Parker J. Palmer is a writer, speaker, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality, and social change. In this episode of the Zen Bones Podcast, Marc and Parker explore the creative tension between what is and what is possible, the art of perspective taking, and how to find wholeness in a challenging world.

Parker shares how his hard experience with depression gave birth to several books, what he aspires to now, how his experiences in a Quaker intentional community showed him a way to transform economic inequality, and how creating safe spaces and tapping into your inner wisdom is a key component in enabling social change.

 

 

ABOUT MARC’S GUEST

Parker J. Palmer is an American author, educator, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality and social change. He has published ten books and numerous essays and poems, and is founder and Senior Partner Emeritus of the Center for Courage and Renewal. His work has been recognized with major foundation grants, several national awards, and thirteen honorary doctorates.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:02] Marc Lesser: Welcome to Zen Bones: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times. This is Marc Lesser. Why Zen Bones? Our world is in crisis and ever-shifting, and now more than ever, more wisdom, clarity, and courage are essential, especially in the world of work, business, and leadership.

In today’s episode, I’m here with Parker Palmer, author, educator, and activist who focuses on issues that include education, community leadership, spirituality, and social change. He’s published many bestselling books, which I’ve enjoyed immensely. He’s the founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal, and he’s been recognized with major foundation grants, several national awards, and 13 honorary doctorates. So pleased to welcome Parker.

In this episode, we talk about the question of what gives you hope, and we talked about the gaps and the creative tension between what is and what is possible, and the art of perspective-taking, looking at the world through others’ points of view. Parker talked about his experiences in a Quaker intentional community, and how that helped him learn ways to transform economic inequality.

We talked about how he rekindles hope with his walks in nature, as well as his profound experiences with depression, and how that helped him give birth to some of his more hopeful books. We talked about the art of creating safe spaces and finding your inner light as a core part of enabling social change. I hope you enjoy and learn from this conversation with Parker as much as I learned and enjoyed it. Thank you.

This is Marc Lesser, and this is Zen Bones: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times. I am just really thrilled and honored to be here today with Parker Palmer, who’s been a hero of mine in his books and writing. Parker, welcome.

[00:02:32] Parker Palmer: Thank you, Marc. It’s a great pleasure and honor to be with you.

[00:02:37] Marc: I’ve reread Let Your Life Speak, which I really enjoyed just as much reading the second time from 10 years ago. I think where I want to start is this question of the world seems to be in a pretty messed up challenging place in many, many ways. I wonder, how are you feeling about things these days, and especially what gives you hope, and how do you practice and bring your sense of hope and possibility into this world of ours?

[00:03:21] Parker: I’m sure there are days when had you asked me that question, I’d be Mr. Doom and Gloom, because those days come, don’t they? Like bad weather. For the most part, hope is a notion that I work with and work on. I’ve always seen hope as an action rather than an attitude. I’ve thought a lot and talked a lot, and I guess tried to live the notion that we stand and act in a tragic gap between what is and what should be, and what could be.

Our job is to keep putting one foot in front of the other in that tragic gap with whatever role we’re playing in the world. I hear people saying, “Well, it’s hopeless,” and my thought is, if I were to embrace that, what’s left to do except sit in the corner and suck my thumb? That seems to me not a fit way for a grownup to live. I think what gives me hope is all the good people I know, all the good work they’re doing, a lot of it stimulated by the apocalyptic feel of the last decade or so. Apocalypse after all means revelation. A lot of people have walked into that revelation and seen possibilities that they either hadn’t seen or hadn’t really activated in their own lives before. Young people, especially, I think there’s a whole cadre of the rising generation, and for me, that would, I suppose, be anybody under  45 or so, that’s how it looks at age 83 as I sit here today.

They live into what I just said about folks engaging the tragic gap and keeping on. I read, the other day, a wonderful quote from a woman who represents the Black Liberation Movement in this country, which is one of the historical streams of American history that has inspired me for a very long time, ever since I became a community organizer at age 30 in Washington DC.

She was asked about hope, and she said, “I know of no narrative in the Black experience in this country or elsewhere around the world that ends with the words, “And then we gave up.” I take inspiration from people who’ve really had a much harder row to hoe than I have literally and figuratively.

