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Speaker 2: Where's the creative tension of holding between I want to
Speaker 2: show up in the Michigan Legislature and argue my case
Speaker 2: in open dialectical manner. And I'm going to show up
Speaker 2: at the Michigan Legislature and let my AK forty seven
Speaker 2: do my talking for me.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers
Speaker 3: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
Speaker 3: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
Speaker 3: think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
Speaker 3: thoughts don't strengthen or empower. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
Speaker 3: or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
Speaker 3: what we do. We think things that hold us back
Speaker 3: and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Speaker 3: Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort
Speaker 3: to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
Speaker 3: how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
Speaker 3: how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us,
Speaker 3: our guest on this episode is Parker Palmer, the founder
Speaker 3: and senior partner of the Center for Courage and Renewal.
Speaker 3: He's a world renowned writer, speaker, and activist who focuses
Speaker 3: on issues of education, community leadership, spirituality, and social change.
Speaker 3: Parker has reached millions of people through his nine books,
Speaker 3: which include Let Your Life Speak, The Courage to Teach
Speaker 3: a Hidden Wholeness, and Healing the Heart of Democracy, among others. Today,
Speaker 3: Eric and Parker riff on whatever topics come up.
Speaker 1: Hi Parker, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Hi Harik, It's good to be back with you.
Speaker 1: It is great to have you back. I am just
Speaker 1: really happy to talk with you again. I was saying
Speaker 1: to you before we started, like, it's not like you
Speaker 1: have a new book out where I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: we got to talk about this book. I just was like,
Speaker 1: I just want to talk to Parker again. So I'm
Speaker 1: glad that we were able to make it happen. We'll
Speaker 1: be talking about this and that, but we'll start in
Speaker 1: the way we always do, with the Parable of the
Speaker 1: Wolves and see what you have to say about it
Speaker 1: this time. So in the parable, there's a grandparent who's
Speaker 1: talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there
Speaker 1: are two wolves inside of us that are always a battle.
Speaker 1: One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
Speaker 1: and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
Speaker 1: the grandchild stops think about it for a second, look
Speaker 1: at their grandparents. They say, well, which one wins? And
Speaker 1: the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like
Speaker 1: to start off by asking you what that parable means
Speaker 1: to you in your life and in the work that
Speaker 1: you do.
Speaker 2: I love the parable, I have loved it for a
Speaker 2: long time, and what it brings quickly to mind is
Speaker 2: my long time belief for understanding that so much in
Speaker 2: life depends on what it is that we bring from
Speaker 2: inside our lives to the outside world. And conversely, when
Speaker 2: the world throws stuff back at us, what do we
Speaker 2: do internally to process it? How do we receive it?
Speaker 2: Do we cling to it? Can we let it go?
Speaker 2: Can we turn dirt into gold? Can we receive affirmation
Speaker 2: and blessing in an open hearted way? I call it
Speaker 2: life on the Mobius strip. It's this constant exchange of
Speaker 2: the inner and outer which keep co creating each other.
Speaker 2: And in the end there is no inner and out.
Speaker 2: It's one continual act of co creation. But when I
Speaker 2: think of that, when I think of it that way,
Speaker 2: or in terms of the parable of the two wolves,
Speaker 2: I'm reminded of how much responsibility we have for creating
Speaker 2: and recreating the micro environments around us. You know, as
Speaker 2: one person, a friend of mine has said, our reach
Speaker 2: may be only three feet or so, but let's make
Speaker 2: a positive impact within that three foot reach. And at
Speaker 2: the same time, we're co creating ourselves by how we
Speaker 2: internalize what the world throws back at us. So it's
Speaker 2: a huge parable in terms of life today. I mean,
Speaker 2: look at all that's going on, where so much is
Speaker 2: being manifested from the shadow side of our lives in
Speaker 2: the external world in murderous ways, in hurtful ways, in
Speaker 2: ways that threaten democracy itself and certainly injure other people.
Speaker 2: So it's a big, big story.
Speaker 1: I'm always interested in. You know, there's a narrative that
Speaker 1: things today are worse than they've been before, and I'm
Speaker 1: always interested in, you know, talking to people who've been
Speaker 1: around a little bit longer, you know, is that your
Speaker 1: sense also, And I know as we tend to get older,
Speaker 1: we tend to think that the world today is not
Speaker 1: as good as the world used to be. I'm just
Speaker 1: kind of curious. If you're eighty you were born you know,
Speaker 1: really still well, the really horrible time in human history
Speaker 1: was happening, right, you know, you were born during a
Speaker 1: war that killed what like seventeen million people or something,
Speaker 1: you know, So that historical context I find helpful. How
Speaker 1: do you think about our current time and placing it
Speaker 1: in overall context?
Speaker 2: Well, I think the gist of what you just said,
Speaker 2: Eric is correct, which is that in my lifetime, I'm
Speaker 2: actually eighty four right now, born in nineteen thirty nine,
Speaker 2: So I've seen a lot of human ups and downs.
Speaker 2: Can't even begin to tick them off. But certainly World
Speaker 2: War Two, the Holocaust which you referenced on, through the sixties,
Speaker 2: at the Vietnam War, and our recurring inability to come
Speaker 2: to terms with the original sin of race, racial prejudice, injustice,
Speaker 2: white supremacy in this society, the McCarthy era of the
Speaker 2: fifties right on through today, with incredible numbers of American
Speaker 2: citizens sort of joining in on conspiracy theories and the
Speaker 2: denial of the obvious, the denial that an election got
Speaker 2: won by the person who actually want it, and buying
Speaker 2: in on the basis of no evidence to the notion
Speaker 2: that somehow that election was massively rigged and massively flawed.
Speaker 2: So there's been a lot of that in my lifetime,
Speaker 2: and I'm not forgetting what's going on in the Middle
Speaker 2: East these days. Add that to the list of very
Speaker 2: fundamental human struggles to decide which wolf we feed. I
Speaker 2: think what I do find troubling today is the rise
Speaker 2: of the far far right, not only here at home
Speaker 2: but around the world, and the ease with which so
Speaker 2: many citizens seem to buy in to baseless conspiracy theories.
Speaker 2: I'll never understand these conversations that I sometimes get into,
Speaker 2: where I'm saying, well, here's what the research shows about X,
Speaker 2: Y or Z, and the other person basically says, well,
Speaker 2: here's what an anonymous person named Q has to say
Speaker 2: about that, and so I refute the research. These things
Speaker 2: truly baffle me. I may be deluding myself, but I
Speaker 2: think I mean. I was in on a lot of
Speaker 2: conversations about Vietnam. I was in on a lot of
Speaker 2: conversations about McCarthy and that era of threat to democracy,
Speaker 2: and my memory is that they were measurably more rational
Speaker 2: and more empirical than what it is that we're treated
Speaker 2: to today. So in that sense, I'm a yes and
Speaker 2: a no. I mean, yes, it keeps happening, and there
Speaker 2: are some twists and turns in the current crisis that
Speaker 2: I find really hard to wrap my mind during.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, you wrote a book I don't know
Speaker 1: how many years ago now called Healing the Heart of Democracy,
Speaker 1: and I think we've talked about that in one of
Speaker 1: our previous interviews, and I think that that book was
Speaker 1: written before the rise of as much conspiracy theory as
Speaker 1: we're seeing today, as much the word polarization seems overused sometimes.
