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.

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

Sunday afternoon 13 September 2009

It’s been a while since I wrote, but before I tell you where I’ve been (working/writing/traveling sums it up) I want to tell you where I am right now– sitting at a table in the Omega Café overlooking the late summer landscape of Omega Institute, Rhinebeck NY. It’s turnover time–in the seasons, in the class schedule, in who is wandering around here trying to find the Dining Hall and lost among the flower garden instead. I have fourteen Storycatchers showing up this afternoon and we will head into the kind of sweet, deep listening circle of writers and storytellers that I know so well. And before that happens, I want to capture of the essence of what has been going on here for the past two days since my arrival Friday afternoon.

The weekend included a few minutes to say hello to Gloria Steinem who commented on how much she appreciates Storycatcher, and thanked me for my work on story and circle, a good laugh on the foibles of writing with Isabel Allende, and a lunch conversation with Helen Thomas, who is at a stage of life where everything out of her mouth is sage advice. And those are just the iconic figures I walked in knowing. I was soon introduced to incredible younger leaders and women of color who inspired and educated me, from the Afghani woman rights advocate, Sakena Yakoobi, to California powerhouse activist, Lateefah Simon, and New Yorker cartoonist, Liza Donnelly.  And amidst all these women, the brightest lights in the room were often the women under 35 who comprised a third of the 400 of us gathered here for the eighth session of the Women & Power Conference, this year’s theme: Cross Generational Dialogue.  And for entertainment, there was Sarah Jones, Natalie Merchant, and Katya Grineva. (If you don’t know who these women are—and I didn’t, Whidbey Island isolationist that I am—get out on You Tube and enjoy the discovery!)

In this crowd, I am definitely on the bridge of history, on the way to elderhood, and not yet there. I’m not Helen Thomas (who turned 89 sitting with Obama on the couch, sharing a birthday cake and iced tea) and not quite Gloria Steinem (who at 75 still likes to use the “F” word—both “f*cking” and “Feminist”). If we had lined up by age, at least 85% of the room would be behind me, about 10% alongside me, and 5% older than me.  There is a huge amount of activism and need for activism going on in the world that I have not been tracking, and a whole communications network that I didn’t know existed. Look up, for example: www.pulsewire.net, www.feministing.com to see what the young ones are up to—feministing has live blogging entries from the conference itself and video clips shot mid action. For what’s happening in a mid-life scene, check out www.wowowow.com and for politics: www.thedailybeast.com. My horizons are expanded, and I keep jumping off this letter and on-line so I can see these references myself as I pass along my notes.

And it raises a lot of questions about legacy for me, especially as Ann Linnea and I get ready to launch our new book, The Circle Way (March 2010) and her new book, Keepers of the Trees (July 2010). How do we offer the quiet presence that is our soul contribution into this wild ride of the world expanding into a global media phenomenon? No answers: just questions raised.

As one brilliant moment after another unfolded, I was wishing I had been more insistent that my niece Erin accompany me here and join this cadre of young women. Erin is leaving for Brussels, Belgium, in a few days to study for a master’s degree in International Relations in a cohort group where she will definitely be an American minority among the students. Maybe we will be here together next year when she’s on her way home.  Next year’s conference dates: October 8-10, 2010. I’m going to start talking with the planners about focusing on story as a map to the future.

So, go out and click around to get a sense of the conference and its resources on-line, and I’ll close with a few quotes.

Gloria Steinem: “When addressing domestic violence, we know the maximum moment of danger is when a woman is escaping the control of the abuser. Just because she has a restraining order in her pocket doesn’t keep her safe—all who want to protect her must be diligent.  I think this is where the country is: we’re making it clear that we want healthcare, want a redefined financial system, want peace instead of war, and that we are determined to escape the control of the political abusers… And in response there is an upsurge in hate media, male-led violence and intimidation at town hall meetings and other social settings. We must not be intimidated back into the abuse!”

Edit Schlaffer, founder of Women Without Borders “We thought we’d focus on countries in crisis, and five years later we realize we (Europeans) are in countries in crisis. We are in a culture war raging against the most universally held human values and rights.”

