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Parker Palmer is a world-renowned author, educator, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, and social change. This episode touches on a wide range of relevant topics, including the importance of healthy dialogue, listening well, why community is critical, and how we can cultivate relentless gratitude. Parker infuses the discussion with his abundant wisdom and humor, and makes clear his immense respect and compassion toward educators.
Because of the breadth and depth of this conversation, we’ve divided it into two parts. Give yourself the gift of time, to savor the words and presence of Parker Palmer.
Teaching, Reading & Learning: The Podcast elevates important contributions to the educational community, with the goal of inspiring teachers, informing practice, and celebrating people in the community who have influenced teaching and literacy to the betterment of children. The podcast features guests whose life stories are compelling and rich in ways that are instructive to us all. The podcast focuses on literacy as we know it (reading and writing) but will also connect to other “literacies” that impact children’s learning; for example, emotional, physical, and social literacies as they apply to teachers and children.
[00:00:01.030] - Speaker 1
We all agree that every child is capable of learning to read. The Institute for Multisensory Education has been helping teachers make that happen for 25 years by offering extensive training and virtual teaching resources. Learn how to apply MC's IDA accredited Orton Gillingham approach based on the science of reading by signing up for their virtual trainings this spring and summer. Visit Mce.com that's Imse.com to register for their free virtual overviews and learn more of their extensive list of summer courses. Hello and welcome to Teaching, Reading, and Learning. The TRL Podcast The focus of this podcast is to elevate important conversations in the educational community in order to inspire, inform, and celebrate contributions to teaching and learning. Our guest today is Parker Palmer, who embodies the focus of this podcast. I'd like to take a moment to share Parker's biography. Parker J. Palmer is a writer, speaker, activist, and founder and senior partner Emeritus of the center for Courage and Renewal. His wisdom has reached millions worldwide through his ten books, including the best selling Healing The Heart of Democracy, Let Your Life Speak, The Courage to Teach, and A Hidden Wholeness. His latest bestseller is on the Brink of Everything, Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old.
[00:01:47.910] - Speaker 1
Parker holds a PhD in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley and 13 honorary doctorates. The Leadership Project, a national survey of 100 educators, named him one of the 30 most influential senior leaders in higher education and one of the ten key agenda centers of the past decade. In 2010, Palmer was given the William Rainey Harper Award, whose previous recipients include Margaret Mead, Ellie Wiesel, and Paula Fry. For 20 years, the Accrediting Commission for Graduate Medical Education has given annual Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach and Courage to Lead awards to directors of exemplary medical residency programs. Living the Questions Essays inspired by the Work and Life of Parker J. Palmer was published in 2005. A member of the Religious Society of Friends Quakers, Dr. Palmer and his wife, Sharon L. Palmer, live in Madison, Wisconsin. I have had the pleasure of getting to know Parker over 1415 years, and I am both personally and professionally enriched by his teaching and his life's work and simply his way of being in the world. And if you know Parker and his work, you know that he has the deepest admiration for teachers. If you're unfamiliar with his work, I think this will be a terrific opportunity for you to get to know him.
[00:03:22.300] - Speaker 1
Either way, you're in for a treat. We are going to embark on a wide ranging conversation about living your deep truth, authority in teaching, and the importance of curiosity and living on your growing edge. I am honored to be speaking today to Parker Palmer. All right, so Parker, I am deeply grateful to be with you today. You and your work have just been profoundly impactful in my life and in the lives of so many others. So thank you for the gift of your time.
[00:04:08.830] - Speaker 2
Well, it's great to see you, Lori. Thank you for having me on.
[00:04:12.490] - Speaker 1
Absolutely. And I have so many things I just want to talk to you about today. So let's just see where the conversation takes us.
[00:04:20.770] - Speaker 2
Great delight.
[00:04:22.690] - Speaker 1
I came to know you first from Courage to Teach, and this is really, in my mind, a book about honoring a teacher's inner landscape and how do we become more authentic in our work. And I know that when I was a beginning teacher, I found this whole concept pretty revelatory to the idea that that's important for teaching as opposed to just teaching techniques, instructional techniques. And I reread this recently, preparing to talk to you. So I wanted to read you something from the book that really struck me, and maybe you can comment on this. So you were talking about authority. Authority comes as I reclaim my identity and integrity, remembering my selfhood and my sense of vocation, then teaching can come from the depths of my own truth. And the truth that is within my students has a chance to respond in kind. So I wonder if you could, first of all, maybe just tell us about your origins as a teacher and what influenced you to write this and then this whole idea of the depth of a teacher's truth.