Speaker 1: I mean, I watched the sixties and I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we were killing president, you know, we were
Speaker 1: assassinating leaders here in the US. Like that seems pretty polarized.
Speaker 1: But I do agree with you about this not even
Speaker 1: being able to agree on basic facts. Is there anything
Speaker 1: in your thoughts on how we heal that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's interesting you should ask, because that book, Healing
Speaker 2: the Art of Democracy, which was published in twenty eleven,
Speaker 2: will be republished in a new edition next year twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four, and I was asked by the publisher to
Speaker 2: write a new introduction to it, which is basically around
Speaker 2: the question, how have you changed your mind if at all?
Speaker 2: I say basically two things in that new interest deduction.
Speaker 2: One is that my fundamental thesis in healing the heart
Speaker 2: of democracy is that we have got to learn to
Speaker 2: talk to each other across lines of difference, and we
Speaker 2: have to learn to engage in what I call creative
Speaker 2: tension holding. Creative tension holding means the ability which can
Speaker 2: be taught in schools and voluntary associations, in religious communities
Speaker 2: and families, that can be taught anywhere and everywhere. Creative
Speaker 2: tension holding means holding apparently opposite positions in a way
Speaker 2: that eventually allows the two parties either to come to
Speaker 2: some compromise in the middle of it, or to learn
Speaker 2: that there's a kind of transcendent third thing that neither
Speaker 2: one of them had considered or thought of, which would
Speaker 2: meet the needs on both sides of the equation. That's
Speaker 2: why it's creative tension holding toward some place new that
Speaker 2: had not yet been imagined. It has everything to do
Speaker 2: with focusing on nurturing that relationship between two or more
Speaker 2: people where what's important is not to always be insisting
Speaker 2: on being right, but to keep your eye on being
Speaker 2: in right relationship, because that creates the container that allows
Speaker 2: for an ongoing discussion. And a lot of these issues
Speaker 2: around which were conflicted are complicated issues, and so they're
Speaker 2: not going to be resolved in five minutes. It may
Speaker 2: take five months or five years. But we have to
Speaker 2: learn to hang in with each other. So as long
Speaker 2: as we are a country rooted in we the people,
Speaker 2: a government of by and for the people, as long
Speaker 2: as we're at least maintaining the premise the principle, however
Speaker 2: broken it may be in practice that we the people
Speaker 2: have the final say, should have the final say on
Speaker 2: all things. I don't see any way to get away
Speaker 2: from the proposition that talking to each other is the
Speaker 2: way forward, because that's how you build up we the people.
Speaker 2: But in this introduction to the new addition of healing
Speaker 2: the art of democracy, I also say, what's happening now
Speaker 2: poses us with some oppositions, some polarities that are not
Speaker 2: open to creative tension holding. I mean, where's the creative
Speaker 2: tension of holding between I want to show up in
Speaker 2: the Michigan legislature and argue my case in open dialectical manner,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to show up at the Michigan Legislature
Speaker 2: and let my AK forty seven do my talking for me.
Speaker 2: There's no creative tension to be held between those two positions.
Speaker 2: There's no creative tension to be held when the gist
Speaker 2: of the conversation is around which race, which religion, which ethnicity,
Speaker 2: which nationality, which gender or sexual orientation is superior to
Speaker 2: the others. Yep, there's no creative tension holding with conspiracy
Speaker 2: theories up against research based facts. So I think what
Speaker 2: that means is developing a thicker skin around saying this
Speaker 2: is not a conversation that's worth pursuing. This is not
Speaker 2: a conversation in which we can expect either to meet
Speaker 2: in the middle or to generate a transcendent third thing.
Speaker 2: And I think a lot of good hearted people, and
Speaker 2: I've been one of those people over the years, just
Speaker 2: have a hard time with saying this is not a
Speaker 2: conversation that's going to go anywhere fruitful. We keep pretending
Speaker 2: that if we just change the subject and pass the turkey,
Speaker 2: everything is going to be fine, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, I tend to agree with you, right. I'm
Speaker 1: a big proponent in almost all cases like get to
Speaker 1: know the other person, understand why they think what they think,
Speaker 1: understand where they're coming from, see their humanity, you know.
Speaker 1: And I'm a big proponent of that, right, And it
Speaker 1: does seem, like you said, there are certain positions and
Speaker 1: viewpoints that, like, I don't know how much creative tension
Speaker 1: you can get when I'm like that wall is black
Speaker 1: and you're like, no, that wall is white. Human perception
Speaker 1: things around colors aside. I mean, the basic thing is
Speaker 1: that we can't even agree on a base reality to
Speaker 1: have a conversation around. And that's where I feel a
Speaker 1: little bit despairing, you know, around these things, right, because
Speaker 1: I don't even know how to engage in conversation in
Speaker 1: a useful way, I end up often not even having
Speaker 1: the conversation, which then doesn't feel good either, Like I
Speaker 1: don't know what to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with you. I think you have to try.
Speaker 2: I think you have to keep trying until all the
Speaker 2: precincts have reported in that it's pretty clear that this
Speaker 2: is not a discussable item. Yeah, but there's another point
Speaker 2: that I've made in Healing the Heart of Democracy that
Speaker 2: I also built into the new introduction, and that is
Speaker 2: that there's a long history in America, dating from the
Speaker 2: very beginning of this country, in which it doesn't take
Speaker 2: one hundred percent of the people to get the people's
Speaker 2: business done. I mean, you know, one of the salient
Speaker 2: features of democracy is you can do business with fifty
Speaker 2: one percent, even if forty nine percent are saying a
Speaker 2: pox on all your houses. I was fascinated when I
Speaker 2: was researching Healing the Heart of Democracy to learn I
Speaker 2: think for the first time that in the Constitutional Convention
Speaker 2: of seventeen eighty seven, which basically resulted in the document,
Speaker 2: we now any of us at least treasure, even revere
Speaker 2: while we acknowledge its brokenness in practice and continue to
Speaker 2: work hard to live by its norms. In the Constitutional
Speaker 2: Convention of seventeen eighty seven, a third, a full third
Speaker 2: of the delegates walked out, refusing to sign a document
Speaker 2: that they regarded as an abomination. But the two thirds
Speaker 2: one right, Yeah, And a lot of people are saying
Speaker 2: these days, well, it's about a third of the people
Speaker 2: who continue to believe that the twenty twenty election was stolen. Okay,
Speaker 2: the two thirds can still win. I think one of
Speaker 2: the things that's come to me. This will seem pretty
Speaker 2: simple minded to some people, but those of us who
Speaker 2: participated in the civil rights movements of the mid twentieth
Speaker 2: century are very well acquainted with its famous anthem, we
Speaker 2: shall overcome. About five seconds of thinking about the word,
Speaker 2: overcome means we're going to win. We're going to put
Speaker 2: that other position down, We're going to squash racism. We're
Speaker 2: going to win this struggle. We're going to win it
Speaker 2: by nonviolent means, but we are going to win. We
Speaker 2: shall overcome. And I think the whole story of democracies slow,
Speaker 2: slow progress toward a more perfect union, toward fullness, toward integrity,
Speaker 2: and we're not there yet. But the whole story is
Speaker 2: time after time after time, the beliefs that we shall overcome,
Speaker 2: not long ago. Just one more thing about this. I
Speaker 2: was listening to a speech given by a woman who
Speaker 2: was the head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and
Speaker 2: retired from that position after a very distinguished career. She
Speaker 2: said something that's really stuck with me. She said, there
Speaker 2: is no point of black history where the last words
Speaker 2: in the story are and then we gave up. There
Speaker 2: is no such story in the history of Black America.
