up, smile at my beloved, pet the dogs, call the grown kids in LA and Denver, write my niece in Japan—young people venturing into the world, offering their gifts to an uncertain age. In other words, life in the immediate and the moment is still good. And the “goodness,” the “ordinariness,” the “stability” of anything is impermanent. How do I make story out of this?

Today I’m looking at three aspects of story:

• Story as meaning-maker,
• Story as pattern keeper/breaker,
• Story as path-finder.

The story of meaning is how we got here, how we have strung life together thus far and arrived at our worldview, our beliefs, explained our life circumstances to ourselves an others. We make the world of our history by the stories we hold onto about who we are and how thing are.

The story of pattern-keeping and pattern breaking is how we stand at the edge of all we know and reinforce the stories that got us here, or challenge them and open ourselves to new possibilities. We make the world of the moment by discerning the values within the stories swirling around us and choosing that to follow.

The story of path-finding is how we dream our ways forward, stories of what if, and wow did you hear about the courage of someone else? We make the world we want first in the stories we share—and then in the creativity with which we face our own choices.

So on this Monday morning, I am looking at the onslaught of meaning-making that streams in through printed and electronic media, looking for patterns to keep, patterns to break, and trying to find a path forward.  Here are a few questions that might elicit stories that help:

• Do you remember a childhood moment when being an American (or whatever nationality you are) was significant to you?
• How does that moment live in you now?
• What patterns do you see around you that you cherish and want to keep? What patterns do you want to challenge?
• What or who nourished you today?

Let’s start there—

            Tell me that story. 

When my neighbor started emailing me articles about Obama and McCain, I was intrigued—he seemed to be asking me to join in his thought process; he admitted to being unsure who to vote for. It was the first time we had the possibility of getting to know each other beneath chit-chat. We began writing back and forth, and our dialogue reminded me of this story from a few years ago.

In Boston in the early 1990s, when there was increasing violence around abortion clinics, the Center for Public Dialogue called a group of people together, half adamantly anti abortion, and the other adamantly favoring a woman’s right to choose. They asked participants to commit to six months of facilitated conversation to put a human face on the opposition. The primary mode of conversation they used together was story—not opinion.

Nobody changed their position, but they understood the other side better, and they had people on the other side of the issue about whom they cared, and whose life stories they knew. So all these people became in their own ways advocates for tolerance and developed the ability to see abortion as a social issue that was not going to necessarily be “resolved” in their favor, but could be carried socially without that resolution. Violence decreased and the conversationalists became so engaged with each other they stayed together for three years.

Reading about such experiments as this led me to write my book, Storycatcher, about the role story plays in making society possible. One of the things I totally believe after all this work is: stories build bridges, opinions build walls. Opinionating has become a kind of verbal blood sport in our country—with people cheering on one outrageous spokesperson or another as though they were cheering sports teams. But opinion can tear apart the social fabric, and it has. We have become more an us/them society based on polarized pro/con thinking than ever before.

What is possible in story is the chance to learn how people come to hold values and opinions and deep beliefs. So, when someone comes across my path expounding a passionate opinion, I try to find time to ask: What life experience do you think led to this belief?

It’s hard to switch—opinion is a little race-track in the mind, and our thoughts run round and round it, deepening the groove and our sense of being right. But if we are willing to stop rushing by each other and inquire into the story level, we can have an amazing conversation. We can discover what sources our opinions and beliefs about the world and find ways to draw together—even in our differences.

What are you curious about: and who might you be willing to talk to and listen to in story?