[00:05:33.910] - Speaker 2
Yeah. Well, let me flip those questions over and just start with a little bit on the quote you just read.
[00:05:40.770] - Speaker 1
Yeah.
[00:05:41.380] - Speaker 2
So I've long resisted the notion that any human activity can be reduced to technique, to tips, tricks and techniques, which are very popular books get sold with titles like that. But it's not that tips, tricks and techniques are useless in my mind, but they're not where you start. You start with the fact that teaching or whatever the human activity is is being done by somebody and who that somebody is and the extent to which their inner life has been examined by them and, you know, corrected, where it needs to be corrected and amplified, where it needs to be amplified. It matters in the doing of the profession, whether it's teaching or medicine or engineering or political leadership. We aren't robots. We aren't delivery machines for goods and services. We are human beings interacting in a very human enterprise called teaching and learning. Socrates, way, way back before I was going to school, said, the unexamined life is not worth living. And that's a quote that's emblazoned on more than a few doorways in education. But I think my work is in some ways an extension of that Socratic dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living.
[00:07:24.010] - Speaker 2
And I've sometimes used that at old commencement ceremonies, for example, where I've added something like this, if you choose to live an unexamined life, please do not go into a job that involves other people, because if you do, you're going to end up doing damage. So the book is basically an exploration of what it means to kind of keep clarifying your own identity and integrity, the depth of your own mind, heart and soul so that you can teach from a place that is most likely to connect with that same place in other people. In students, we can talk later about perhaps about how the subject plays in to that as to how it all began for me, I'm not sure that I have a good answer to that, because like a lot of growth, it starts with a very tiny seed and a lot of compost, and there's mystery involved in what happens as we germinate and come to flower and mystery and Grace and good luck and mentoring and just all kinds of things. The one thing I can say that has always kind of interested me is that I'm the first person in my family to go to College.
[00:09:00.970] - Speaker 2
And so it's not that I came from a learned tradition of any sort. My grandparents were blue collar workers. My dad was a businessman in Chicago who came there during the Depression. And what I know about them is that they were open minded, open hearted, generous people who were always curious about the world. We always had books in our home, and some of them, when I was a kid, were way over my head. But their titles intrigued me. And I did a lot of reading growing up because the material was there at home and there were good conversations at home. And I think a lot of education is good conversation, but with intent, with trajectory, with purpose, and with some boundaries. I also have come to believe over the years that I was born baffled. Some people have sent me bumper stickers with those words Born Baffled because I think it's true. I think I emerged into this world. They slapped me on the butt or whatever they do. It knocked the breath into me. And I think I looked around and said, Wait, what what's going on here? This is madness or It's beautiful.
[00:10:39.110] - Speaker 2
Yeah. How did it get so dull when it could be so interesting or something along that range of responses to the outer people? And so I've always been curious. And I think when you've written ten books like I have, people may get the impression that, okay, so he knew something about ten things he must have because he's written ten books about different subjects. And the truth is that writing has always been a form of uncovering or bafflement, of digging, only to discover once I've got that layer removed, that there's another layer of bafflement beneath that. So I had a lot of that. I was a very undistinguished elementary school and high school student. True fact, I graduated from a high school of about 2000 people in a class of about 500 right in the middle, a sort of Passable C average. But I think it was largely because I was interested in extracurricular activities more than I was teaching me. I had some caring mentors during that time, but there aren't any sort of great academic teacher standouts, but I had the good fortune, and it really was dumb luck to get into a good College, Carlton College in Minnesota.