Finally, I take inspiration from the natural world. I live in Wisconsin in Madison. We’re blessed around here with lots of lakes and woods and rivers. I get out and walk and sit and meditate and absorb, even in the coldest months, as much as possible, because there’s a resurgence in nature that’s also in us. I’ve seen areas that were burnt to the ground by forest fires or blown to the ground by derechos, inland tornadoes. 5, 10 years later, they’re back with new forms of growth but green fecund and growing. When I have the presence of mind to recollect and be present to all of that, I find hope.

[00:07:04] Marc: One of the words you used a couple of times and you started with is the word gap. Maybe there’s the tragic gap. What you’re describing, I think, is the gap of possibility. I, more and more, see how we live in and work in those gaps as a practice, as a core. This is where I think, as business people, everything about the life of work is the gaps between what is and what you are envisioning.

I think this is also true of our personal lives or our spiritual lives or the lives of Black people or our democracy. That approach, I find, so just practical and useful, and yet it’s uncomfortable. It’s basically acknowledging discomfort of being able to stay with and work in those gaps.

[00:08:12] Parker: Yes, it is. I guess the reason for that discomfort is that there’s something in us that always wants resolution. We always want to solve the problem rather than holding the tension. Of course, that’s a disease that’s eating away at our democracy right now because the founding genius of this democracy for all of its flaws and all of the founders’ flaws, the founding genius was a system that was really designed to get creative use out of tensions, out of the great debate between left and right, this and that, and to slowly, as time went on, to not close that gap but to negotiate it was something that somehow begins to approximate the moral arc of history, as Martin Luther King talked about it. I like your description of the gap, it is what it is and it’s where we are. It draws us forward, doesn’t it, that gap? If you’re on to its possibilities, if you don’t turn away, if you feel the opening for you to move forward with life-giving creative work and activity or in the case of a business person to innovate a new product to be of greater service to the consuming public, then that gap functions to in a teleological way. There’s an end in there that draws you into a more creative future. I like to think of this and a lot of other things as a matter of choices that we have to make.

My notion of the tragic gap is that we’re always in this gap between, on the one hand, the harsh realities around us. On the other hand, the life-giving possibilities that are not wish dreams but are real. These are possibilities we’ve seen with our own eyes. I look, for example, back at my 11 years in a Quaker intentional community where everybody made the same amount of money, no matter what your role was. There was no distinction by rank or status or education or age.

It was an absolutely flat economic system of radical equality. I spent 11 of the most creative years of my life there really coming to understand how much nonsense there was in the notion of privilege, which I grew up with as a White straight male from a well-off family. How, by getting rid of the economic distinctions, it suddenly became possible to look at everyone as equally valuable, equally worthy, and to pay more attention to what they had to say and to how they lived their lives than to how much money they made or how much status their role in the organization carried with it.

I look around my neighborhood right now in Madison, that’s not how we live, but I spent 11 years living with real people in real space and time living that way. I know that there are possibilities in a less predatory and consumptive model of economic life than the one we live at this moment in my town where there are clearly the haves and the have-nots and the have-nots are really suffering. For me, the choice is, do I flip out on the side of harsh reality, which I call corrosive cynicism?

That means, okay, I see how the economic system works. I’m just going to game it to max it out for myself, let the devil take the hindmost, or do I flip out on the side of an unrealistic idealism, irrelevant idealism? Wouldn’t it be nice if some floaty notion of how all of this can change tomorrow? If it doesn’t change tomorrow, then I get off the train.

I did my graduate work at Berkeley in the ’60s, and I saw a lot of people who thought all of this will change by the end of the decade. At the end of the decade, it hadn’t changed. It had actually gotten worse with Vietnam raging. They got off the social change train and devoted themselves to the acquisition of wealth. We have choices to make, and I think a lot of people these days are reflecting deeply and well on the choices they want to make at this critical time in American history.

[00:13:36] Marc: There’s a book that I find myself surprisingly how often I refer to the work of Peter Senge in a book called The Fifth Discipline. In there, he uses the expression creative tension, and he makes a statement that I highlighted that says, “The ability to stay in the discomfort of these gaps may be the most important quality of a leader.” He goes on to talk about various strategies that we have for avoiding the gaps. He describes the three most popular strategies.