Speaker 2: And that's true, and the process of overcoming is going
Speaker 2: on to this day.
Speaker 1: Thank you for that. My despair just took a step down,
Speaker 1: a couple steps down. Maybe I'm actually not like permanently
Speaker 1: in despair. I just have moments, you know. I think
Speaker 1: anybody looking at the world, almost at any time in
Speaker 1: history would look at parts of it and be like, oh,
Speaker 1: I can't. To use the modern phrase, let's change direction
Speaker 1: a little bit. I want to read something that you wrote,
Speaker 1: and I think it can act as framing for the
Speaker 1: rest of the conversation. You use a term called being
Speaker 1: fierce with reality, and you say, fierce with reality is
Speaker 1: how I feel when I'm able to say, I am
Speaker 1: that to which I gave short shrift and that to
Speaker 1: which I attended. I am my descents into darkness and
Speaker 1: my rising again into the light, my betrayals and my fidelities,
Speaker 1: my failures and my successes. I am my ignorance and
Speaker 1: my insight, my doubts and my convictions, my fears and
Speaker 1: my hopes. And that seems to me also a pretty
Speaker 1: good way of describing human wholeness.
Speaker 2: Very much so, Eric, Yeah, I appreciate you reading that. Quote.
Speaker 2: I'd almost forgotten it, but it's nice to have In
Speaker 2: this case, at least, it's nice to have my own
Speaker 2: words come back to me. So one sort of summary
Speaker 2: statement that I made somewhere that I try to live
Speaker 2: by is that holdest does not mean perfection. Oldest means
Speaker 2: embracing everything, including your imperfections, as part of who you
Speaker 2: are and to the best of your ability. To show
Speaker 2: up in the world whole is saying, yeah, I'm all
Speaker 2: of the above. I am my successes, and I am
Speaker 2: my screw ups. I am whatever light I am able
Speaker 2: to shed, and I am the darkness that I carry
Speaker 2: within me, which can sometimes engulf me. As you know,
Speaker 2: we've talked before about my three descents into clinical depression,
Speaker 2: which were in my forties and my sixties, I think
Speaker 2: at age eighty four. There's another piece to this that
Speaker 2: has come to me more recently that is sort of
Speaker 2: another way of summing this theme up, which is that
Speaker 2: these days, of course, I think about mortality. I think
Speaker 2: about my own death more often than I did ten, twenty, thirty,
Speaker 2: forty fifty years ago. When you can if you're healthy,
Speaker 2: if you're lucky enough to be healthy, privileged enough to
Speaker 2: be healthy, you can sort of pretend that that day
Speaker 2: will never come. And I cannot imagine a sadder way
Speaker 2: to die than to be lying there, drawing your last
Speaker 2: breath and am thinking I never, in all my years on
Speaker 2: this planet, I never showed up in the full wollness
Speaker 2: of myself or anything vaguely approximating the fullness of myself.
Speaker 2: I hit out. Whether it was because I was afraid,
Speaker 2: or I didn't want to subject myself to the winds
Speaker 2: and currents of change, whatever the reason might have been,
Speaker 2: I can't imagine a sadder way to die than when
Speaker 2: somebody is having to say to him or herself I
Speaker 2: never showed up here as who I am, because ultimately
Speaker 2: who one is is the gift you were born to
Speaker 2: give to the world through your work, yes, through what
Speaker 2: you say, how you conduct relationships, yes, but just in
Speaker 2: the very quality of your being.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree with you that that's a sad thing,
Speaker 1: and it also to me there's all sorts of downsides
Speaker 1: to not being as whole as possible, right, I think
Speaker 1: that part of wholeness is recognizing that you're not even
Speaker 1: whole a lot of the time, Like that's just how
Speaker 1: we often can be but it seems to me that
Speaker 1: my experience is if I'm not bringing as much of
Speaker 1: myself to the table as often as I can, that
Speaker 1: all the relationships in my life are not nearly as
Speaker 1: whole and good as they could be. You know, Like,
Speaker 1: that's one very direct downside of that, in addition to
Speaker 1: the internal cost of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, showing up as yourself to the greatest extent possible,
Speaker 2: and of course it's not done perfectly every moment of
Speaker 2: every day. But imagine, for example, that you're in one
Speaker 2: of those conversations we were talking about a moment ago,
Speaker 2: and you find yourself getting highly critical of another person's
Speaker 2: delusions as they seem to you. Imagine that you're present
Speaker 2: in that conversation, was at least the self knowledge that
Speaker 2: you yourself had brought into illusions at various stages in
Speaker 2: your life. Doesn't it stand to reason that if you
Speaker 2: have that kind of self awareness of your wholeness, not
Speaker 2: only the things you got right, but the things you
Speaker 2: got wrong. You know, not only the times you had
Speaker 2: measured twice and cut once because you cared about the data,
Speaker 2: but the times when you just bought in on something
Speaker 2: because it was the popular thing to believe. Doesn't it
Speaker 2: stand a reason that you would give your conversation partner
Speaker 2: some slack for that and perhaps be more compassionate, more tender,
Speaker 2: more open, more vulnerable without jumping down their throat about
Speaker 2: the nonsense that they're spouting, which is not unlike the
Speaker 2: nonsense you once spouted. You know. Yeah, somebody once said
Speaker 2: something that I think applies on many, many levels. This
Speaker 2: person was talking about interreligious dialogue, and he said, isn't
Speaker 2: it interesting how often in these dialogues we take the
Speaker 2: best in our own religious tradition and lift up the
Speaker 2: worst in the other person's traditions in order to make
Speaker 2: an argument. Well, that's a great example of the failure
Speaker 2: to embrace wholeness. Wholeness doesn't mean, you know, wearing your
Speaker 2: heart on your sleeve about everything that's happening in your
Speaker 2: life at any given moment. Carl Young, the great psychologists, said,
Speaker 2: the soul needs its secrets, and it does. The soul
Speaker 2: needs to work kind of very quietly in the dark
Speaker 2: on you know, important matters that we wrestle with, existential
Speaker 2: matters that shape our lives. But there's a lot that
Speaker 2: we can hold on a more conscious level, a level
Speaker 2: of self awareness that could really change our way of
Speaker 2: being in the world and our way of dancing with
Speaker 2: others in the world.