[00:12:20.010] - Speaker 2
And there I hooked up with three mentors who just changed my life. As happened back in the day, they were all men, but they all had spouses who also became important parts of my life. And I spent time in their homes. I mean, I was extraordinarily lucky to have three of these. And one was the College chaplain. One was an expert in Southeast Asian religions, and the other was a physicist who also had a degree in theology. They were all people in whom religion and science lived happily and in a very honest and honorable way. So I've never wrestled with what I think is a bogus war between religion and science. What's wonderful for me is that I stayed connected with those three men as long as they lived, and one of them is still living. And I talked with him on the phone. He's 95 now and then. So I just had a lot of good fortune along the way. And I think driven by curiosity more than anything else, by Bafflement, I became a learner before I became a teacher. And then, of course, teaching. Rightly. Understood becomes a way to extend the learning journey.
[00:13:45.850] - Speaker 2
Right. That's the way it's always been for me. So it's been like this kind of perfect feedback system.
[00:13:52.040] - Speaker 1
Feedback system. Yeah. What you said about teaching becomes the learning makes me think about something else that you wrote in this book about paradox, the paradox of teaching. And something that you wrote here about the knowledge I have gained from 30 years of teaching goes hand in hand with my sense of being a rank amateur at the start of each new class. Teaching always takes place at the crossroads of the person on the public. And if I want to teach well, I must learn to stand where these opposites intersect. So it feels like curiosity as well as holding paradox, are really important concepts to this idea of teaching.
[00:14:37.950] - Speaker 2
Yeah, very much so. And I think what's important about holding paradox, and just to clarify for anyone listening, a paradox is one of those statements where it sounds like you've uttered two opposites, but in fact, they are complementary truths. The great Nobel Prize winning scientist Neil Bohr, who made the Bohr model of the Adam B. O. Hr, once said something that I think really reveals the nature of paradox. He said the opposite of an ordinary fact is a lie, but the opposite of one great truth may be another great truth. And so paradox is a both and statement rather than either or. Life is full of very important eitheror distinctions, and not all opposites that we'd like to stick together, stick together naturally. But some do good example are we as human beings made for community. Absolutely. No question about it. We are communal creatures. Are we also made for solitude? Absolutely. Because there are many things in life that you just can't negotiate if you can't take that inward trip into solitude. When I talk with people about it, I liken it, too. The paradox is the body holds every moment of our lives, which is breathing in and breathing out.
[00:16:14.480] - Speaker 2
We don't think of those as opposites.
[00:16:16.650] - Speaker 1
We don't it's both.
[00:16:17.680] - Speaker 2
And because together they sustain life, and that's what paradoxes do. And to break any of those great paradoxes, like saying I think I'll do community instead of solitude for the rest of my life or vice versa, is to break the flow of life energy, it would kind of be like me saying right now, you know what, Laura? I think I'm basically a breathing out kind of guy. So that's what I'm going to do.
[00:16:42.710] - Speaker 1
For the rest of the week. Good luck with that.
[00:16:48.840] - Speaker 2
I did that. I'm on the floor pretty quickly here. So, yeah, paradox is teaching is filled with paradoxes broader than paradox. It's filled with the need to learn how to hold tensions creatively so that a teacher and a student can easily get into an impasse around the student not wanting his or her fundamental beliefs about this or that to be changed by the information that the teacher is providing or the argument the teacher is making. If you try to deal with that through the imposition of power, by God, this is the way it is. And you better get it straight. You're just going to reinforce the false belief if you try to deal with it by saying, well, whatever. One truth for you, another truth for me doesn't matter. That obviously leads to bad places, too. But if you can hold that tension creatively and keep inviting, honestly invite the student into a continued exploration of this force field that you create by holding questions in a particular way that's when learning might occur and you get buy in from the students rather than resistance.
[00:18:20.410] - Speaker 1
Yeah. So it sounds like you're talking about being boldly, curious, holding paradox, living in our own truth so that we can nurture our students truth, and holding that tension that those are all ways that teachers can be. Could I say more? Maybe this is the courage to teach, right? Maybe this is the courageousness of well.