One is to be so busy that we forget that the gap exists, that’s very popular today. The second, to get embroiled in the emotional aspects, to get so worked up about our anger and frustration. The third is to lower the bar. That’s a bit of the cynical, I think, approach. This is impossible. I think it’s interesting and important to look at what the challenges to being able to stay in these gaps and then to be able. What I was hearing you say, one of your practices is nature and keep coming back to nature, but you also seem to– I was hearing you as a perspective taking. The practice of perspective taking, which I think is a really undervalued practice, like seeing things from a multitude of perspectives.

[00:15:22] Parker: Thank you for underscoring that. I do the best I can at that. I think it’s really hard for any of us to escape our own perspective but we can at least be aware of the limitations of our perspective. We can read enough, we can talk to enough people who are unlike us in their life story, and to understand their perspective on things more fully. With that information, we can begin to ask ourselves, what more do I need to know about how the world looks from another person’s point of view in order to check and correct the blinders that come with my perspective?

As I said earlier, I’m an older, reasonably well off, straight, White male in America, and it took me quite a while in life to figure out that the way I looked at the world was not the way a lot of people looked at the world, because this world was made for me, not for you and me, but just for me. I was the person for whom this society was designed to work very, very well.

I think one of the great struggles these days is there are a lot of White people, men and women, who, like me, are reasonably well off and not marginalized in any significant way, who are just having a very hard time realizing that their perspective is not the only perspective. The life that comes, the three-dimensionality that comes, the color and texture from adopting other people’s lenses, as the old cliché goes, look at it from the other person’s point of view. Do that multiple times from multiple perspectives and life just gets more exciting. It gets less boring, it gets more engaging.

I think, above all, I was reading a wonderful piece that Joanna Macy wrote, one of my heroes, about the Buddhist concept of the bardo, which I’m sure you know far better than I do. The bardo is that gap between the times when things could either get better or they could get worse, and it looks like the odds are they’re going to get worse. She says, one of the big pieces of Buddhist advice is very simply, do not look away, do not blink it, do not turn aside, take it in engage it, try to understand it, and then keep moving into it, or at least sitting with it without evasion.

I think your comment about how hard it is for us to hold tension is well taken, and it takes us back to the old fight and flight syndrome. I wrote a book called Healing the Heart of Democracy, which drew heavily on the importance of creative tension-holding.

One of the things I learned in researching that book was something I hadn’t known before, I should have known probably, but for psychology, we talk a lot about stress and distress, but psychologists also have a word eustress for stress that draws out the best in us. When you think about the power of the fight and flight instinct and how it actually created so many cultural institutions that are designed to help us hold tension well, language is one. Once we have language, we don’t have to respond to something startling behind us by reaching out and clubbing them with whatever we got in our hand. We can inquire. We can say, “What’s going on here?” Turn around and look and conduct inquiry into it. Art itself is always driven by dynamic tension. The cultural inventions of art in every form are, I think, in many ways,an effort to help us transcend the impact of fight or flight, and on it goes. A very fundamental human problem, but let’s not waste all those years of evolution by failing to take advantage of the openings we have into holding tension creatively.

[00:20:24] Marc: Yes. It’s interesting. Evolution and the bardo and tension. One of my favorite moments that I ever had in writing was– this was a book I wrote many years ago about paradox. As I was writing about paradox, at some point, I found myself writing, “I don’t like paradox, it’s uncomfortable. I want clarity.” Then what really surprised me, and this is one of the things that I love about writing, is being surprised when I wrote, “Well, perhaps Paradox is actually more clear than clear.”

What we usually think of as clarity is usually very one-sided, right? Whether it’s too much looking at the world through rose-colored glasses or too much cynicism, or as gradual, do things change gradually or do they change suddenly? I think, yes, we’re experiencing, as you were saying, the brilliance of how our government was initially designed as a way of being able to create tension and hold tension.

[00:21:39] Parker: It’s what the tripartite division of government is all about in this or any other democracy. It’s so interesting, Marc, that you mentioned the word paradox, because, this morning, as I was preparing for our conversation, by reconnecting with you in my mind and heart, I was remembering that my very first book, which is one I don’t think about a whole lot anymore, 10 books ago, was called The Promise of Paradox.