Speaker 1: Two things there you said that I really like. I mean.
Speaker 1: The first is that is the best corrective for me
Speaker 1: when I start to become judgmental of other people is
Speaker 1: to just reflect on my own life. I often joke,
Speaker 1: you know, the benefit of screwing up as often as
Speaker 1: I have in my life is that I actually tend
Speaker 1: to be fairly non judgmental because I don't even have
Speaker 1: to be very self aware to be reminded of all
Speaker 1: the ways in which I have struggled. And even recently,
Speaker 1: I went through a really difficult period and I was
Speaker 1: able to see it in the context of wholeness, and
Speaker 1: I was able to see not that I liked it,
Speaker 1: because I did a difficult period. You can't like, you know,
Speaker 1: and that wouldn't be difficult, but it did allow me
Speaker 1: to sort of reconnect to what it feels like to
Speaker 1: really struggle. And that felt really helpful and really useful
Speaker 1: to me because sometimes I can get in well, I
Speaker 1: got sober fifteen years ago kind of thing, right, So
Speaker 1: for me recently, in addition to remembering the times I
Speaker 1: screwed up. It's you know, being face to face again
Speaker 1: with suffering for real was a good part of for me,
Speaker 1: helping me feel more whole.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's a poet I can't quite remember
Speaker 2: his name right now, but he has a great line
Speaker 2: in one of his poems. He says, be kind to
Speaker 2: people because you never know what's going on where the
Speaker 2: spirit meets the bone. Eh, And you don't, you just can't.
Speaker 2: Bug Yeah, you can know what that place feels like
Speaker 2: in your own life, where the spirit meets the bone,
Speaker 2: and you can begin to remember that nobody could grock
Speaker 2: you during those times, nobody could get you. You felt
Speaker 2: very isolated and very alone. So cut the other person
Speaker 2: some slack because we're all in this together and you've
Speaker 2: been there too. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Talk at a couple different points. You're talking about wholeness,
Speaker 1: and you're saying that you know wholeness can be achieved
Speaker 1: if we can use devastation as a seed bed for
Speaker 1: a new life. You go on elsewhere to say, but
Speaker 1: there's two ways to understand what it means to have
Speaker 1: our hearts broken. One is to imagine the heart broken
Speaker 1: into shards and scattered about. The Others to imagine the
Speaker 1: heartbroken open to new capacity. And I'm always curious. I
Speaker 1: think if we look in the world, we can see
Speaker 1: people who have seen devastation and heartbreak and it has
Speaker 1: diminished them greatly. And we can see people in the
Speaker 1: world who have had devastation and heartbreak and you can
Speaker 1: see that it has Maybe enhance isn't the right word,
Speaker 1: but I'll use it because it's coming to mind. It
Speaker 1: has enhanced them. It has made them more whole, it
Speaker 1: has made them kinder, better, more compassionate people. And I'm
Speaker 1: always curious, what is it that the people who are
Speaker 1: enhanced by their suffering do differently?
Speaker 2: Well. I think there's a great mystery there. It's a
Speaker 2: question I am people a lot also, and I don't
Speaker 2: think anybody has a definitive answer. One thought that I
Speaker 2: would contribute to that big conversation is that you know,
Speaker 2: if you pay attention to your life, heartbreak of maybe
Speaker 2: small size happens on a fairly regular basis. You know,
Speaker 2: a friendship that you valued begins to go south, or
Speaker 2: there's some kind of blockage there that you can't understand.
Speaker 2: A project that you were working on begins to fall
Speaker 2: apart while you thought you know you were almost at
Speaker 2: the point of being able to bring this to a
Speaker 2: successful completion. You have a child, whether still at home
Speaker 2: or an adult child, who is suffering and struggling in life,
Speaker 2: and you lose sleep over it because you never stop
Speaker 2: being a parent, right, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2: I think the key is to not try to ignore
Speaker 2: those little heartbreaks and just push on with your life,
Speaker 2: but to let them in, to feel them as deeply
Speaker 2: as you can, because in doing that, you're exercising that
Speaker 2: muscle called the heart, the spiritual heart, not the physical heart,
Speaker 2: although cardiologists will say that this also relates to the
Speaker 2: physical heart. You're exercising that heart in a way that
Speaker 2: is akin to how a runner exercises muscles so that
Speaker 2: when under stress, they won't snap. Then when the big
Speaker 2: heart breaks come along, you're more likely to have that
Speaker 2: experience of heart opening rather than shattering, because it's never
Speaker 2: been exercised. You know, there's so much about our lives.
Speaker 2: They move so quickly, We are subject to so many demands,
Speaker 2: either real or imagine, that there's something in us that
Speaker 2: just wants to rush through the hard times whole it
Speaker 2: all off. I mean isn't that what the great American
Speaker 2: hobby of anesthetizing ourselves is all about. Whether the anesthetic
Speaker 2: is ings or drags, or busyness or overwork or noise
Speaker 2: or you know, a focus on a thousand different irrelevancies
Speaker 2: in order to distract ourselves, in order to numb ourselves
Speaker 2: to these fairly regular experiences of small heartbreak. So I
Speaker 2: would say that it is like the runner exercise. Those
Speaker 2: small muscles, keep them blimber, keep them fluid, and when
Speaker 2: the bigger heartbreak comes, your heart is very likely to
Speaker 2: be more supple. I think the cultivation of a supple
Speaker 2: heart is something worth reflecting on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was reading something. I don't remember who said
Speaker 1: it or where it was, but they were talking about
Speaker 1: this idea of somebody saying, like, my heart is broken.
Speaker 1: I can't or whether it was a quip, but it
Speaker 1: was more or less like, no, it's not. It's doing
Speaker 1: exactly what it was designed to do, right, it's working
Speaker 1: very well, you know, because you're feeling so much of this,
Speaker 1: you know your heart is actually working. It was an interesting,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of way of reflecting on it very differently,
Speaker 1: like oh, yeah, you know, this is what a heart does.
Speaker 1: And my most recent brush with you know, particularly difficult
Speaker 1: thing was you know, I had moments of like, is
Speaker 1: all this practice I've been doing to open my heart
Speaker 1: in general?
Speaker 3: Is this really a god?