[00:18:49.440] - Speaker 2
I think it is, because if you do all of that, others can look in on what you're doing and say you're not doing your job. Your job is to get them to sit down, shut up, memorize, learn the information, and learn. But all the research shows that that's not learning at all or that it gets learned long enough to pass the test. But then for the rest of that student's life, that information is gone and there's no real interest in learning. I'd toss one more concept into that mix of who you need to be as a teacher, I believe and what I'd like to transmit to my students. And that's the Buddhist concept of beginner's mind. I love the notion of beginner's mind because what it means is you hold your prior knowledge and your assumptions loosely. You don't deny them, you don't deny that careful inquiry, disciplined, rigorous inquiry into a field has come up with this or that conclusion. But it's always the conclusion of the moment. There is no field in the curriculum where the conclusions of 30 years ago are the same as they are today, whether it's literature, physics or sociology, political science, whatever.
[00:20:26.690] - Speaker 2
Inquiry is an ongoing process, and it's affected by all kinds of things, including who is included in the circle. It was a long time in our society, sadly, when people of color and women were excluded from the circle of inquiry. But as they came in and started to make a claim on the learning enterprise, new things were seen. The teaching of US history became or should become very different when looked at through these other lenses than it was when I was in grade school 70 years ago. So beginner's mind is the ability to say, well, I think I know what this is all about, but maybe I don't. It's a way of talking about the humility that must be cultivated to really learn and to really teach. And that's always a risk. Certainly in higher education, unfortunately, what sometimes gets cultivated is a kind of arrogance of knowledge, like, hey, I'm the expert here, so sit down and shut up. That's what I get paid for. But again, in terms of teaching or anything else that a person wants to do with his or her knowledge, that's not a good way to go in. It shuts more doors than it opens.
[00:21:56.640] - Speaker 2
And I think learning is about opening doors. And just one more thing. There's a very important distinction between authority, which you mentioned earlier as part of my vocabulary, authority and power. So power is the imposition of control from the top down. I'm the guy with the PhD. I'm the guy who hands out the grades. So I'm going to get you to sit down, shut up and memorize, because you're all interested in getting a good grade, and that's the way you're going to get one from me, just by rote. Authority is power that's granted to you by people because they find you credible and compelling. I have no interest in having power over people. I have an interest in holding this whole thing in a way that authorizes everybody, that authorizes every voice in the room. And that's tricky. That's like choreographing a big, complicated dance to fast moving music. But it can be due on as you learn your steps over time.
[00:23:18.240] - Speaker 1
Yeah. And one of the reasons I chose that is because of the word authority, because I think that does sometimes become conflated with power and really, when you say you want to authorize, that helps me to understand that through your reclaiming your identity and integrity, your sense of vocation, you are helping to authorize your students to seek and hold that same truth.
[00:23:52.220] - Speaker 2
Yeah, absolutely. If we think about it just in terms of our everyday lives, if we're face to face with a person who's phoning it in or reading it from a script, we'd be fools to buy in because the signals that person is getting are coming from another planet, the sales manager or the curriculum director or whoever wound this person up and set them in motion with these marching orders. But if we're with a person who seems to be authoring his or her own voice, his or her own insights, if I am authoring my responses to your questions in a kind of face to face, spontaneous way, rather than picking up a book or a piece of paper here and reading them off a script, it's just a different vibe. And we know the difference, humanly.
[00:24:50.840] - Speaker 1
Yeah, we do. And I also wanted to just pick up on what you said about that beginner's mind, because that idea that you may have 30 years of teaching or you may have a PhD, you may be an expert. But coming in with that beginner's mind and thinking of yourself as a rank amateur at the start of each class, that humility, I think, is important to continue to open us up to our curiosity and to our following those threads of bafflement so that we're constantly enriching our own personal and professional selves. And this really rings so true to me now when I think about the landscape in which we are operating around reading instruction and looking at the growth, the exponential growth of what we know about the acquisition of reading and how we can't be doing things the same way we've done them for 30 years. We have to continue to grow and learn and keep that beginner's mind and keep that humility and that openness so that we can unfold new ideas into our practice. And I think that's one of the things that we're really striving to do right now.
[00:26:04.950] - Speaker 2
Yeah. That's the way advances in every field have happened, not just the humanities, not just pedagogy, but subatomic physics. It's always the person who says, wait a minute, there's another way to look at this.
[00:26:20.830] - Speaker 1
Yeah, right. What advice would you give or what wisdom do you have to share around how teachers can continue to tap into this courage that we've talked about day in and day out as they go about the work of teaching?
