Words of EnCOURAGEment #8
Where is hope now?
A message from Co-Director Marcy Jackson
Back in December a friend told of an acquaintance who said: Every week I get an invitation to join the recession, but so far I’ve managed to say “No Thanks!” He was, of course, speaking of a “recessionary mindset.” A mere two months later and you can’t go anywhere without hearing bad news that hits close to home: a painful personal story of a friend or family member getting laid off, stories of communities struggling to cover essential services, daily reports of the “the numbers” that indicate further decline in our nation’s economic health and in other nation’s economies. It feels a little like being under siege. Saying “no thanks” to a recessionary mindset becomes much harder as tough times come home to roost in our own midst, in our own families.
So where is hope now? How do we weather what some thought would just be a short-lived “winter of discontent” that now looks to stretch on much longer? Surely there is a need for belt tightening on all of our parts, and that’s not a bad thing in and of itself. But I’m beginning to notice other levels of impact from all this bad news. There’s something insidious here in the way I—and others I know—are looking at our own lives, our choices and what the future holds. The necessary external “pulling in” of frivolous spending or use of resources has translated into a kind of internal pulling in or pulling away. It’s subtle in some ways and can look like a person is just being prudent or thoughtful about committing time, money or energy. Better to wait until things become clearer, less volatile, more stable. The risk, though, is that the need to “hunker down” too easily becomes a kind of immobilization.
Perhaps a better question about hope might be “How do we hope now?” or better still, “How shall we live now?” The latter hits the mark more squarely as that’s what we need to keep doing: Living! And being “alive” is as much about our spirits and internal orientation to the world as it is about the external arrangements and necessities of our lives.
Parker Palmer on Bill Moyers Journal February 20
Please tune in to Bill Moyers Journal on PBS this Friday night, where one of the segments will feature Parker Palmer and his work with the Center. Afterward, visit our blog to join in the discussion about what you saw, what you learned, and what you're interested in learning more about.Economic Collapse: Calling forth images of true self
by Courage & Renewal Facilitator Paul Michelac
I opened my newspaper recently to the following description of our national economic landscape. “Unemployment rate hits 7.2%, the highest level in 16 years.” “A net loss of 2.6 million jobs from the economy in 2008, the most since 1945.” “11.1 million workers unemployed in December.” (Denver Post, Jan 10, 2009). A short time later I opened my email to read that my work place was freezing all open positions and offering severance packages to encourage early retirements, all in the service of reducing payroll costs. A small but grinding pebble of economic uncertainty, a chip from a larger mountain, has now become a part of my life. And perhaps you or someone you know has opened his/her email to find that uncertainty has turned to reality and their department has been eliminated in an effort to improve the company’s balance sheet.
I listen daily to the business news and worry about the economic and personal loss of so many American workers. I wonder what it must be like to experience such a rapid shift of identity from employed to unemployed, often with the stroke of a computer key and frequently with little or no warning. There is no doubt in my heart and mind that I live in troubled times with the weighty realities of economic collapse and personal catastrophe. How might I make meaning of the pebbles, boulders, and mountains of fear and loss that characterize our national economic landscape? As I live the questions of professional meaning and finding relevant work I find myself thinking about winter and its invitation to search out elements of true self that remain alive, but inactive, in a frozen land. The Courage work invites me to reconsider the little stone in my shoe as a gentle reminder that my dormant gifts of selfhood, once awakened, can draw me toward meaningful sources of employment.
But of course in the midst of waiting, the hardships of under-employment and unemployment continue in very real ways. I’m reminded, especially in the winter of my personal and professional life of the words of Mary Oliver, from her poem “Wild Geese.”
“Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.”
Steady on Their Feet
An interview with Courage & Renewal Facilitator David Hagstrom, by Courage & Renewal Facilitator Karen Noordhoff
In these times, many folks are experiencing discouragement and despair. How does Courage & Renewal work encourage hope?
It’s very clear to me that school leaders, along with teachers and clergy, need this work now more than ever. In this time when they’re being required to massively cut budgets, while also being asked to “leave no child behind,” paradoxically almost every school leader I know in a Courage to Lead series says something like this: “This is still a hopeful time. I feel optimistic about myself and my work and the people I work with. I have a feeling that as result of being in Courage to Lead, whatever the challenge, I am—we are—going to be able to survive. In the midst of very tough times, we’re going to figure things out.”
