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

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

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

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

We were out in the garden prepping the ground for planting the early peas and spinach–something we can do in March in the Northwest (though it did snow a bit Sunday and it’s been blowing ever since sun/rain/sun/rain, etc.). Anyway, I was troweling around and found half a potato from last fall, a small Yukon Gold, shovel cut and undiscovered. I gave it a glance and tossed it over the garden fence and into the field next door. As soon as the little tuber left my hand I had the thought, “That is the gesture of someone who can still go to the grocery store and buy more food.” And I wondered if I would ever be hungry enough that I’d be grateful to find half a potato and maybe even contribute it to the making of Stone Soup.

All my adult life I’ve been a person who recycles and saves and shops at the thrift store and looks for bargains. It’s a game of hide-and-seek I play inside this huge consumer culture. In 1968-69, my first year out of college, I was paid $3600 working in the peace movement, and I saved $1000 and went to Europe. I rode my bicycle and buses and bought my first used car for $200 when I was 30–part of the advance upon selling my first book. The list goes on, and I won’t recite it here. Suffice it to say I have traded a lot of security in order to have a self-designed, self-employed life. I have no regrets about that: it was a choice. It’s still a choice and I have a very comfortable level of frugality. For me, frugality is grounded in belief that consuming less is necessary for right relationship with planetary resources. I choose it: I am not desperate about it. And then, as I tossed half a potato over the fence, I began wondering what conditions I will be asked to face in the coming months and years and how I will respond as frugality becomes a necessity. For surely, in the great rebalancing of humanity’s place in the world, frugality is our path forward.

A few entries ago (2/08/09 “Taking Stock) I wrote about the conversation I had with my Zimbabwean colleague who was heading home to a country in ruins–and yet felt rich in knowing that in his Shona culture there was always a place to run to, someone who would share their last potato. I have just heard more recent news from Kufunda Village, the learning centre and experimental village outside Harare. They haven’t had electricity for two months since their transformer blew up–so they decided to take themselves off the grid intentionally, to study other ways to power themselves. The big concern is getting water from their bore hole and running an electric stove where the community cooks communally–and offers hospitality to the groups that rent seminar space and guest houses from them. The country’s health care system has pretty completely ceased to function, so they are running a clinic of herbal medicines at the edge of the farm. (For a fuller understanding visit their site www.kufunda.org. If you have some money you want to give, you can do so online and support their preschool, the herb farm, their shift to sustainable power sources, and their human spirit.)

These people are my teachers about frugality and resilience! I think of them often these days, and the challenges they face living collaboratively under the social conditions that surround them. Jackie Cahi, the director and interface person between the village and the outside world writes: “…we have opened our space and our hearts and are hosting constantly - mostly the Tree of Life, which conducts healing circles.  This partnership is a perfect synergy for our healing place.  It is challenging without power to draw and heat water and to cook for large numbers each week.  But we are earning enough to keep going - to pay ourselves and to do some work in the communities.  It’s a good feeling. I say tentatively that we are growing….. stronger, wiser, braver, more powerful, and that we know and hold the ground on which we walk.”

I look up and down the street on which I live–thinking of the 25 homes that comprise my little neighborhood, and wonder how we would do if we had to be frugal together. If we had to keep the cook fires going and homes heated and share resources. I want to believe that the great majority of people have an innate spirit of cooperation and altruism in us: my life work is invested in making that story true.

To make that story true in my own life, I offer a tangible gesture–this year, I am committed to eating or feeding others with everything we grow in the garden–no more potato over the fence. I will practice developing a truly appreciative relationship to the food that comes my way and to steward the earth’s abundance within the community. In the midst of a summer teaching and consulting, I’ll be taking a class on safely canning vegetables, and I’m saving Mason jars from the thrift stores. I have marked off dates in my fall calendar that I’ll hold for the work of harvesting.