[00:26:38.490] - Speaker 2
Well, you know, I think I would do teachers a disservice if I didn't first say that's a really complicated and challenging question in our time, because as most thoughtful people know, our educational institutions are themselves getting signals from another planet about what they should need to do. The decisionmaking, the public policy decision making around. Education has very rarely involved having a teacher or two at the table when those decisions are made. And so they're often made by people who really don't know about education or really aren't tuned into the needs of students and the people who teach them, but instead are tuned in to what will gain them votes and make them look good with their base. And sadly and this is a sad but dominant fact of American life, a lot of problems that teachers have nothing to do with creating teachers get scapegoated for in relation to, let's say, bad educational outcomes, which are rooted in poverty and in food insufficiency among kids in a quarter of American families, and them showing up without breakfast in their stomachs, barely able to stay awake, let alone learn. And so public education teachers have become the scapegoats for politicians, the public and the press on way too many occasions.
[00:28:32.990] - Speaker 2
So the first thing I have to say about how you keep your spirit alive is that unless you're in a really good school where the leaders are doing what they ought to do for you, which is to run interference against all of that stuff as if they were the offensive line, clearing the field.
[00:28:54.990] - Speaker 1
For you to do your thing right.
[00:28:58.810] - Speaker 2
As well as you can unless you're in a school like that. I think we have to cultivate our teachers have to cultivate teacher leadership among themselves. And that means coming together in effective modes of organization that allow teachers to press up against the deforming pressures that come from administration and from outside the school that might sort of strangle their best practices in teaching. And there are stories, as you know, teachers who have done that where they suddenly find themselves in a situation where the results on standardized test, high stakes testing get used to determine who gets merit to pay and who gets docked. Teachers have come together and said, no, that's not going to work with us, because whatever happens here, we're going to pool everything and then distribute it evenly among ourselves so you can stop playing that little game. We are the resistance.
[00:30:10.090] - Speaker 1
Yeah, right.
[00:30:11.150] - Speaker 2
This is what democracy looks like.
[00:30:13.400] - Speaker 1
Sure.
[00:30:13.880] - Speaker 2
So there's one step involved in doing that with administrators, with school boards, with parent teacher associations, and being politically savvy. I've written about a belief I have that all forms of professional education should include a component of learning, some of the tools of a community organizer, because it's an effective model for contributing to positive change in your institution. So I think in addition to that, then we need to find ways to help teachers take heart in a profession which they entered with great heart. Most of them, they didn't do it because they thought it would be a road to wealth and Fame. They did it because they care about kids and they care about learning and they care about the future of the society. And then that gets stomped on as time goes by with these institutional conditions. And so the question becomes, how do we help teachers take heart again so they can give heart to their students, which I think is what good teaching is ultimately all about. And that, too, is a big subject, but I can reduce it to a quick sound bite. I guess this is why I founded almost 30 years ago, the center for Courage and Renewal.
[00:31:48.810] - Speaker 2
Yes. And which now has over 300 facilitators all across this country and other places around the world, where we gather groups of teachers in retreat not just once, but over a period of time, and help them build a community of inspiration and encouragement and even the sharpening of skills, but especially of recommitment to teaching, which teachers can only do for each other and within themselves in that kind of community. We can provide the center for Courage and Renewal can provide the space, the safe spaces in which they can have honest conversations and work with sustaining the viability of their professional commitments. But only they can do the work in those spaces that results in increased teacher retention and morale. And we've seen that happen in our programs over the past 30 years. I wrote a whole book about the nature of those programs, which are based in what we call a circle of trust of maybe 25 teachers. And the name of that book is a hidden wholeness. And so if anybody is interested in the kind of nuts and bolts of that circle of trust process and all that surrounds it, that's where you'll find it.
[00:33:35.950] - Speaker 1
Thank you so much for bringing up the center for Courage and Renewals. I definitely wanted to talk about that today and let our listeners know more about that. And actually, in the show notes, I'll have all your books so that they can know where to go to look for your books, but also I'll make sure that they can be connected to the center for Courage and Renewal. And I mentioned in the intro that you're a founding member and a facilitator. And, you know, I don't know if you remember, but I actually had the pleasure of meeting you when you spoke at an event that I had organized for teachers. And then shortly after that, I had the pleasure of going through one of the center for Cursion renewal retreats in which you were the facilitator. And this was a deeply personal experience for me, a growing experience for me. I would say it was also a master class in how to convene and how to facilitate conversations. And you use the word space. I think that's one of the beauties of the Courage and Renewal model is the spaciousness that it affords, let's say, a group of teachers who are coming for a Courage and Renewal retreat for teachers.
