Common Good Podcast

Parker Palmer & Peter Block: The Thread of Life

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The Common Good podcast is a conversation about the significance of place, eliminating economic isolation and structures of belonging.  For this episode, we're returning to the the Abundant Community Conversation from October 26 where Amy Howton speaks with Parker Palmer and Peter Block.

Checkout the first part of the conversation here.

This event was produced in partnership with Designed Learning, Abundant Community, Faith Matters Network and Common Change. These conversations happen on Zoom and they always contain poetry, small groups and an exploration of a particular theme.

The recited poem: Everything Falls Away by Parker Palmer

Credit to Portraits in Faith for picture of Parker

Resources Referenced:

This episode was produced by Joey Taylor and the music is from Jeff Gorman. You can find more information about the Common Good Collective here. Common Good Podcast is a production of Bespoken Live & Common Change - Eliminating Personal Economic Isolation. 

Welcome back, everybody. We're actually going to create an opportunity here for some of you to be in direct conversation with Parker and Peter. So if you have a question that is really burning on your heart and you are like, I need to offer this up and be in conversation, raise your digital hand or also just raise your hand like this and we'll find you and bring you into this conversation. Here we go. Lori. Welcome. 

 Thank you so much.  This has just been such a gift. And I love the poem that we started that metaphor of the thread was really beautiful. And I just wondered, if each of you, Parker and Peter, if you'd be willing and just maybe two or three sentences to describe what you treasure about the thread of your life.

 I think about that, and I think in the end, I treasure that my life was my own.  didn't turn out the way I planned. It was better in some ways, and, unforgiving in others. Okay, it's not like I've worked anything out, but at the end of the day, when you say, what was it, the life that you chose and created, eventually it was, and I'm just very grateful for that, and I'm lucky to be alive, I'm the same age as Parker, he claims, but we're both 84, and I just, I'm just grateful but I think that that's what came to mind when you asked that question, thank you. 

Yeah, 84 year olds are among the lucky ones, right, Peter?

I know. Luckily, I'm not acting my age.  

That too.  I love the question, Lori. What quickly came to me is what I treasure most about the thread of my life is the weave of which it  has become a part. The poem I think tells my story of thinking for a long time that my life was a solo turn and I just had to make the best of it. But then learning over the years through both falling down and getting help getting up and being held up  over time that the weave is what counts and that even that in the long run that that weave is going to incorporate. It's dark parts, it's shadow parts, it's unattractive parts, into a larger whole that will make everything  well, that will show that everything belongs. I think Richard Rohr has made a lot out of that phrase, everything belongs. That's what I treasure about the thread of my life.

Yeah, you know, everything belongs, including you. That's the biggest surprise of all. Maybe we do belong. 

 Beautiful. Thank you, Laurie, again. Welcome, Will. 

Thank you. Parker and Peter, one of the threads throughout your life and work are the threads of  and wholeness. And I'm wondering as you think about our world today, what are some of the ways you would inspire people to live more authentically? What are some of the practices of wholeness that we could embody in what feels like a really crazy world?

 Yeah, it is a really crazy world, isn't it? And always has been, I think. Some of us grew up in a culture of illusions about how wonderful it was.  I was one of those people on the North Shore of Chicago, but it never was that way, and  we just didn't know it. So, big dose of reality, always a good thing, and evokes in us, I think, responses that are needful. What I would say about  the unending quest for authenticity, to live into one's identity and integrity, is first of all, that it never ends. There's a new situation every day, every moment of every day, as it were, that challenges us, at least challenges me, to show up with my identity and integrity intact. As a writer, for example, who is glad for the audience he has, do I say my truth? About, for example, the MAGA movement, in ways that are very likely to lose me a part of my audience. Shocking people who are surprised that someone with spiritual convictions would have strong political opinions, as if those two were incompatible. That's a choice. It's the kind of choice we make day in and day out, whatever kind of work we're doing. Parents make it, employees make it, teachers, students, etc. make it. What's important is to practice, first of all, being honest with yourself. As Peter said earlier, embrace the stranger within. If you want to embrace the stranger without, no other way to do it.  Because otherwise, the stranger without is constantly reminding us of what terrifies us about who's in here. That's a way of living that leads towards violence, toward the stranger and toward oneself simultaneously. So, in those micro moments of life, in those micro relationships of life with yourself, with the people closest to you, to show up as you most fully and truly are and to keep moving those concentric circles out as far as you're able and cut yourself some slack this is not about lashing yourself with remorse, regret, guilt. Inadequacy. This is about growing and growing requires nurture and certain levels of self care, not done just for ourselves, but really on behalf of whoever we touch in life.

 Beautiful. Thank you again, Will, for that question. Welcome, Dinesh.