No way, am I ready to become a subsistence farmer, but my family and neighbors and I are practicing how to live a very local life. Meanwhile, we’re working on a new book, supporting the books and work already out there, and keeping an eye on the world.  Frugality continues to be my choice, my teacher, my connector between myself and conditions in wider world.

How are you changing? What is your tangible gesture?

I’m listening.

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

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

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

A note of appreciation: I am so grateful for the quality of comment building on this blog–and thank many of you for writing in these past months. I read every comment, and  smile and greet the names I recognize:  friends, long ago students, and storycatchers coming in whose names are new. If you haven’t clicked into the comments, take time to do so–it’s a great community. I have an impulse to respond to each of you personally, and have decided I pretty much have to hold the boundary of how I spend my writing time. I can do this blog, and I can write the book under contract, and manage the business, and I can’t take on much individual response. Please know my heart says hello to each of you commenting, and each of you reading. Thank you.

I’ve been commuting back and forth all this past week between my house and our exquisite local retreat center, The AlderMarsh, where we teach when we’re home. I was guiding a small group of women writers through the complexities and magic of a circle that is gathered to have an experience together, while at the same time focusing on the depth of their own works-in-progress. Most of them stayed on-site, so I was the bringer in of news from the world–and it’s not an easy time for morning sound-bites. In conversations that plunged into depth and poked into many topics, we kept raising the question–So, what’s really happening?

This is the most recent example of being in small groups where we are seeking a deeper story that will prepare us for the conditions that are really coming our way. I cheer when President Obama calls for a cap on the CEO salaries of corporations in bail-out, and snarl at the idea that these people are so removed from the realities of the rest of us that they can even imagine taking millions in bonuses and buying private jets, but that’s just one layer of the problem: I believe we are finally facing the imperative to retool the global economy.

In a recent article written for Merrill Lynch, I highlighted these quotes from economic analysist David A. Rosenberg:

“We are witnessing epic changes in the ways in which people approach how they move around and how they allocate their budgets, especially with respect to discretionary spending and their attitudes toward debt.” …
Since WWII, (78 million boomers) ensured that even the most dire recessions were modest… Now, the baby boomers are done. … there is no pent up demand for discretionary items in the household budget. The average household owns nearly $40,000 of non-housing durable goods assets (i.e., the art, the third SUV, the fourth television set, etc.)… The boomers are not just satiated, they are over-saturated, and since one of the few booming segments of the economy are consignment stores, …these assets are being liquidated so the marginal household can trim its record debt and interest burden.”

Wow, I had no idea that buying my teaching wardrobe at Senior Thrift would kick off a national trend (and economic downturn!).  A year ago we paid off our mortgage and we live debt-free. We have plans if our income continues at current levels, and plans if it drops. We live in a community in conversation about local sustainability.

I’m sharing this because I believe the current financial crisis raises the need for conversations that ignite a passionate willingness to redesign our understanding of the material world so that we–people, businesses, communities, and countries– can establish a new equilibrium and move forward into the realities of the 21st century. I’m an English major, a Storycatcher. My last math class was 10th grade geometry. Yet I know wisdom resides in each of us. We can assess what is happening in the larger story and design our lives to survive and thrive.  We can build the path forward, story by story and insight by insight, and action by action.

This is my first entry on this issue. I invite us into conversation, here, as well as wherever you are living.

• What are you talking about? Hearing or reading about?
• Who are you talking and listening to?
• What stories inspire you? What scares you?
• How are you framing the facts so that you can hold them with confidence?

At the end of January I had a conversation with a member of the Kufunda Village community in Zimbabwe where we visited and taught in 2007. He had been on a respite travel time here and I asked him what it was like to be in the US during the Obama inauguration, and also what he was taking home to speak to his village. He said, “It is terribly hard in Zimbabwe right now. I am afraid to go home and see what inflation has done to us in the time I’ve been gone. And I also go home to say, ‘there are ways we Zimbabweans are still rich. Rich because in our country there is always someplace to run–people who will take us in, who will share their last potato. Here, I see that people don’t know who will help them. They close the doors of their houses and suffer alone. This must be so much harder.’ ”

Wise words from one of the “poorest” nations to one of the “richest.” My interpersonal work now is to participate in conversations where we break the remaining taboos of isolation and start the conversation and share the stories that will help us help each other in the necessary losses and unexpected gains of these times.  I still have extra potatoes–let’s talk.