[00:34:48.930] - Speaker 1
And that's something that I think the breathing space, the space to reflect, the space to share the space to, as you mentioned, intersect personal with community. All of those things happen in a retreat at the center for Courage and Renewal. And so I definitely want our listeners to know about that and how that's so important in a teacher's life is that sense of personal reflection, that sense of community, and that helps us connect. I love the term that I've learned from you, Parker, which is connect soul enroll, connecting our soul enroll. And I know that really came to light for me when I read this book of yours, Let Your Life Speak. And I read this book when I was kind of entering into my, what shall I say, middle years. And I think that's kind of when we start tuning into this idea of alignment, maybe, and that whole idea that connecting soul enroll is really important.
[00:35:57.360] - Speaker 2
Yeah. Well, thank you. Lovely words to hear. I mean, I'm laughing a little bit because I'm headed toward the middle of my 80s. So I guess that's the far side of what most people think of is the middle years. But of course, I remember Laura, and so grateful for your testimony. This work has been so rewarding for me. And it's always wonderful to hear that it's been rewarding for other people like you. But for me, it's been huge learning about the conditions under which other folks teach and huge encouragement to see teachers like you rise to their own challenges in the presence and with the help of other people. So for folks who maybe wrestle with the word soul, I love this notion that we help people connect soul and role. And soul is a word that nobody knows what it really means, and it cognates of many sorts and many traditions. But we sometimes say help people bring their identity and integrity more fully into their personal, vocational, professional and public lives. It can serve anyone in any walk of life. And we now work, as you know, with many different professions, including medicine and nonprofit leadership, and several clergy as well.
[00:37:35.380] - Speaker 2
Yeah. Religion and philanthropy. So it kind of addresses a very fundamental human need. And I think what brings a lot of people there is pain. When you get into the leading edge of your middle years and you've kind of run out of that useful energy and you're wondering why you're not feeling right about your life, you realize that there is this chasm between what you really want and need and hope for inwardly and what you're doing outwardly. A divided life. Yes. So then for some people who really feel that pain, the Hunt is on for some way to bring the inner and outer in themselves into deeper congruence. And that's I think what the center for Courage and Renewal helps people do through a process that by this time is, I would say, time tested and proof. It's so different from the normal, I don't know, staff development program where somebody stands up either cheerleads for the profession or tells you what you're doing wrong and how to get it right and then flips through the workbook. Now let's turn the page now and you'll learn the next thing you need to do. Well, the truth is that kind of thing has never helped me because people are so different.
[00:39:15.290] - Speaker 2
Situations are so different. Human life is just like all biological life is all about adaptation, not about a cookie cutter approach to anything. And so those kind of training models or cheerleading models just, I think, alienate a lot of people and give methods a bad name, even though methods are useful depending on what you're doing and what works with your identity and integrity. I've seen good teaching, and this is, of course, part of the heart of the courage to teach. I've seen good teaching in so many forms. I mean, there are people who are brilliant lectures who can use that mode. They're dramaturgists is what they are. They put on a kind of one woman or one man fee class, and they draw you into learning. There are other people who do it all Socratic style, dialogical style. And then there's the flipped class where you don't use the class to instruct you get the reading done outside and you use the class to experiment and actually work with the subject matter in question. So it's really hard, I think, to make the case that there is somehow a template that fits all good teaching.
[00:40:44.690] - Speaker 2
There just isn't that defies experience. But there's this other way of growing people from the inside out.