I just want to thank both of you for just wonderful, wonderful insights and lovely conversation. My question is for those of us who are working in the corporate world and trying to work with those leaders who are trying to create community. What suggestion or advice both of you have for those leaders who are really Trying to build community inside the organizations. 

my first piece of advice is don't work with the people at the top because they have the least ability to bring about change in the world. Love them, embrace them. Listen to them, but the idea that the leaders at the top, the corner office, the president,  the CEO, the entrepreneur, uh, they're so surrounded. if they invite you in, you say, thank you. And I'd like to meet with some people in the middle and that's for real change where you'll be most useful. So that's one thought. And,  the other is, is related to the last question is, connecting people with peers with each other is the work. So my notion of how to be useful is local, small, underfunded, and places within reach. That's my response to the Middle East. That's my response to MAGA. That's my response to conflict. My giving them my attention is a distraction from what you and I want to create together in wherever we reside and I just feel that my attention is the one thing I have choice over. And so people, you say, don't you want to meet the CEO? I say, if I have to, and I'll be kind to them. But the idea that changed from the top, it's an illusion. I don't even like the term bottom up. That means up is a destination. Let go of up. It's not a destination. It's a two letter word. If it was four letters, it'd be more popular. It's a context. I think the task, which since you do work with peoples at the top, Dinesh, is their job is to bring people in the middle together with each other, not for them to connect to the middle.  Let them be conveners leader as convener and that's just my ridiculous thoughts. I'll take 'em back in a minute so I better pass it on to Parker. 

Don't take those back please. Peter. So, Peter's done a lot more work in this arena than I have, and I very much respect the answers he just gave. I've always been very big in whatever large systems I've worked with. On the idea of creating what I've called pockets of possibility, rather than aiming at some kind of systemic overhaul of a vast machine, which isn't going to happen. These pockets of possibility can be structured within organizations either by positional leadership or non positional leadership who can always find ways to gather  in those kind of cell like environments and offer something new, which eventually has people looking over their shoulders and saying, they seem to be having fun while the rest of us are miserable. How can I get some of that? So I think often it's these pockets of possibility rather than aiming at large scale reform  make change happen, I think we have to understand that change is a constant, back and forth ness between getting stuck and then some parts  machine getting loose. And loosening up others and then getting stuck again. It's an example, maybe a low level example of what I call walking in the tragic gap, which is an orientation toward the idea that there is no final fix. I think the mentality of final fixes  is eventually a fascist mentality that somehow we're going to nail this whole thing down and get it right. And I don't much care where the final fix comes from, whether it's people I agree or disagree with ideologically.  It still tends toward fascism, toward the lockdown, towards the loss of questions, the loss of ambiguity. The loss of being interested in paying attention to what's happening in the 

I'm going to jump in here and I want to move us actually to a final conversation. I love what you were just saying, Parker about the tragic gap. And the sense that they'll ever be a final fix. So I think there's like a sense of like, we're going to be in some mystery together. We're not going to actually arrive at the final answer, even in the in this conversation. But, Parker, you say something really beautiful about gifts. And I want to bring that in as we shift to this focus around gifts. You say our strongest gifts are usually those we are barely aware of possessing. They are part of our God given nature with us from the very moment we draw our first breath. We are no more conscious of having them than we are of breathing. And so in this time together, I wanted to invite each of you to speak a bit around the gifts that you've received from one another.  Parker, I'm going to invite you to begin. What gifts have you received from this other 84 year old man  

Well, to put it in the big frame, it's been the gift of companionship, of feeling even when we weren't face to face and talking directly to each other as we've had the opportunity to do today. That we were somehow on parallel tracks, and that there was a kind of accompaniment going on. I also want to say that Peter has given me a gift of spikiness,  and I love it. So,  the too smooth good Christian boy from Wilmette. Peter was something else. I was the too smooth, no ragged edges,  no sharp edges, wanting never to offend, wanting never to upset anybody's apple cart, just wanting to kind of slip in and do my work  and quietly sneak away. But Berkeley in the 60s where I did my graduate work changed that some, I must admit, before I met Peter Block, but then to have the modeling of people like Peter who were out there. In a much more, it's a wonderful way and it's, spiky isn't quite the right word. It's a jokester way, you know, it's willingness to turn apple cards over. It's a way that shakes up conventional thinking, often turning it right on its head. I love all of that about Peter and his work, and I've learned from it. I probably haven't pushed the envelope as much as he had. But I think together we've built a larger envelope. So  I'll just lay it down there with my gratitude to my friend Peter. 

Thank you, Parker. That's beautiful. You know, I have a very specific gift. I remember talking to you once about people in your struggles who wanted to be helpful to you. And you said none of them were except one person who came once and rubbed your feet. And that just touched me so deeply. And I think  there's a grace to your being and your language that I think is so beautiful. And I think the reason you and I have gotten through it is because I never felt angry at the things I was objecting to. I always identified with them. And I think part of authenticity is to be able to say what you see without blaming anybody. And it's a beautiful thing about you.  You can open worlds with your language, you know, you said earlier, stop being an object of interest as part of the task of our age, and Thomas Merton said that,  you have a poetic practicality, and I would be happy to sit and listen to you and I, and you're also so welcoming when we were in the room together you're right, because for everybody on this call, it's a lonely journey, if you are trying to imagine an alternative future, there's a part of me that knows that I'm crazy. I am a spike and I wonder what's wrong with me. Can't you just get along for God's sake, So that's why I need you in my life, Parker. I need everybody on this call on my life because it looks like we're fine, but we're not. 

Well, you make crazy look good, Peter.