Helen Thomas: “What we should really be against today is the climate of hate. We are on the verge of allowing it to destroy our nation, what we believe we are as a people. In all my years in Washington, I have never seen it like this before—partisanship, yes, but this is sourced from a place beyond debate or civility. And Congress—where are the women in Congress? They became men. And the men all became Republicans, owned by the interests who paid their ways into election. And the first thing we need to change is our passivity toward all this: are we really willing to say this is acceptable to us and let’s just go on about our private busy lives?

Me: Okay we have work to do. Here come the storycatchers for a week of writing. We are spending one day on personal healing, and then heading into story as social activism and social transformer. It’s urgent! I am riding and writing the wave of change. Let me know how you are–as the seasons change.

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!

My friend Deb Lund, a well-known children’s author, is traveling on school visits throughout Japan these  weeks, and her companion is her 6th grade son, Kaj.  They are both keeping blogs of the journey–shared experiences through two generational eyes. It is beautiful to read these parallel and unique trains of thought and I invite you to check them out. Kaj is a voracious reader and has started his own blog to gather and share ideas for good books for the 12-year-old set. His blog is:http://portalreads.edublogs.org/ and his mother’s blog is: www.deblund.com/blog/.  I can tell Kaj is having a great time–his blog is not being kept up to date! Imagine that, a boy living in the present moment of his big adventure! However, he did tackle a huge piece of observation and reflection–their visit to the Peace Museum in Hiroshima.

Both mother and son are profoundly impacted. Each writes of it from their own ways of carrying story.

As a person who grew up very close to World War II, who was conceived near the day the US dropped the Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and sent 100,000+ people to their deaths in a few moments, I have carried this story in my life narrative. And sometimes I feel I carry it in my psychic DNA somehow–as my soul was called in at the moment when so many others were called out. That’s an exploration for another time… what strikes me now is the picture of Kaj staring at the  rusted, twisted tricycle of a little Japanese boy who was killed by the bomb.

These are important lessons in the middle track of childhood. I remember the somber lessons from my own childhood. I was haunted by the big red book of LIFE’s History of World War II, and far more than I think my parents knew I would pour over pictures of this history that was still shaking us throughout the 1950s. My parents sponsored refugees from Germany and Poland and the tiny house of our Indiana childhood would swell with strangers whose stories we could barely know through the barriers of language and culture.

When the movie “Shindler’s List” came out, one of the responses I had was gratitude to have been shown the fullness of that horror in one sweeping story. I sat frozen in my theater chair, barely able to blink. But I was middle-aged and had studied this era. I had thought about these atrocities and come up with ways to accommodate my prenatal darkness in the peaceful privileges of my life. The teenage daughter of a friend, who was at the time much more removed and ignorant of WWII’s horrific details, was taken to the movie by her German language teacher. She came home, went to her bedroom and wept and wept. I remember her mother called me quite worried and asked, “What shall I do?”

I said, “I think she’s all right. Her heart breaking at the cruelty of the world. She needs that stamina and empathy. She needs to know she can hold this story and hold her own…”

That is also my prayer for Kaj–that he can know the story of Hiroshima and hold his own path. As a boy who just finished Lord of the Rings, he is already a student of good and evil. As a child heading into the 21st century, he is already living in the turning point. He needs to know–and to find ways to think about it–and then to go out for sushi and explore temples and let the light and the darkness make their rivers in him.

That is also my prayer for myself and all of us in this Storycatcher network–that we let the light and the darkness make rivers within us and learn to swim them both.

It seems to be an incredibly intense time at the moment. Is this temporary or permanent? We don’t know. I  made two teaching/speaking trips to California in less than a week and participated in a conference here–moving around several thousand people at a time who are infused with excitation, exhaustion, anticipation, resignation– all the big words seem to be in play. People are having life crises, health crises, work crises (not to mention Mexico shutting down for 2 weeks and serving up a big reminder of not being in charge of much of anything anymore)…

It is three weeks until Ann’s and my new book on circle is due at the publisher’s–and it is being a struggle for me to be as regular as I usually like with this blog. If you don’t hear from me for awhile it means I’m editing chapters and weeding the garden without a moment to spare for extra writing. I’ll be back in June.