[00:40:54.820] - Speaker 1
Right. Yeah. And I think one thing. Yes. Thank thank you you for that. And I think one thing that you said, too, that I want to capitalize on is community and how we have found in our work at the Reading League that the community of educators who all are striving to know more and do better know more about how do children develop as readers? What is the process of learning to read? How can I best instruct to that process? And how can I put aside some of these very old ideas that have been existing for 30, 40 years? How can I put that aside and make space for this newness how can I look at my role as a teacher with a beginner's mind, and how can I bring this new learning to fruition to the betterment of my children? And having that's a heavy lift and having community around that, I think, is something that we've been trying very hard to do, and we find it's just incredibly important.
[00:42:01.180] - Speaker 2
Yeah. And as you know, Laura, and there's more about this in that book, a hidden wholeness what we do with community. We try to hold the paradox of community and solitude in our circle of Trustworth.
[00:42:16.730] - Speaker 1
Yes.
[00:42:17.730] - Speaker 2
And so the community that you're with in a Courage to Teach program is not a community that listens to you and then tells you what to do. In fact, that's prohibited. Instead, it's a community that learns to listen deeply and then to hear you into deeper speech by asking you honest, open questions. So if a teacher expresses a pain, people don't just jump on that and say, oh, poor deer, poor deer, I'm so sorry. Or here's what I did when I was in pain. I'm sure it'll work for you because you really can't get inside another person that way. But what you can do is hold them with honest, open questions that help them go deeper into what they're wanting to say about all this on their terms, in their own way and in their own time. And there's a high art to asking honest, open questions, because educated people especially, are accustomed to asking questions that are little speeches in disguise. So the example I always use is if somebody says, I'm in really deep pain about X, Y or Z, it's not an honest, open question to ask. Have you thought about seeing a therapist?
[00:43:36.940] - Speaker 2
Think you ought to see a therapist? Yes. You're saying that, oh, my gosh, I now feel responsible for saving you, and I haven't got the foggiest idea of save I've seen. So let me check this one off by saying, have you thought about seeing a therapist? That's taboo in our groups and our facilitators just stopped that in their tracks. But if you say, if you listen to the person's story and after some silent receptivity, you say you used the word angry at this particular moment, could you tell us more about that feeling and what evoked it in you that helps a person think into or feel into what it is they're trying to get out. And as people get their own stuff out, rather than just letting it rattle around their heads and hearts, they often have self curative powers over time.
[00:44:48.950] - Speaker 1
You know, I had the privilege, I guess, of going through that Clearness Committee, and it really was to be deeply listened to is such a gift. And to learn those and then within the Centre's work to learn those open questions that we can bring to people. That's a gift as well.
[00:45:17.760] - Speaker 2
It is, yeah. Lots of people have said that. They've said that in the Clearness Committee is another concept in our work that's spelled out in a hidden wholeness. But people have said, wow, I got a lot out of this. The single thing I may be valued the most is that Clearness Committee experience and learning how to hold another person in that totally focused space without imposing my agenda or holding the arrogant assumption that I can or should to save this person.
[00:45:55.660] - Speaker 1
Right.
[00:45:56.140] - Speaker 2
As soon as we let go of that, we free everyone to let the human thing happen. Yes.
[00:46:04.780] - Speaker 1
I apologize. I think I said clearance. I meant clearness.
[00:46:10.290] - Speaker 2
Clearance is what Macy's does, correct?
[00:46:12.880] - Speaker 1
Yeah. Somehow I got that. It's so easy to mix those two things up. Right?
[00:46:17.530] - Speaker 2
It is. I do it all the time.
[00:46:20.250] - Speaker 1
I wanted to talk to you about some of your current work because I'm an avid listener to your podcast, The Growing Edge with Kerry Newcomer. So what entice you to do a podcast and are you enjoying that?
[00:46:32.490] - Speaker 2
I'm delighted you're doing one, and I really enjoy being your guest. I'm honored. Yeah. So about ten years ago, I met this remarkable singer songwriter named Carrie Newcomer. She actually emailed me and said she'd read one of my books. I think it was Let Your Life Speak, and it spoke to her, and she wondered if I would write the liner notes for her next album, since we don't really have albums. Albums. Yeah, we have MP3 albums used to come out either old fashioned records or CDs by somebody about these songs in this singer. And so I was delighted. I loved her music before she ever contacted me. I wrote the liner notes and we started a conversation which is really across disciplinary lines as well as lines of age. I'm significantly older than Carrie. For me, as a word person, connecting creatively with a professional and very gifted musician has been a wonderful kind of stretching and opening experience on the creative side of my life, like any partnership is across lines of creative difference. And so, Carrie, I write some poetry, but Carrie is a poet at heart. She is writing songs, lyrics and poems all the time.
