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.

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!

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

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.

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?