Christina

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Last Tuesday, Inauguration Day, I don’t think very much work got done in America–and from what I hear from Canadian and European friends, a lot of people took time off  in other countries as well to watch Barack Obama become President of the US. We went to the local library to watch a video-stream on big-screen, and to sit among neighbors and be emotional together in public. Parents came in with kids, the Friends of the Library served coffee and cinnamon rolls, and it was a ceremonial moment. We cheered when the folks on the Mall cheered, stood when the national anthem played, and listened carefully to his first words to us from this high office of authority.

That night we joined about 300 Island folks to dance in the Freeland Hall. This wonderful community building has served to hold so many local functions from birthday parties and weddings to town hall gatherings, to canning the harvest, and wakes for the unchurched locals–I dare say this was its first “Inaugural Ball.” Potluck, of course. Someone’s son set up a sound system, and soon this high spirited crowd of mostly white folks were dancing to various decades of music under a projected CNN feed repeating the Inaugural moments. Children ran across the stage, playing in the video stream, their dancing, laughing bodies becoming part of the imagery. How different their America is, how different it will be, from the America of my childhood.

There are several thoughts from this moment that seem important to note–for this is a day of huge change in our national story.

First, the presumptions of my childhood are truly and (I pray) irrevocably over. Growing up in the Midwest of 1950’s and early 1960’s, America was presented to me as a white country with barely acknowledged minorities (none of whom were evident in suburban Minneapolis where the diversity in my entire school was the presence of two Jewish sisters). Media and advertising imagery was white, and all the people around us were white, and everyone in our school-books was white. Though my parents were sincerely liberal, the reality of other American subcultures was beyond my protected grasp…. and within the privileged cocoon of my skin and the places I have lived, the diversifying of the US has remained to some degree elusive in my consciousness–until now.

Today white Americans saw America as it actually is: wonderfully multi-ethnic and multi-dimensional. We are invited to truly understand that white people are part of the mix, but not the dominators we have sadly tried to be. The crowd at Grant Park on November 4th, the nearly 2 million people on the Mall on January 20th, this is us, the US, now. I almost feel in need of being welcomed into this new country. And it has changed my sense of relationship and dialogue with all those strangers around me: how we see each other within this diversity, now that we are led by a man of diversity, is a wide-open story. I am eager to notice what shifts in the coming months and years.

Secondly, the thought went through me that my generational impact is starting to wind down. I was born in 1946, the first year of the Baby Boomers. The eventual 75 million of us have been a huge cultural wave–reinventing fashion, music, arts, social norms, and liberation and consciousness-raising movements as we pushed forward decade by decade. And now, after just two passes through the Presidency, our generational leadership is replaced by this vibrant young man.  Two thirds of the people in Freeland Hall raised their hands when asked who was older than Obama: he is not young enough to be my son: not old enough to be my brother, the other end of the Boomer spectrum.

For the children and the grey-haired, our local party was over by 10:00 PM. The balls went on in Washington, and Michelle and Barack were out ’til 1:00 AM on a weeknight. Then he got up after 6 hours sleep and headed into work to try to make a functioning country again out of the mess we’re in.

