Parker Palmer & Peter Block: Walking One Another Home

The Common Good podcast is a conversation about the significance of place, eliminating economic isolation and structures of belonging.  This episode is a snapshot from the Abundant Community Conversation on October 26 where Amy Howton speaks with Parker Palmer and Peter Block. 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

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. 

Transcript

 Amy: Parker you so beautifully communicated in the poem that we began with. That the more we let go of this ego of this self and really open to the diversity of life to connecting into something much larger than us, then we actually return back into a sense of home that we're always longing for the sense of belonging that I'm hearing each of you. And so I'm wondering, from a practical standpoint, as two men who've been in this work for a very long time, say a little bit around what your experiences of that has been as each of you have really grown into your sense of Parker Palmer and Peter Block, how have you continued to stay Connected into that sense of home and this expansiveness of the universe.

Parker: Peter, I'd love to hear your answer to that.

Peter: It may be that the stranger is where I find where I belong. My own story was that I grew up as a wandering Jew, I thought I was a gypsy, and for the first half of my life, every time I moved there was nothing that I missed, and then I came to Cincinnati, and I was here thinking I was here because of Kathy, and after a while, I said, well, maybe There's some other reason, and part of the vulnerability for me was whether I went public in my hometown, because if I'm public in another person's town, I can go home and not have to live with any consequences of my action. And when I started to get involved in Cincinnati and decided I'm no longer a gypsy. I found a place where I belonged. I was on a city council, neighborhood council. It was transformative to me. And that was huge.  Now you asked me who I am. I say, I'm a citizen of Cincinnati. And so that's been my shifting. And I was going to write a book on a community. And my wife said, Peter, don't you think you should try it first? And I thought, good idea. And so I did, I got involved in my neighborhood. And then I wrote the book. And so that's kind of my discovery now. And it's not that it's that satisfying or rewarding. And I think, well, what difference have I made? And I can't declare any victory. But I found a place where I know the backstory of my neighborhood. When things are going on, I know how people really feel about it. And it's changed everything.

Parker: Yeah, thank you. Maybe I'll respond to your question from just a little different angle while feeling gratitude for everything that Peter just said, because that's part of my story too. I think for me to wander away from true self, which is a concept that has meaning for me from Thomas Merton, to wander away from true self is to end up in ill health. I believe in something called the self. I believe in it as a birthright gift. Does that mean that it remains solid and static through a lifetime? No, of course not. I think of true self almost as I think of genetic material, which we have learned through the science, expresses itself differently under different situations. So, even genes aren't solid blocks of continuity through a lifetime. They respond differently to different things. They, in that sense, evolve and grow, either individually or as a system. And what I found is that the signs of ill health for me are signs that I'm wandering away from true self. It's one of the reasons I've written several times in my books about my my several descents into clinical depression which as you know is a very real phenomenon for millions and millions of people around the world and for those who, Have to live with them, sit with them, try to walk with them, and support them. I've probably heard more about my writings about depression than I have about any other single subject that I've written about. Even though that's not what gets the professional goodies where it's sometimes regarded as a weakness, but to me, writing about depression, once I got to the point of being able to acknowledge that this was part of who I was, which takes time, to be able to get to the point where you can say, I am all of the above. I am my strengths. I am the light that I have the opportunity to bring. I am also my darkness. I am my weaknesses. My failures, my descents into hell. What really strikes me, and Peter and I are roughly of an age, I think I maybe have a year or two on him, but I'm 84, and one thinks at this age more about one's mortality. That's partly where everything falls away came from, right? And this notion that your life never was the solo act you thought it was. Thank you very much. What strikes me at age 84 is that I cannot imagine a sadder way to die than realizing with your last breath that you never showed up in the world with the wholeness of yourself. Because now that opportunity is gone. I can imagine more painful ways to die, but I can't imagine a sadder way to die. And so writing about shadow as well as light, trying to be present to the people in my life in a way that acknowledges I am all of the above is for me an act of self therapy, which goes far beyond the needs of the self. It extends into the capacity to relate to other people. Some of the deepest relationships in my life with people I know well and people I barely know at all. have been around the darkness of depression, that shared experience, and the sense, as Ram Das once said, that we're all just walking each other home. We can walk alongside each other with these hard, struggles. This question of personal health and social health, are intimately related. If we are in the world as self impersonations, no community is possible. Because you can't connect to an illusion. You can't relate to a non person. And that's what a self impersonation is. If we're in the world with our own truth, to the extent it's humanly possible, it's like Leonard Cohen says,  ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering. There's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. And that's how we connect heart to heart as well.

Amy: I think here's an opportunity for us to share just what's resonating, what's really capturing our attention. Parker, you just mentioned something, a really beautiful quote around walking one another home. So there might be something around that that we want to actually speak to. What is our experience of that? I wonder if the two of you have something else maybe that you want to offer up as a possible question or prompt as we go into breakout rooms.

Peter: I was going to say that what Parker was calling it was welcoming the stranger within. And you might ask people, who are they walking home with?

Amy: Beautiful. Who are you walking home with? Maybe that's internally, maybe that's another friend.