A Poet on the Road: An Introduction to Parker Palmer

A speech given by Diana Chapman Walsh, October 4, 2007

On behalf of all of Boston – no, all of the Northeast (how’s that for a sweeping claim?) -- I want to express our gratitude to this traveling road show for making us the second stop on their historic tour.

They launched it a mere two weeks ago, in Seattle, home base for the Center for Courage & Renewal, and already they have come to us, with seven more stops to go, ending in Minnesota in April. Jossey-Bass, the publisher of the 10th anniversary edition of The Courage to Teach, believes that this is a national book tour. But we know better than that.

This is Parker’s opportunity to live out his boyhood fantasy of being a rock star, taking the show on the road. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and we have heard and read many comparisons of Kerouac’s era with ours – and his mood with ours. Are our times better or worse?

What a ridiculous question, Parker -- the poet -- would help us see. Parker the poet is using language to create worlds that never were. He is singing new songs of possibility for our culture, inventing original language and concepts that will enlarge our horizons and invite us to cleave together and imagine into being a safer and saner future on a more human scale.

A “circle of trust,” for example – three words that create a wide world. You can sit in that circle and have a new experience that will change the direction of your life. I’ve done it -- so have many of you, I suspect.

I first met Parker Palmer in March 1990 at a week-long retreat he facilitated for a small group of Kellogg National Fellows in Taos, New Mexico. We connected deeply on that occasion, which was transformative for me (and, I think, for everyone there, including Parker). He and I have remained in close contact ever since.

He spoke at my inauguration as president of Wellesley College in 1993. I wrote the preface and a chapter for the book we wrote in his honor, Living the Questions, which I recommend to you if you haven’t read it. Sam Intrator, who co-edited that volume, wrote a wonderful opening chapter that tells the story of Parker’s life.

Parker and I have participated together at many retreats and meetings and have, on several occasions (most recently last spring), been bookended as keynote speakers, opening and closing national conferences. I have a snapshot from that recent conference, taken by a friend in the audience. It shows me and a colleague listening as Parker (just off camera) is introducing us. The looks on our faces are sublime, a study in ecstasy, as we revel in the rare and exquisite delight of being seen – profoundly seen – by another human being. To be in Parker’s presence is to have this experience of being seen; he touches a very deep chord in many of us and finds depths in us that his seeing calls into being.

I suspect that all of you know Parker to one degree or another as a writer, teacher, and scholar. In aggregate, his eight books have sold three-quarters of a million copies and have introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to his vision for a better world. They have earned him a wide and devoted following, as well as numerous awards and accolades. And they are catalyzing a social movement. That’s what this tour is about.

The impact of Parker’s words and work is wide and ever-expanding. The last time a group of us gathered to do him a favor, he presented us, as compensation for our efforts, our very own copies of Let Your Life Speak – in Korean. It looked like there were plenty more where those came from and I’m pretty sure Sharon was relieved to see us haul a few of them out of her house when we left.

Some of you know – too – (and we hope more of you will after this evening) of the exceptional work of the Center for Courage & Renewal on Bainbridge Island, which Marcy and Rick Jackson are leading with consummate skill. The Center has been elaborating and disseminating Parker’s ideas, putting wheels on them, as he likes to say. They are rolling now and picking up momentum – an 18-wheeler hauling freight from sea to shining sea. The Center has trained 150 facilitators in 30 states and 50 cities; they’ve touched the lives of some 25,000 professionals, who, in turn touch countless others – students, patients, clients, parishioners, colleagues, family members and friends. This is a social movement; make no mistake about that.

And it is a book tour, a poet on the road. Parker writes with a rare mix of analytic rigor and linguistic elegance, posing questions that are multilayered, complex, universal, and yet deeply personal. He writes with enormous moral authority, leavened with an infectious and playful Midwestern sense of humor that reminds us earnest do-gooders not to take ourselves too seriously. It is just plain fun to hang out with him as you are about to find out. And yet this is serious stuff – as Parker knows better than most. At a time when the need for trustworthy leaders is increasingly manifest in mounting crises around the globe – crises that are quite literally threatening life on the planet, Parker’s work and that of the Center for Courage and Renewal offer the possibility, as he has written, of taking us “beyond ourselves to become healers of a wounded world.”

So please join me (and all of New England, all of the Northeastern United States) in welcoming Parker Palmer to Boston. We are so glad you are here to take us beyond ourselves.