Speaker 1: Is this a good idea? Because you know, I'm fairly
Speaker 1: undefended here, and it is a good idea. It was
Speaker 1: a good idea, But there's those moments of like, well,
Speaker 1: do I have some way to turn this down a
Speaker 1: little bit. It's just such an interesting concept because everybody's
Speaker 1: going to deal with lots of really difficult things and
Speaker 1: knowing how to do it in a way that we
Speaker 1: get to the other side of enhanced I think the
Speaker 1: other thing that is often tricky is that we often
Speaker 1: hear that like, well, just go ahead and feel it,
Speaker 1: like let it in and feel it, and as if
Speaker 1: that is going to be an experience that is in
Speaker 1: any way shape or form enjoyable, or that it's going
Speaker 1: to make it suddenly just go away. It actually doesn't, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: And I do think it makes it more likely that
Speaker 1: we respond in a wise helpful way ultimately for ourselves
Speaker 1: and others. But letting it in is not pleasant.
Speaker 2: And as you talked in the last minute or so,
Speaker 2: I've been thinking here how important it is to have friends,
Speaker 2: at least a friend to whom you can say, when
Speaker 2: they ask how are you, you can say, I'm heartbroken. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm profoundly and deeply, and it sometimes feels terminally heartbroken.
Speaker 2: And a friend who will not run screaming from your
Speaker 2: house and he or she hears those words, who will
Speaker 2: not become afraid of you? Who will not? Is that
Speaker 2: they assume, oh my god, I got to fix this person. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but can simply receive you Because to be heartbroken, to
Speaker 2: acknowledge it to yourself is one thing, but to be
Speaker 2: able to have it held by someone who knows you
Speaker 2: and cares about you, who will walk with you without
Speaker 2: being afraid, is an incredibly important piece of life. I'll
Speaker 2: just refer very briefly here to my experiences of clinical depression,
Speaker 2: when so many of the people who came hoping to
Speaker 2: comfort me basically engage in what I call drive by caring.
Speaker 2: It was sort of in and out. You know you're
Speaker 2: going to be okay, hang in there, you're a good guy.
Speaker 2: So long because they somehow regarded my depression as contagious,
Speaker 2: and if they hung around me too long, they would
Speaker 2: get depressed too, And of course the only reason one
Speaker 2: feels that is because you feel the burden of having
Speaker 2: to fix someone when you don't have the foggiest idea
Speaker 2: how to fix them. Yeah, and you can't. It's impossible.
Speaker 2: It's a false assumption. But the impact of that on me,
Speaker 2: of course, is to leave me feeling even more isolated. Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know, this person with whom I used to enjoy long,
Speaker 2: rambling conversations about all manner of thing is now fleeing
Speaker 2: from my presence because they're scared of me. So part
Speaker 2: of processing we were talking earlier about processing life experience inwardly,
Speaker 2: part of that processing is having someone who can just
Speaker 2: hold your true feelings and your expressions of grief, for pain,
Speaker 2: or anguish about them without running away in fear.
Speaker 1: I had some insights about all of that as it
Speaker 1: was going through this difficult time, and I am very
Speaker 1: fortunate that I have a number of good friends that
Speaker 1: I can say I am heartbroken to and these people
Speaker 1: really stepped up and stepped in, and you know, they
Speaker 1: would check in on me, and I realized how oftentimes
Speaker 1: not good of a friend I have been to people
Speaker 1: where I do the if you need anything, I'm here,
Speaker 1: and then I forget all about it because I'm busy.
Speaker 1: I've made it clear I'm there for them, and I
Speaker 1: am like, if they call, I'll drop everything. But I
Speaker 1: wasn't as proactive as I would like to be in
Speaker 1: the future. You know, where I go, Oh, they may
Speaker 1: not know what they need, and this isn't a short
Speaker 1: term thing for them. They're going to be in pain
Speaker 1: for a while. I need to keep sort of checking
Speaker 1: back in. And I also know that as somebody who's
Speaker 1: like a behavior coach and you know, has worked in
Speaker 1: the recovery community for a long time, there's this idea
Speaker 1: of like fixing things right, and so I, more often
Speaker 1: than I want, will drop into fixing mode. And so
Speaker 1: it's just been very interesting for me to go, oh,
Speaker 1: there's some real things from me to learn about how
Speaker 1: I be a better friend. It was humbling in that
Speaker 1: regard and very instructional.
Speaker 2: Right, right, I totally agree. I learned so much during
Speaker 2: my depression about how to be a better presence in
Speaker 2: other people's lives.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm curious. There's sort of two approaches I think
Speaker 1: that we often get when we're struggling.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: One is what we've just described the person who comes
Speaker 1: by and immediately starts trying to fix it or you know,
Speaker 1: shake it off, no big deal, right, And then there's
Speaker 1: the other side of it, which is where somebody just
Speaker 1: only ever listens and almost encourages the difficult time. And
Speaker 1: I've often thought about like for me throughout time, the
Speaker 1: people who've been the most helped to me actually did
Speaker 1: some of both. You know, they actually first like I
Speaker 1: felt really deeply understood. But then they might say, have
Speaker 1: you thought about a different way of looking at that?
Speaker 1: Or they'll ask you know, I know you're a big
Speaker 1: fan of good questions in your circles of trust, right,
Speaker 1: asking non judgmental questions. It's not like you just sit
Speaker 1: in what it is. You recognize that people can give
Speaker 1: us different ways of looking at things by the questions
Speaker 1: they ask. Is that your experience too, that it's kind
Speaker 1: of a blend of those things over time that is
Speaker 1: really helpful to someone who's struggling.
Speaker 2: Yes, and no, maybe, but not a hard No. Let
Speaker 2: me tell a couple of stories. Yeah, So in my
Speaker 2: first depression, there was a guy somewhat older than I,
Speaker 2: maybe six or eight years older than I, very intuitive
Speaker 2: fellow fellow, I trusted who did something for me proactively
Speaker 2: that I will never forget and that really helped me
Speaker 2: on my road to recovery. He asked permission to do
Speaker 2: all this before he started doing it. You'll understand why
Speaker 2: in a moment. What he did was to come to
Speaker 2: my house every day. We were living at Pndall Hill
Speaker 2: Quaker Community, so we were on the same sixteen acres
Speaker 2: of land with a community of about eighty people, and
Speaker 2: he had easy access to where I lived. You'd come
Speaker 2: to my house every afternoon around four o'clock without fail.
Speaker 2: He would have me seated in an easy chair in
Speaker 2: my living room. He would kneel down in front of
Speaker 2: me or sit on the floor and take off my
Speaker 2: shoes and socks and massage my feet. He very rarely
Speaker 2: said a word, but I knew him to be an
Speaker 2: intuitive person, and occasionally he would say I feel your
Speaker 2: struggle today. No more than that, because that was really
Speaker 2: about all the language I could take at the time.
Speaker 2: I was so deep into this hell. Or he would
Speaker 2: say I feel you getting a little stronger today. And
Speaker 2: these were honest reflections from where he sat, and I
Speaker 2: always benefited from them. When he said, you know, I
Speaker 2: feel your struggle today, somebody understands me right where I
Speaker 2: feel you getting a little better today. Gosh, maybe that's true.
Speaker 2: And if I did a little gut check, maybe I
Speaker 2: found out that I did, in fact feel a little better.