Little work got done on Tuesday, and a lot of work has been getting done ever since! Every day there is a list of actions taken to correct our course, to restart America’s presence in the 21st century. It’s not possible to wipe out the past 8 years and the profound damage done in our name to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, the folks who used to live in New Orleans, the young soldiers who used to have arms and legs, those who rest in the bloodied ground… It’s not possible to comprehend the shift from a $237 billion budget surplus in January 2000 to a $1 trillion budget deficit in January 2009. And yet the pervading mood  is a sense that truly an old story is over and a new one has begun. (Newsweek Magazine gave GWB an 81% shame rating as he left office: and Obama had a 68% approval rating at the end of his first week. The lady at the drugstore said today, “I didn’t vote for him… but I have to say, I’m impressed.”) We are picking up the threads of a different narrative and going on from here

And when a new story is gelling, it’s important to avoid assumptions about how things are going to go, or to set the path too firmly because we don’t yet understand the full range of possibilities. The storyfield needs to stay open-ended, ambiguous, contributory. My job, as we enter Obama’s Presidency is to keep praying thankfulness for his/their safety, and to keep open to the mystery that is unfolding in the world around me, from the local to the global, to keep noticing what is mine to do next. That’s what he is doing: the next thing, and the next: and that is what I’m going to do as well. And I’m going to continue to ponder my expanding awareness about what America is, what she might become, and what we grayheads have to offer the new age we set in motion while Obama grew up, and went to school, and to Harvard, and to Chicago and to Washington.

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

I’m writing on the eve of Inauguration Day in America… and it feels like New Year’s Eve–again. It feels like we are collectively starting the year over, which is a good thing since the first two weeks of 2009 have sped by faster than I can track. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to step onto a rolling treadmill set for jogging speed and been shocked and stumbly at the attempt to join something already going faster than you are. I’ve caught myself doing that a few times–and after 2 weeks of slowing down to the pace of guidance, stepping back into my usual pace feels just like that.

However, I also feel blessed that my busyness is just that–busy, but not disasterous. Around western Washington thousands of people have been dealing with flood in the lowlands and avalanche in the highlands. And friends across the northern US and southern Canada have been so far below freezing that the Centigrade and Fahrenheit thermometers match up–minus 40.  My brother and sister-in-law got in their Pruis in MInneapolis and just started driving south. Colleen said she wasn’t going to stop until she could stick her arm out the window and feel warm air. I think they are in Alabama by now.

And then there is the rest of the world and how we spin along in our suffering places of famine and war. And every day, when I think I’m at some kind of whelming point, I go down on the beach with my beloved and dogs and am wrapped in the peace of wild things. Words drift off my mind, and there is just the end of the day beauty–even if it’s rainy or foggy or a slit of light as the sun falls behind the mountains. I am filled with profound gratitude for this moment of peace, for the place I live, and the privilege of my life. Please, God, hear my gratitude, and fill me with the ability to do this all justice–the earth, the work, the tending, letting fall apart what needs to fall apart; fiercely saving and savoring what needs to be saved and savored. Let me discern which is which.

And when I think I’ve got too much to do, too many people I’m trying to relate to effectively and with heart, a schedule for upcoming speeches and projects that I’m committed to, I catch the news out of the corner of my eye and think about this new President and all that waits his doing! How is he going to manage his new year’s commitments? How will he learn to sleep through the night in that big slave-built house, under the coverlet of his burdens? And I pray:  pray for him, for his family, for Joe Biden and his family. I pray for all those gathered around this administration, the cabinet and advisors. I pray for the US Congress to come into its courage now, it’s ability to take action. And this is a new form of pray–one I invite you to join in with me, in whatever way fits your spiritual life.

My prayer is not a statement of request, a petition. I do not say, “please watch over… please guide…” My prayer is a statement of accomplishment, a completion. I pour a cup of tea and with my dog I go sit on the front steps under the shelter of the roofline and look into the raw breath of the new day. From this vantage point  I say, “Thank you for protecting President Obama and all around him. Thank you for their wise and courageous decisions today. Thank you for bringing the American people into readiness for this leadership, and willingness to face a future that needs to be different. Thank you for making me ready. Thank you for imbuing me with courage to step into the unknown, to let go of old forms of security and reach boldly for that which is coming into being.”

These are my words–you have your own words. Whatever they are–may you step into your statements of accomplishment.  I will meet you there, in that place where we are headed; in that place where we already stand in the future looking back with profound satisfaction and gratitude at how we expended our lives at this time.