Courage work offers teachers, school leaders and clergy opportunities to return to the reasons they became a teacher, school leader or a clergy person in the first place. And, in fact that’s what happens. When participants reconnect with their vocations, they regain their “voice.” It’s not an exaggeration to say that when one finds one’s voice, it’s pretty close to thrilling. In the school visits I make to Courage to Lead participants between retreats, I hear school leaders saying, “Here in the midst of immense financial woes in the district and at my school, I feel surprisingly steady on my feet.” “Because I have such a strong sense of who I am in these dangerous times, the parents of the kids in this school listen to me with a sense of deep belief. That helps stabilize our school community.”
Tell us about your introduction to Parker and to Courage & Renewal work. How has this work changed you? How has it changed your work?
Fire and the Courage to Lead
by Courage & Renewal Facilitator Ken Saxon
In the Courage & Renewal world, fire is a wonderfully positive metaphor. There’s the fire of vocational calling, the fire of passion, and fire as the burning fuel that drives us out into the world with courage. There’s fire’s warming capacity, or how fire allows the artist to soften the glass or harden the clay to make things of beauty. And there’s fire as a catalyst for seed dispersal.
I initiated our Courage to Lead program to help tend or reignite the fire in the hearts of leaders of community-based organizations in Southern California, where I live. Nonprofit leaders are the type of people who too often serve everyone else and neglect themselves. New challenges constantly arise, and these leaders are expected to figure out what to do and to lead their organizations forward. So many eyes are focused on them.
The twenty leaders that responded to my invitation for our 13 month retreat series comprised an amazing group representing all kinds of organizations – including a preschool for the children of homeless families, an organization that fights domestic violence, a rehabilitation hospital, an after-school art program for at-risk youth, and the largest environmental nonprofit in our region. These folks are all heroes to me.
Transformational Leadership in Education
A profile of Circle of Trust participant Dr. Ann Unterreiner, as interviewed by Courage & Renewal Facilitator Dr. Megan LeBoutillier
Ann, would you tell me the story of how you came into this work?I attended my first retreat in Puget Sound in the fall of 2004. It was a Circle of Trust with Rick Jackson. I’d read Parker’s work and was curious where his work intersected with my own teaching practice. So I went to the retreat and it was amazing. Learning about Parker’s ideas through my own reflective experience helped me explain my own practice as a teacher; the things I’d always done internally. The concept of the inner landscape of a teacher became a tangible something giving me a language, insights and a way of seeing courage in teachers in a new way.
I went back to Arizona, finished my Ph.D. and came to the University of Redlands to become a professor at a time when they were beginning the Educational Justice Leadership Doctoral Program. I actually got a small grant from the University to continue going to Circle of Trust retreats. I have been to three more retreats and find they just keep deepening my thinking about social and educational justice.
Reconnecting the Soul Through Hopeful Imagination
By Courage & Renewal Facilitator Diana C. Brawley
For the last year the waves of news have rolled in about our nation’s shaky financial footing, and we have seen wide-ranging reactions to it. At first, it was easy to say that we saw this coming and that an economic adjustment was long overdue. Then, as the news hit a bit harder, it was easy to be distracted and even in denial. We wanted to focus on anything but the grim financial news. Next our gaze fell heavy on those we could blame for this mess -- pointing fingers and shaming the greed of leaders. Those reactions are less prevalent today. As I look around, I see a shift occurring. The occasional wave has been replaced by crushing daily news of lay offs, downturns, unemployment, and foreclosures. Even polite dinner conversations have begun their own version of wave-making with talk of the latest neighbor to file for bankruptcy.
In this season of winter, there is a global shift happening around us -- like huge plates of ice shifting on the winter landscape. If you’ve ever been in a similar landscape you have heard the eerie moan the ice makes deep down below. That is what I imagine as each country faces its own financial chaos with groans from down deep in the belly of the earth. The reverb of those groans is heard around the world from community to community, from one ice-covered expanse to the other. As the globe braces—breathes in and holds its universal breath across the frozen horizon —some bravely, quietly, ask questions: Where is this leading us? How bad is it going to get? How much misery is this going to bring? When will it end? These questions have no easy answers and they have now become the backdrop for what we call “Courage & Renewal work.” And we, Courage & Renewal facilitators, also must bravely ask questions about our work: How does the changing economic landscape inform or even transform the work we do? What is Courage & Renewal work? Part of the task for these times is our ability to first face and then adapt to the shifts that are occurring.
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