Speaker 2: What he did took me some time to understand. But
Speaker 2: in depression, you're you're radically disconnected from everyone that you're
Speaker 2: an atom floating free in the void. That's part of
Speaker 2: its terror. There's no community, there's no real relationship. He
Speaker 2: found the one place in my body, the body which
Speaker 2: had largely gone numb, where I could feel connected to
Speaker 2: another human being the soles of my feet, I mean,
Speaker 2: whose feet don't ache most of the time. And this was,
Speaker 2: you know, such an act of kindness and generosity that
Speaker 2: he kept me connected to the human race in an
Speaker 2: almost wordless way, but not, as you say, not passive,
Speaker 2: not just sitting there and listening to what little I
Speaker 2: might have to say. And then the next step up
Speaker 2: from that was, in fact, the people who, as you said,
Speaker 2: had the gift of asking honest, open questions, they also
Speaker 2: had the gift of, I think, discerning when I was
Speaker 2: ready to deal with a question and when I wasn't.
Speaker 2: Because you know, there were moments in my depression when
Speaker 2: somebody might ask me a well intentioned question and I
Speaker 2: would just want to say leave, please leave. You know,
Speaker 2: I just don't have the bandwidth to think about anything.
Speaker 2: I'm barely surviving here. I'm, you know, wrestling with the
Speaker 2: question of is this the day to kind of bring
Speaker 2: things to an end? And so there are these huge
Speaker 2: acts of discernment, and you know, people range on their
Speaker 2: ability to do that. I think you have to know
Speaker 2: yourself pretty well to enter that force field.
Speaker 1: I'm going to rescind all the nice things that I
Speaker 1: said about my friends, because not a one of them
Speaker 1: rubbed my feet, and so I'm taking it all back.
Speaker 1: You all fell short of the mark.
Speaker 2: You might want to check your feet for you critique
Speaker 2: your friends.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm curious about your depressions. You've fallen into
Speaker 1: them several times. It sounds like the last time was
Speaker 1: in your sixties, So you are somewhere from fifteen to
Speaker 1: twenty years from the last one. Is that roughly accurate
Speaker 1: or was it late sixties?
Speaker 2: Yeah, about twenty two at this point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you think you learned what you needed to learn.
Speaker 1: You outgrew them. Another one could be right around the corner.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I'm just kind of curious, you know, because it sounds like,
Speaker 1: you know, if you had them in your forties and
Speaker 1: then in your early sixties, they were kind of clumped
Speaker 1: up there a little I mean a little bit, you know,
Speaker 1: and you've had a pretty good run any sense of
Speaker 1: I mean, and I know it's a speculation, but what
Speaker 1: has sort of kept you from falling back into you know,
Speaker 1: chasms that are that dark?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I could easily say that I've become more aware
Speaker 2: of the warning signs of depression. Even that is tricky though,
Speaker 2: because we all have melancholy days or just the blooms,
Speaker 2: you know, seasonal effective disorder, whatever. And the last thing
Speaker 2: I want to do is to is to panic about
Speaker 2: symptoms of that sort and say, oh my god, I'm
Speaker 2: on the slippery slope again, because that's not going to
Speaker 2: help me at all. Yeah, but there are a few
Speaker 2: warning signs that I watched for, you know, repetitiveative, negative
Speaker 2: patterns of thinking, catastrophic patterns of thinking, etcetera, etcetera. I think,
Speaker 2: I mean, maybe in a sense I outgrew them. Although
Speaker 2: the big heading for this particular conversation ought to be
Speaker 2: depression is a great mystery nobody really fully understands it,
Speaker 2: and that includes everything from genetic and biochemical process has
Speaker 2: gone awry, to experiential crises that one's psyche doesn't know
Speaker 2: how to handle, internal contradictions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
Speaker 2: levels of fear in life, and so forth and so on.
Speaker 2: In my forties, looking back, it's reasonably clear to me
Speaker 2: that I was taking all kinds of risk, vocational risks
Speaker 2: that hardly anyone in my life understood, let alone affirmed
Speaker 2: or applauded. And I won't bore you with all all
Speaker 2: the details, but I got a PhD from Berkeley in
Speaker 2: the sixties late sixties, expecting to go into academia, and
Speaker 2: indeed got academic job offers, but had been so impacted
Speaker 2: by all that went on during the sixties, the crises
Speaker 2: we mentioned earlier, assassinations, the racial crisis, Vietnam, that I
Speaker 2: decided to become a community organizer in Washington, d c.
Speaker 2: Working with a couple of other people on issues of
Speaker 2: racial justice, in redlining and blockbusting. That was my first
Speaker 2: five years out of grad school. And all of my
Speaker 2: mentors and all my friends are saying, why are you
Speaker 2: doing this in saying you're disappearing from the professional radar
Speaker 2: for which you prepared. Why did you get a PhD? Well,
Speaker 2: it turned out there's a good answer to that. I
Speaker 2: ended up working independently most of my life the PhD.
Speaker 2: While the content of my PhD is largely irrelevant to
Speaker 2: what I've done professionally, just having that union ticket has
Speaker 2: opened some doors that wouldn't have been opened otherwise when
Speaker 2: you're trying to make an independent career. So I was
Speaker 2: taking vocational risks, substantial vocational risks. I was married, I
Speaker 2: had two three kids as the years went on, and
Speaker 2: I was taking financial risks as well. I had grown
Speaker 2: up in the family where my parents were able to
Speaker 2: help me go to college, but I was making very
Speaker 2: marginal money at this work I was doing, which was
Speaker 2: service work in a lot of ways. Was looking at
Speaker 2: the prospect of not being able to give my kids
Speaker 2: a leg up on getting a good higher education if
Speaker 2: that's what they wanted when they got there. So I
Speaker 2: was living with a lot of doubts. I was living
Speaker 2: with anxieties. It still kind of baffles me how I
Speaker 2: hung in there. But I do have an answer that question,
Speaker 2: because I should leap ahead and say, in the long run,
Speaker 2: I'm really really grateful for the circuitous path that I followed,
Speaker 2: because a lot of the writing and teaching I've done
Speaker 2: involves things that I could not have learned about any
Speaker 2: other way. If I had become an assistant professor or
Speaker 2: associate professor, etc. Etc. My bank of experience, my view
Speaker 2: of the world would necessarily have been, I think, more
Speaker 2: constricted than it is, at least for me. But back
Speaker 2: in the day when people would say why are you doings?
Speaker 2: I had an answer to me, an interesting answer. I said,
Speaker 2: you know, I can barely explain it to myself, so
Speaker 2: I'm sure I can't explain it to you, But I
Speaker 2: can say this what I'm doing I can't not do.