I’ll miss you–please take care, keep writing, and know we’ll be back in the story circle soon.

Blessings,

Christina

It’s the night after Easter weekend, and while we started off Friday evening enjoying an amazingly professional concert of sections of the Brahms Requiem performed by the local Methodist church choir and island musicians, my main spiritual practice these past weekend has been largely focused on gardening. We put in about 6 hours a day prepping garden beds for our household and neighborhood vegetable plots, cheering the peas that have come up under the Remay cloth and the spinach forming a straight line of green down the black soil, and turning in compost for receiving seeds that will be planted in the coming week–and if that isn’t a study in resurrection … Besides the hours in garden beds, we dug out a 20 year old fuchsia bush that had died in our colder-than-usual winter, and moved a lilac bush into its place, and then helped friends transplant several dozen ferns and open up space for fruit trees at the edge of their woods. Not too bad for an almost 63 year old, almost 60 year old, and an almost 11 year old dog. Putting in earth time.

There is a big difference between this year and last year in how a number of folks around here are looking at gardens and gardening. We are seeing it as an integral part of island life. Not to get too bucolic, this little neighborhood is fairly suburban in how it looks, it just happens to be hanging on a cliff edge. The infrastructure that sustains us is more rural and vulnerable than many suburban areas that are hooked into huge metropolitan grids: here little housing areas are developed around shared wells and each lot has its own septic system. It’s a climate that fosters flowers and spring is a marvelous season that lingers four months. Most of the island farmland has been parceled into smaller lots and developments and the era when Whidbey was a floating truck farm sending tons of vegetables to Seattle food markets has faded into vague history.

The island itself was formed about 12-10,000 years ago when retreating glaciers created a huge river delta of debris that spewed out from the melt, then froze and compressed down into dense layers, then melted, then froze and compressed again–and when you try to put in a garden you come to understand this process rock by rock, clay by clay, sand by sand. Despite the glacial till, we do get things to grow here and more and more people are augmenting the grocery store with the garden bed.

One of the reasons we are having such a strenuous garden start-up is that we have joined with three other neighborhood households in collective gardening in the sunny back yard of one of the bigger lots. This is our second season: we have the fence in, the bunnies out, the beds tilled and early planting begun. We have jumped over the idea of strict property rights and everyone needing to do it themselves into an experiment in sharing ground, work, expertise, and food. The family with the shadiest lot is starting to raise chickens that will become part of the exchange.

There are many tangible and fairly immediate benefits to this experience and there is an underlying shift in our perceptions about what it means to live together. We talk about things: ask each other how we’re doing. All of us are hard working folks dependent on making a living to sustain our families. We are creating a safety net for whatever comes. Growing food together, and listening to each other’s anecdotes about daily life lessens our fear and increases our confidence. It is one of the signs of readiness I believe is coming up everywhere in America this spring, and hopefully sprouting all over the world: a resilience in our community efforts to take care of each other and the natural world.To me, this seems like the only agenda there: taking care of each other and everything else.

Somewhere out there grunting in the rain, shoveling around the rocky soil I composed this letter to President Obama. He and Michelle are gardening this spring–I hope they are actually getting their fingernails dirty, not just posing for the occasional photo-op. And now they have a puppy who will want to roll in the lettuce patch. All these things humanize their lives and connect them a bit more to the ordinary lives the rest of us lead.

I hope you are inspired to find your own ways toward increased community resilience, and to communicate with the leaders who need to be assured of our populist wisdom, willingness, and determination. Speak up, bend down, plant and rant.

Dear Sir,
Attached to this letter is the most disturbing article about your current policy challenges that I have read since your inauguration. Bill Moyers is the most integral voice of true liberalism, realism, and statesmanship that I know. To be the President you promised us you would be, you must listen to his voice, and include perspectives like Moyers’ in your thought process!