Let me know your prayers…

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Wow, when one closes off the world, even partially, for a couple of weeks–reading a 1000 page novel (highly recommended by the way–Pillars of Earth by Ken Follett), trying out some new recipes, sitting by the fireplace in the evenings and watching the Christmas tree with nothing going on but a little mental reverie, and then opens the door again–the whoosh is intense! The week has sped by–and it’s not the whoosh I want to write first into the new year.

We stepped out of our two-week mid-winter rest last Saturday evening (January 3rd) by attending a concert at the local arts center and then a reception full of island friends. It was so sweet to be greeted a dozen times with words of welcome, “You’re back? You came out for this?  What did you not do this year?… I thought of you, as this was the year I spent the holidays in some kind of retreat because we were all snowed in and had to be quiet!”

The reception was potluck, of course, and candlelight and clusters of conversation moving from room to room. All we middle-agers stayed up late, “My goodness it’s 11:00PM…” We drove home in the dark, floated in the hot-tub, and slept in the next day. Sunday we took down the tree and began admitting how few holiday cards we were sending. We put away Christmas.

It’s a week later and the evidence left of our quiet time is two card tables in the living room where we are still working a few evenings more to catch up on our annual scrapbook. This is a project where we go back and review the year, collect photos and journal entries and write out the narrative of life experiences. It is an act of storycatching that always surprises me in the meaning it gathers over time.

“Maybe we don’t want to do this anymore,” I said on Solstice in my desire for totally unstructured time… “We don’t have to…Nobody looks at these but us.” And then we open the books of the years behind us and see what is there. On one level it’s a photo album: the children grow up, a grandchild is born, we look older, events both personal and professional are recorded. On one level it’s a chronology of community building: one by one and two by two and group by group, here come the people who surround our lives with love, collegiality, inspiration, outreach into the world–trips to offer circle training, consulting, vision quests, storycatching, writing (see www.peerspirit.com, our educational company website if you’re not familiar with all this). On one level it’s a shared journal of reflection on the meaning of our lives: quotes from our actual journals, strings of narrative thought, perspective over time, the chance to write things like “little did we know…” or “much to our surprise…” or “now we see…”

Of course, we want to keep doing this.

While it’s fresh, while the mess is still part of our decor, here’s the value of this record as I understand it now. First, it sends me into the pages of my own journal, starting with last winter’s volume, and the story I was carrying at that time. I had forgotten how grief-filled I was over the state of the world, how I was working with myself to attach to spirit in ways that would keep me going. Having shifted out of that space, it’s privately fascinating to watch myself work it through in the journal, to observe my process and learn from it the way I might learn from reading someone else’s writing. And then, as the work picked up and carried us forward in an astounding momentum of travel and commitment, I watched myself grow into the “yes” we had said. And when Ann had a car accident and my brother had cancer and a colleague died, and a book contract came through–I could see both the fresh and the reflective reactions to the chronology of events.

And the second benefit is sitting side by side with my partner who is having a similar experience. How often, as we are passing scissors and glue and blank pages back and forth, one says quietly to the other, “Can I interrupt you a minute, listen to this…” And that most private revealing occurs between us–how we held one another from near or far, how we individually perceived the same event with different emphases, what we wrote in the times we were apart. It is amazing to hear the voice that we each use to speak to ourselves when there is no other audience than our own hearts.

And something alchemical happens in how we can see the patterns we’ve just come from, and how we look into the path laid out before us in the coming months. We know the new year will be full of both plans and surprises–no one schedules in an accident, a health crisis, a flood, an economic crash, renewed activism, more gardening, less money, more need for community… And what we see from the volumes of the scrapbooks is that we always find ways to respond to life that make sense out of plan and surprise, that we are making in this record the raw elements of story. The building blocks, the things we count on.

How do you do this in your life?

And what are your thoughts as you enter the new year?

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

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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Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright ©2009 Christina Baldwin. All rights reserved.