A Wild Patience Has Taken Us This Far 1

Where We’ve Come From & Where We’re Going with “Courage Work”

By Parker J. Palmer

It’s hard for me to believe that it was fifteen years ago that Rob Lehman, then president of the Fetzer Institute, invited me to join him and his colleagues in dreaming up a program for K-12 public school educators that has now morphed into the Center for Courage & Renewal. Fifteen years! That’s half my life… ^₂

“Courage work” (which offers people an opportunity to reconnect who they are with what they do, for their sake and the sake of those they serve) has done much good for many people since 1991—not least for those of us who facilitate the “circles of trust” in which Courage work is done. Here is a highlights reel from the past fifteen years:
• From 1994 to 1996, we created a two-year series of seasonal retreats under the title “The Courage to Teach.” Working with 22 public school teachers from southwest Michigan, I facilitated this first circle of trust, ably aided by Mickey Olivanti and Dave Sluyter of the Fetzer Institute staff.

• From 1996 to 1998, we replicated that pilot experiment in four locations around the country with pioneering facilitators Judy Brown, Sally Hare, Marianne Houston, Marcy Jackson, Rick Jackson and Penny Williamson.

• In 1998, as the program grew larger and more complex, we moved it outside of the Fetzer Institute, creating the Center for Teacher Formation and inviting Marcy Jackson and Rick Jackson to become the founding co-directors. Under their leadership, the Center has developed a network of nearly one hundred-fifty facilitators in some thirty states and fifty cities, numbers that grow larger each year.

• In 2004, the Center changed its status from a program arm of the Fetzer Institute to a free-standing 501(c)(3) non-profit educational organization with its own board of trustees, a group of people who are devoted to this work and know it well, either as facilitators or participants.

• As our work with K-12 educators became more widely known, people in other professions began saying, “Helping public school educators ‘reconnect who they are with what they do’ is important, but what about us physicians/lawyers/clergy/philanthropists/non-profit leaders? We need this, too.” We have responded to these calls with care, wanting to serve as many people as possible, but not wanting to short-change the K-12 educators who will always be at the core of our mission. We have learned that working with other groups is not only consistent with our mission—it can give Courage work more visibility and credibility, helping us maintain our commitment to public school teachers and administrators.

• Case in point: a Lilly Endowment grant of $1.3 million to pilot an interfaith “Courage to Lead” project for clergy and lay leaders has extended our reach, increased our appeal to other donors, and freed up other resources for public school teachers and administrators. Case in point: a national “Courage to Teach” project with the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (which accredits all 8000 medical residency programs in the U.S.) that is a model for large-scale education reform.

• In 2005, it became clear that the Center needed a new name because of the expanding reach of its work, so the Center for Teacher Formation became the Center for Courage & Renewal.

• The impact of our work has been amplified by a series of books that have not only sold well but have helped stimulate conversation and transformation that go beyond the books themselves: The Courage to Teach (1997), Let Your Life Speak (2000), Stories of The Courage to Teach (2001), Teaching With Fire (2003), A Hidden Wholeness (2004), Living the Questions (2005) and the forthcoming Leading from Within (2007). All of these books are from John Wiley/Jossey-Bass Publishers, who have become strong partners in our mission.

Even this bare-bones history seems remarkable to me, given the relatively short time we have been helping people “rejoin soul and role” (a much-needed but not overly-marketable notion in our society) and the relatively small number of people involved in leading and facilitating Courage work.

Those people, of course, are the primary reason for our success. I refer to the gifted and committed staff of the Center for Courage & Renewal—who operate from an undisclosed location in the middle of Puget Sound—and their talented co-conspirators around the country. ³

Equally important to the success of Courage work has been our commitment to two principles. First and foremost is to honor the soul as an end in itself, understanding that “soul” has many synonyms—including “true self,” “identity and integrity,” “heart,” and “inner teacher”—that can be found in wisdom traditions both secular and spiritual.

Our focus is not on improving people’s ability to play their roles or persuading them to keep playing them: when the soul is treated as a means to an end, no matter how noble, it goes into hiding. So everything we do in circles of trust is based on the simple but radical premise that the soul is worthy of respect. We aim simply to give people access to that which is true within them, confident that when the soul shows up and makes its claim on our lives, good things will follow, things no one can predict or control.

Our second principle involves how we think about the expansion of Courage work. We are sometimes pressed to “ramp it up” in a world where the absence of selfhood, identity or soul creates much personal and societal suffering. But this kind of work cannot be expanded by speeding up the assembly line, the way auto makers produce more cars. It can only be grown organically, “like grapevines or pole beans/as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.” ⁴ So we think of ourselves as gardeners, not manufacturers. And the more deeply we have been able to live by this metaphor, the more we have come to understand how well it serves us, our work and the people we want to serve.

At the end of the day, those of us who facilitate circles of trust usually have a simple but powerful feeling: “What a privilege it is to be in the presence of another person’s soul, to say nothing of my own.”

To hear a teacher reclaim the truth that he is accountable not to the test-makers but to young people; to see a physician vow to resist the institutional conditions that might lead her to violate her Hippocratic oath; to see a lawyer reclaim a devotion to justice… To be present at moments like these is to witness rebirth. To be present at moments like these is to be grateful for a work that might be called a midwifery of the soul.

ENDNOTES

1. I borrowed this title from a poem by Adrienne Rich called “A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far.”

2. For the sake of the truth (and of readers who do not know about my frequent flights of fancy) let it be noted that fifteen years is not really half of my life. I was born in 1939. Do the math: the correct answer is 22.39%—but who’s counting?

3. Another flight of fancy. We know exactly where they are: at a P.O. Box on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

4. From Marge Piercy’s poem, “The Seven of Pentacles.”