It was an exploration that began, for me, with Thomas Merton, who was a big fan of paradox. The people who know his marvelous journal, The Sign of Jonas, will probably remember Thomas Merton writing as an epigraph to that beautiful book, “I am traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox.” [chuckles] When I read that, I thought, “This is the guy for me because that’s how life feels.”

Had I not been onto that notion with Merton’s help in my 30s, there’s just so much of the rest of my life that I never could have made sense of, but paradox, as you say, is really clarifying. I think the alternative to paradox is the kind of simplification that actually obscures and distorts things. I don’t remember who it was, maybe one of the Supreme Court justices or some great literary figure, who said this very interesting thing, “For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies the other side of complexity, I would give my life.” That’s where paradox, I think, takes us.

[00:23:31] Marc: In my own mind, I have to keep coming back and reminding myself of at least a definition of paradox, which is something that appears impossible, but may, in fact, be true.

[00:23:45] Parker: Yes. Exactly. I love Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist. What he said about paradox, he said, “The opposite of an ordinary fact is a lie, but the opposite of one great truth may be another great truth.” It calls for discernment. He didn’t say it always is another great truth, but it may be another great truth, like, are we made for the community? Absolutely. Are we made for solitude? Absolutely.

It’s like breathing in and breathing out. If I were to say to you right now, “You know what? I think I’m basically a breathing out kind of guy, so that’s all I’m going to do for the rest of this interview,” this interview wouldn’t go on very long. Neither would I.

[00:24:33] Marc: Yes. Well, thank you for bringing us back to the breath

[laughter] and the paradox, right? The paradox of breathing in and breathing out. This is one of my images of how we exist and how we practice, is what we breathe in and the world appears in a certain way, and as we somehow think it is, and then we breathe out and let it all go. It’s with each breath we make, we create the world again fresh and even the tension, the gaps that exist in our breath, in our bodies. I want to come back to what gives you hope, Parker.

[00:25:28] Parker: All of the above. Conversations like this give me hope. I know, from experience, what human beings are capable of. I’m not talking about merely about what happens among educated people who sometimes really don’t take very good advantage of their education in terms of where the conversation goes or how the life gets lived. In my own family, I come from a line of skilled craftsmen with whom wonderful, very different kinds of conversations were possible.

Sometimes just watching them do their work and marveling at the intelligence in their hands, the kind of genius of crafting a beautiful object. In one case, it was a carpenter, and in the other case, a metal worker, in my own family. I learned so much from those grandparents, about the different modes of human intelligence and what’s possible between human beings of many, many sorts.

Again, we talked earlier about perspective. I think the more forms of intelligence you can connect with conversationally in the broadest sense of that word, the more you’re going to learn. Just observing my grandfather build a cabinet was a learning experience for me. How often he taught me, not with words, but just by saying, watch what I do. Then making space for me to try it for myself without judgment or mockery or anything because obviously, I wasn’t going to do his quality of work.

I’m a big fan of what human beings are capable of. The human possibility, I guess, is how I name it. Are we flawed? Are we greedy? Are we narrow-minded? Do we fall into the pits? Yes, absolutely. That’s part of the deal. I think one of my operating notions is that wholeness, human wholeness, which is I think what a lot of us are striving for. Human wholeness, not just for me, but for everyone. A sense of wholeness, a sense of being worthy, a sense of being seen and heard, which is what we have to offer up to as many people as possible.

I think wholeness has nothing to do with perfection. Wholeness has to do with embracing the imperfections in your life along with the stuff you get right. Being able to say, at the end, and it’s been very therapeutic or helpful for me to be able to say this as a person who’s taken some very deep dives into clinical depression and the profound darkness of that experience for months at a time, it’s been very helpful for me to be able to, eventually, to show up in the world saying, “Yes, I’m all of the above. I’m not only the hopeful books I write, but I’m also the hard experiences that gave rise to those books, and the potholes I stepped into along the path that somehow triggered or landed me in those hard experiences.”

I think there’s so much for us to talk about. So many things to talk about, so little time. [laughs]

[00:29:24] Marc: When you use the word wholeness, I couldn’t help but think of one of my favorite books of yours is called, A Hidden Wholeness. I thought both philosophical, but also very practical instructions for how to design and create wisdom circles, circles of wholeness and finding wholeness not through seeking solutions or advice-giving or problem-solving, but a paradoxical view of allowing and perspective taking, but just with tremendous sense of creating safety.