Speaker 2: I had to use that double negative. There was something
Speaker 2: in me that knew that if I didn't pursue what
Speaker 2: I now think of as the soul's imperative, I would
Speaker 2: pay a very large price down the road, a larger
Speaker 2: price than the one I was paying by living with
Speaker 2: vocational anxiety. I think I would have paid a soul
Speaker 2: price of having ignored my own existential imperatives. I've come
Speaker 2: to trust that very very much. When young people come
Speaker 2: to me because of one or two of the books
Speaker 2: I've written about vocational issues. The first thing I'll often
Speaker 2: say to them after listening for a long time and
Speaker 2: hearing very similar stories really about the struggles that they're
Speaker 2: having their generations having and that I had my generation had,
Speaker 2: I'll say, well, how old are you again? I'll say
Speaker 2: twenty four, and I'll say, well, my vocation didn't come
Speaker 2: together until I was fifty, so you've got a lot
Speaker 2: of time. But do not panic. But I'll then say,
Speaker 2: is there anything that you can't not do? If you've
Speaker 2: got an answer that that rings true for you. I'm
Speaker 2: not saying you can make a living that way. Maybe
Speaker 2: you can, maybe you can't. But I am saying, find
Speaker 2: a way in your life to do that thing alongside
Speaker 2: whatever else you have to do to keep yourself afloat
Speaker 2: so that you don't end up paying the price of
Speaker 2: your soul. When all it's said and done.
Speaker 1: So you feel like some of those depressions had their
Speaker 1: route a little bit in all of the uncertainty that
Speaker 1: you were taking on in life and people not understanding you.
Speaker 1: And yet, even in spite of the depressions that may
Speaker 1: have had their genesis in that it was still the
Speaker 1: right thing for you to do.
Speaker 2: Precisely, that doesn't mean it was the struggle. It doesn't
Speaker 2: mean that I didn't, you know, suffer as a dark
Speaker 2: knight of the soul around all of those questions. I did,
Speaker 2: But somehow I knew I had to persist, And as
Speaker 2: I said, I'm glad I did, because what has resulted
Speaker 2: has been a vocation that really didn't cohere for me
Speaker 2: until I was fifty, when all of these disparate pieces
Speaker 2: started coming together, including the writing and the teaching, and
Speaker 2: you know, a way of working independently. Once I walked
Speaker 2: away not only from large institutions but from small institutions
Speaker 2: and kind of got out in the field by myself
Speaker 2: and said, okay, let's see what might happen here if
Speaker 2: I continue to follow this parative. One of the things
Speaker 2: I said in a book called Let Your Life Speak,
Speaker 2: where I wrote about depression in an essay that actually
Speaker 2: has probably attracted more attention as a single piece than
Speaker 2: anything else among the ten books I've written. Because so
Speaker 2: many people suffer from depression or live with someone who
Speaker 2: suffers from it. I said, you know, people walk around
Speaker 2: saying I do not understand why so and so committed suicide,
Speaker 2: And I said, you know, to me, that's not a mystery.
Speaker 2: They committed suicide because they needed the rest. Depression is
Speaker 2: absolutely exhausting, and to be down there for months at
Speaker 2: a time, trying every day to catch your breath and
Speaker 2: wondering whether it's worth carrying on, just wears you down
Speaker 2: to the bone. And people take their own lives because
Speaker 2: they come to believe that that's a preferable option to
Speaker 2: living in hell. They can find no way out. They
Speaker 2: are just lost in the dark. They have become the dark.
Speaker 2: You know, if you're just lost in the dark, there's
Speaker 2: a difference between you and the darkness. You can negotiate it.
Speaker 2: You can look for a door handle, window, a shade
Speaker 2: to pull up whatever. If you've become the dark, there's
Speaker 2: no negotiating it. You're it, and it's you. You can't
Speaker 2: begin to fumble around to try to find a way out.
Speaker 2: You just have to wait it out, which is a
Speaker 2: very hard thing to do. So the question of why
Speaker 2: people take their own lives is not a mystery to me.
Speaker 2: What's a mystery to me is why it is that
Speaker 2: some people not only survive, but thrive on the other
Speaker 2: side of depression. I feel like I'm one of those people,
Speaker 2: and you know, slap all kinds of adjectives onto it.
Speaker 2: Privileged to be able to have the resources, to be
Speaker 2: able to find the support that I needed, et cetera,
Speaker 2: et cetera. But even that doesn't explain it to me.
Speaker 2: So you want a question that's baffling, Why do some
Speaker 2: people not only survive but thrive on the other side
Speaker 2: of depression?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have that one, and then my other one
Speaker 1: is addiction. You know, why do some people I mean,
Speaker 1: we know what some of the societal correlates are of
Speaker 1: people being more likely to recover, more likely to come
Speaker 1: through depression. To your point, right, there are privileges that
Speaker 1: some of us have in the access to help that
Speaker 1: we can get and many different things. But it's still
Speaker 1: a mystery because we know people who have none of
Speaker 1: those things and come through, and we know people who
Speaker 1: have had all of those things and don't. It is
Speaker 1: kind of a mystery. And even back to why do
Speaker 1: some people with a broken heart become better and why
Speaker 1: do some people end up bitter? There's a mystery to
Speaker 1: it to a certain degree that you know, if I
Speaker 1: ever get to sit down with assuming there is a
Speaker 1: creator who had a plan with all this, which is
Speaker 1: quite a big assumption. But should we say that be
Speaker 1: the case and I could sit down and have a
Speaker 1: conversation once I got some of the really big things
Speaker 1: out of the way, Those would be some of my
Speaker 1: very first questions, right, because I don't understand it. You know,
Speaker 1: you said a couple things in there about depression that
Speaker 1: I thought were interesting. First was better understanding the warning
Speaker 1: signs and yet wanting to be careful with that because
Speaker 1: I seem to have this dual approach and I use
Speaker 1: one of them sometimes and sometimes I use the other,
Speaker 1: and I don't even necessarily know how I know when
Speaker 1: to use what. And one of them is I just
Speaker 1: simply ignore the symptoms and just go like, yep, well,
Speaker 1: you know that's the way it is today, Like you know,
Speaker 1: I think of it as like the emotional flu like
Speaker 1: it's going to come and it's going to go away,
Speaker 1: and there's no sense making a big fuss out of
Speaker 1: all this, right, And sometimes that is absolutely the right approach,
Speaker 1: And then there are other times where it is like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I need to investigate more deeply here what's happening, And
Speaker 1: I may need to dive a little deeper and try
Speaker 1: and understand, and I may need to say, oh, this
Speaker 1: is maybe a little bit more serious. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think for me, the one thing that I have
Speaker 1: learned to do pretty consistently, regardless of which of those
Speaker 1: approaches I'm and as I know, the physical things that
Speaker 1: I do that give me as much immunity as I'm
Speaker 1: likely to get, and I try and do those as
Speaker 1: often as I can, regardless, because for me, it's a
Speaker 1: very physical thing, and taking care of myself physically seems
Speaker 1: to be the best immunity I know to give myself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I totally agree with that. You know, for me,
Speaker 2: daily walk best of all, walk in the woods, Yeah,
Speaker 2: which I have fairly easy access to, is hugely therapeutic.