[00:48:23.390] - Speaker 2
And so we got to talk in one day and decided to go with a quote from a black theologian named Howard Thurman, who was actually a very important mentor and guide to Martin Luther King Jr. And a lot of other people in the civil rights movement of the mid 20th century. King always carried two books with him. One was the Bible, and the other was a book called Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman, which was obviously a book about twelve generations of slavery in this country and a liberation theology that responded to that which King was embodying in his own life. So Howard Thurman, who was born in the late 1900s in Florida, whose grandmother, whom he knew was a former slave, he has many luminous passages in his writing. But one of them is about how things are dying around us all the time. And all we need to do is look around us now, of course, in the middle of a pandemic and in the middle of what has been a lot of political chaos, some of it deadly to see that things are dying around us all the time. But Thurman says the hope is always found in the growing edge.
[00:50:01.250] - Speaker 2
He says a birth that's nature's answer to all this death, but not just the birth of a child, the birth of an idea, the birth of a hope, the birth of a vision, the birth into a new life of a person who's been defeated by despair and is now ready to contribute to the human possibility. And so he says, look always to the Growing Edge. So we thought, okay, there's our theme. We're going to establish a site called The Growing Edge that has a program with several dimensions. Before Cobat 19, we were doing face to face retreats, and we will get back to that as soon as we can. We do a newsletter every month, and every month we do a podcast on a topic of the times, really? And it's a podcast that almost always has a kind of inner life dimension to it, but it sometimes has a lot of gravitas in it, but it often usually has a lot of humor in it and sometimes a real lightness. I think our last podcast was with a wonderful guy named Ross Gay, who a black poet and essayist of great skill and real genius who wrote The Book of Delights, which is about how important it is to Mark those moments of delight in one's average day less today slip on by.
[00:51:43.720] - Speaker 2
So it's a wide range of topics. But we do have our website. You can Google The Growing Edge, maybe toss in Palmer or Newcomer, or you can go to Www.newcomerpalmer.com, so it's Newcomer, Newcomerpalmer.com and see what we're up to.
[00:52:12.810] - Speaker 1
Right. And I'll definitely put that in the show notes for people as well as The Book of Delights so that people can reference that good. I was going to ask you about the title. So that does make perfect sense, right? How can we stay on that Growing Edge?
[00:52:29.010] - Speaker 2
Yeah, I think it's so important. And again, we live in an era where it's just easy, I think, to fall into the shadow of death because it's all around us all the time. There's no American whose life is not touched by this pandemic in some way or another. And obviously, in such times, there's a tendency towards despair. But Thurman is right. There's always a growing edge, and we can reach for it. And I have to say there are some people who could say that, and I'd say, right, thank you for the encouragement, but I'm not sure they know what they're talking about. But when those words are uttered by a man who knew a grandmother who was a former slave, whose own life story had been deeply touched by twelve generations of servitude and oppression, and who found his way through all that into a teaching role and in his case, a Ministry, he was at Boston University as chaplain and professor of religion and then wrote books that influenced such people as Martin Luther King Jr. And many others in the mid 20th century civil rights movement. When those words come from a man like that or a woman like that, I have to listen.
[00:54:06.010] - Speaker 2
I have to suspend disbelief. I grant them authority in my life. And I say, Parker, if Howard Thurman can do it, if Rosa Parks can do it. If Fanny Lou Hamer can do it. If Martin Luther King, Jr. Can do it, surely you can do your own version of that on your own human scale. It kind of robs a person of excuses for lying down and giving up.
[00:54:40.850] - Speaker 1
Yeah, very beautiful. Well said, Parker. Yes. Yes. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed part one of this podcast with the wise and wonderful Parker Palmer. Please be sure to tune into part two where we will discuss the reading wars, the importance of healthy diets, dialogue community, listening well and entering into conversation with a beginner's mind. You don't want to miss it and thank you for tuning in. Thank you for being part of our teaching, reading and learning community. Thank you.