How can we create safe spaces? I think this is a skill. When it comes to racial issues, when it comes to democracy, when it comes to how we can skillfully find our way in managing and working toward solutions to some of these gaps.

[00:30:39] Parker: No, absolutely. Thank you for mentioning that. In raising a teenager or traveling through life with a partner, these are skills, I think, are understandings that are just valuable at so many levels. You’re absolutely right. What I’ve come to refer to as a circle of trust, which is what I write about in A Hidden Wholeness, is manifested in the work of an organization called The Center for Courage and Renewal, a nonprofit that I founded 25 years ago, which is just now celebrating its 25th anniversary. A very joyful event for all of us involved.

In the work of the Center for Courage and Renewal, we do retreats for people in many walks of life, but especially for people in the helping professions; teachers, and clergy, and nonprofit leaders, and so forth and so on, and healthcare folk, especially physicians. We talk about our circles as a way of being alone together. Talk about a paradox. We talk about our circles as places where the primary conversation is not around the perimeter of the circle, but each person in the circle is supported in having a deepening conversation with him or herself.

As you rightly said, there’s a lot of paradox in these practices. They are practices. They’re very concrete practices. Principles and practices are what we talk about when we begin our retreats. Trying to create a culture that will sustain us in this goal of allowing each person to have a deepening conversation with him or herself. The circles of trust that I’ve been in over the years, 25 years and more, are another source of hope for me because, in those settings, I see people who are just like me with all the flaws and foibles, along with the potentials, start to discover that they have an inner voice.

That there is a truth that lives inside them. Some people call it soul, seeds, call it the spark of the divine in every being. It can be called big self or true self. Merton called it true self. I think some Buddhist talk about big self, which is also a non-self or a no-self, which is another great paradoxical notion. I’ve seen people in these very trusting spaces begin to come in touch with the fact that they have what we– I’m a Quaker. We Quakers call the inner light.

Once you start getting access to it, it illumines your path in many, many ways. It’s a source of hope for me just knowing that we are not captive to our roles or our images or the prejudices that the society lays upon us the way it wants to define us, either as terribly important or you hardly exist. We’re not captive to any of that. I’m very, very struck with how most movements for social change have their originating spark in the lives of people who begin to understand this fundamental principle that “I am worthy, I am not unworthy in the way that this racism or this sexism or misogyny wants to define me.” They resolve to live divided no more. They resolve to begin living from the inside out. People who poo-poo in their work as somehow touchy-feely or whatever the latest phrase of dismissal is, really need to study the history of social movements because, so far, I’ve not been able to find one across the globe and across time that did not begin with people recovering that inner voice of truth.

Finding ways to share it with each other, to build community around it, and to deploy it in the world as a force of social change. That’s the story of the Civil Rights Movement in this country, The Black Liberation Movement, which was going on years before we even had a country. That’s the story of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. It’s the story of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. It’s the story of the women’s movement around the globe. On and on it goes.

[00:36:05] Marc: Parker, you are beautifully articulating my hope for this conversation and any of these conversations that I’m hosting because, whether it’s one person or a million people, but who’s ever listening, I believe is having a conversation right now with themselves about this conversation. My hope is that leads people to find their own inner wholeness and their own inner light, which will support and enable people to take social action and to help create anything that we can all do to put our weight over on making this a more whole, whole world.

[00:36:59] Parker: Beautifully said, Marc. That’s a mission. That’s a mission worth pursuing.

[00:37:04] Marc: It is. Maybe this can be part one because I feel like we are just touching on things. Anything you would like to say just as a way of completing our circle here this morning?

[00:37:21] Parker: I just want to say, again, thank you, my gratitude to you for making me your conversation partner for this time together. As always happens for me, a good conversation, this conversation with you, not only your questions for me, but your comments along the line have awakened me to certain parts of my past that I want to reclaim, certain ideas that I don’t want to forget, practices that I want to continue with, and to possibilities, the human possibility in me that I want to try to live into. Thank you for all of that, Marc.

[00:38:06] Marc: Thank you. My heart is full and I really appreciate this time together. Appreciate it a lot.

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