Speaker 2: Reading poetry is hugely therapeutic. There's a lot of poetry
Speaker 2: that kind of walks around and inside of these issues
Speaker 2: that for me gets at the human condition better than
Speaker 2: a nonfiction book about the nature of depression. That the
Speaker 2: medicine is interesting, the science is interesting. The poetry connects
Speaker 2: with me somehow, It speaks to me. You know, it's
Speaker 2: like massaging my psyche instead of my feet.
Speaker 1: The job yep, we're nearly at the end of our
Speaker 1: time here, and I just want to read something else
Speaker 1: that you wrote and allow you to sort of comment
Speaker 1: on it for a second. You're talking about community, and
Speaker 1: you lead into what I'm about to write by talking
Speaker 1: about like, there's a lot of quick fixed solutions in
Speaker 1: the wellness world, right, or the spirituality world, or however
Speaker 1: we want to label that world, And you say, solutions
Speaker 1: of that sort are snake oil. Of course, the quick
Speaker 1: fix mentality that dominates our impatient world serves only to
Speaker 1: distract us from the lifelong journey towards wholeness, and the
Speaker 1: self help methods so popular in our time, the best
Speaker 1: of which offers support for that journey sometimes reinforce the
Speaker 1: great American illusion that we can forever go it alone.
Speaker 1: And I would just love to hear you say anything
Speaker 1: you would like to about that about community as sort
Speaker 1: of a wrapping up point here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, thank you for lifting that up too, because
Speaker 2: that's a big scene for me. First of all, I'm
Speaker 2: a great fan of solitude. There's a richness in solitude
Speaker 2: and in silence that I really value, and I think
Speaker 2: in my younger ears, my sort of inability to turn
Speaker 2: in that direction my need to either make noise or
Speaker 2: pea surrounded by noise in order to what I don't know,
Speaker 2: prove I'm alive, or something that can't quite figured out.
Speaker 2: But my aversion to silence and solitude was a hindrance
Speaker 2: in my own movement towards hold us in my own
Speaker 2: psychological well being. So I spend time in solitude. I've
Speaker 2: never found tips, tricks and techniques as in meditation, for example,
Speaker 2: that really work for me. But I just love staring
Speaker 2: out the window, appreciating the leafless branches on a tree
Speaker 2: in my backyard at this time of year, the way
Speaker 2: the sun plays on the bark of this triflora maple.
Speaker 2: It's in my backyard even when it's leafless and just absorbing,
Speaker 2: especially nature, but any kind of beauty I can find,
Speaker 2: or just sitting wordless and I don't know, taking it in,
Speaker 2: you know, watching the sunset, etcetera, etcetera. So and reading
Speaker 2: poetry is joined for me with solitude and with sort
Speaker 2: of an interior journey in which you're paying attention to
Speaker 2: how those words and images resonate with something in you
Speaker 2: that here most of the time barely in touch with
Speaker 2: big on solitude, but equally big. And this is a
Speaker 2: great paradox in life. I think on community, on relationships
Speaker 2: that can rightly be understood as creative, whether those are
Speaker 2: the kinds of relationships I had with the friend who
Speaker 2: came and massage my feet, or the kinds of relationships
Speaker 2: I have with people to whom I can say I'm
Speaker 2: profoundly heartbroken, the kinds of relationships I have with people
Speaker 2: who know how to ask honest, open questions, never burdening
Speaker 2: themselves with a sense that they have to fix me,
Speaker 2: and knowing that I would fight like hell against anybody
Speaker 2: trying to fix me. The most fundamental need I think
Speaker 2: any of us has is to be heard, to be understood,
Speaker 2: to be received as we are when we show up
Speaker 2: as fully as we know how, with our broken wholeness.
Speaker 2: I used to read a lot of a theology and
Speaker 2: a remarkable man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany who ended
Speaker 2: up being murdered by the Nazis because of his resistance
Speaker 2: to Hitler. He wrote a book called Life Together, and
Speaker 2: in it he has this little formula. He says, let
Speaker 2: the person who cannot be alone be aware of being
Speaker 2: in community, and let the person who cannot be in community,
Speaker 2: beware of being alone. I think there's immense wisdom in
Speaker 2: that that these are the poles of the battery, and
Speaker 2: if you connect these two ends a paradox, then life flows,
Speaker 2: energy flows and in some pretty remarkable ways. I think
Speaker 2: what we have to understand is that community doesn't mean
Speaker 2: a whole lot of people making a whole lot of noise.
Speaker 2: Some people say I can't find community. I mean, there's
Speaker 2: where do I join one? Well, you often don't join one,
Speaker 2: you co create one with a few other people. Community
Speaker 2: can be two, three, four people gathered in some form
Speaker 2: of mutual understanding which everyone finds deeply supportive and nourishing.
Speaker 2: But it must alternate. And I believe, at least in
Speaker 2: my cycle of life, with the richness of solitude, which
Speaker 2: is very different from loneliness, I feel more alone, often
Speaker 2: in a crowd of people who are making noise than
Speaker 2: I do. I'm sitting alone looking at that tri floral
Speaker 2: maple out of my back window. In solitude, there's a
Speaker 2: sense of presence, and I think that the presence, especially
Speaker 2: of the natural world, which is also part of the
Speaker 2: community in which were embedded. That has been a late
Speaker 2: realization in my life probably only began twenty five or
Speaker 2: thirty years ago. I didn't grow up in a family
Speaker 2: that went to wilderness or recreation, but I married a
Speaker 2: woman who did that, and she introduced me to wilderness,
Speaker 2: and I'll always be grateful for that. So, that sense
Speaker 2: of belonging to the natural world, which is in no
Speaker 2: matter how you slice it, whatever you may think about
Speaker 2: the big question of is there anything after we die?
Speaker 2: We're going back to nature, that's for certain. The atoms
Speaker 2: that make us up, which actually came from stars we
Speaker 2: can see in the sky at night, or maybe they're
Speaker 2: a little out of our vision, but they're still up there.
Speaker 2: They're going to return to the Earth's return to the cosmos,
Speaker 2: and remanifest themselves in all kinds of interesting ways. Since
Speaker 2: I've gone to a lot of time and trouble to
Speaker 2: get myself to wilderness, to get myself into primal nature
Speaker 2: every year for three or four weeks, for twenty five
Speaker 2: thirty years, why wouldn't I be perfectly happy to return
Speaker 2: there for eternity. To me, that's a good deal. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, Parker, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 1: It is always such a pleasure to talk with you.
Speaker 1: I feel like we often cover the same themes, but
Speaker 1: they are themes that we all need to hear about
Speaker 1: and be reminded about and lean into more. So, thank
Speaker 1: you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom
Speaker 1: with us.
Speaker 2: Again. Well, thank you Eric once again. I've just delighted
Speaker 2: in your questions. And if I haven't told you before,
Speaker 2: your questions always leave me thinking for months afterwards, so
Speaker 2: I think that's a big thank you. Also, sometimes why
Speaker 2: did you have to ask that?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yep, well I appreciate that. It is very kind.
Speaker 1: That makes me happy.
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