It is my deepest hope that you understand your job is to retool the global economy for planetary sustainability and survival of the human species. Right now, in an attempt to get the economy stabilized enough to make this shift, I call what you are doing “feeding the lions.” This is a dangerous task: for while feeding the lions, you must not let your mind be eaten by their voracious agenda.

You said you offered “change we can believe in:” I am believing in your ability to name the full scope of that change and to invigorate our willingness to step into a hugely different world than the one that has been sold to us. I also believe we are ready. I notice how we are taking leadership at the local level in tens of thousands of ways—preparing our communities to hold together in this challenge. The collective mindset of America knows the old way is over. We elected you to lead us through the largest correction of course in human history. Yes, we can—can you?
Sincerely,

Christina Baldwin

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

It’s been three weeks since we last “spoke” in this conversation. I’ve been traveling in Indianapolis, Indiana and Columbus, Ohio for the past 10 days on a teaching trip with Ann Linnea doing our PeerSpirit circle training. And it was heartrending to observe the level of financial pain. Houses with boarded up windows were evident everywhere we drove around Indianapolis, and the Columbus Dispatch  was running a front page series on getting through these times while the unemployment rate in Ohio rose to 8.8%.

In the midst of this, we’ve met wonderful people.  In an inner city Methodist Church the congregation and neighborhood are engaged in mutually supportive programs that evolve their sense of “beloved community.” Then we worked with a health care association and foundation whose wise leader said, “The more we work internally as an authentic community, the more we can extend authentic community.” Their entire staff had already been using PeerSpirit Circle Process and we were invited in to help deepen their practice. The last two days of the week we spent at The Ohio State University. I gave a speech on Story as Leadership, and then Ann and I did a day of story practice and circle training for over 100 people—making little “campfires” around tables of seven participants. In each of these settings it was wonderful to watch the confidence of their leadership spread around the rim, and to be present as they shared meaningful stories that expanded acquaintanceship.

This is humbling work, or at least work we offer humbly: to be invited into the heart of people’s lives and facilitate qualities of conversation that change how we hold together in these times. The responses to my previous entry, “Taking Stock” moved my heart for I see that many of us are taking the opportunity to reassess what most matters in our lives and to seek a spiritual layer within themselves and the way they carry the story. Do read these entries in their entirety, they are thoughtful and engaging.

One of the writing theories I love to work with is the idea that we make story at several levels simultaneously: the Story of the Day, the Story of the Times, and the Story of Meaning.   When the story line falls apart at one level, we have two other levels that can sustain us. As we collectively grapple with ongoing and increasing change in the Day Story and the Times Story, we will need to reach more and more deeply into the Meaning Story. Certainly by the responses and bloggish dialogue emerging here, we are engaged in puzzling together our personal and collective Meaning Stories.

To make Meaning Story, I will often write in the third person—still about my own life, or experience, but metaphorically, as though writing a fairy tale or fable.  Once there was a (wo)man who… And from there I let imagination and reality mingle until I find myself writing out the patterns that I’m living through and provide myself with a sense of stability and where to step next…

Once there was a woman who walked among the boarded up dreams of ordinary people. Her heart was saddened to see these signs of struggle and loss. “These are not the lives that should be broken,” she thought, for she had walked through other streets as well where the walls were gilded with promises of unending plenty. “And yet,” she strode on, “as the people learn so the leaders will learn. What is the lesson? What is the new story?” She rounded a corner, and there was a fire going in an old metal barrel. Some folks had made a band instruments out of trash–a string base, a garbage pail drum–a woman sang, children clapped and ran around each other making play out of the moment. Someone looked her way and smiled. The woman swallowed her nervousness at meeting strangers and smiled back, joined the song, and emptied her pockets looking for things to share. “Here, it begins again…” she thought. “We will find the way.”

These little tales don’t have to be long–they just need to reinforce the patterns we want to maintain for ourselves and those around us, and set one impression or image of guidance into the field of our imagination. Write a fairy tale… and we’ll go from there.

Blessings on this day, and on the folks who are shifting their dreams, and on the folks whose dreams have been shifted–ready or not.

Christina