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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. Welcome to part two of my discussion with the esteemed Parker Palmer, where Parker shares his wisdom, his many lessons learned, how important it is to stay on our growing edge, and the gift of gratitude. What a gift it is to bring you this episode. Enjoy. I listened to the last episode from 2020, and you and Carrie spoke really eloquently about the national discourse and some of the divisive rhetoric. And it made me kind of think about in the educational community, especially in the community in which I work. We've been kind of wrestling off and on with this concept of the reading wars, and they've kind of gone on now for a couple of generations.
[00:01:54.310] - Speaker 1
So I may have mentioned this to you in an email, but I'm involved with a group of six other people in this kind of literacy community, and we've nicknamed ourselves the Peace Knicks because we just came together kind of about a year and a half ago, just United in this common interest of how do we neutralize the rhetoric specifically around these reading wars, how do we advance conversations that would allow us to really listen and really focus on our shared goal? All of us want children to learn to read. All of us want to do our jobs as teachers. And I actually introduced the group to your book, Healing the Heart of Democracy, and we've talked quite a bit about these habits of the heart that you share in this book. And if it's with your permission, I'd like to share those with our listeners.
[00:02:49.460] - Speaker 2
You bet.
[00:02:50.600] - Speaker 1
These habits of hearts are that. Number one, we understand we're all in this together. Number two, we develop an appreciation of the value of otherness. Number three, we cultivate the ability to hold tension in life giving ways. Four, we generate a sense of personal voice and agency. And fifth, we strengthen our capacity to create community. And I think about, you know, all of those habits, I think, apply to so much of what we're trying to do when we engage with the other in any way. And in your podcast, that the last one of 2020, you talked quite a bit about that. How do we bring people to the table and with that beginner's mind, with that humility, with that appreciation for the other to have conversations of deeper compassion. And I wonder if you could maybe talk a little bit more about that.
[00:03:57.200] - Speaker 2
Yeah. Well, I'm glad. Thank you. I love the notion of your group, because that's how this that's how this happens. You know, that's how all change happens. Wendell Berry once said about the big crisis called the ecological crisis, but you could say this about any big crisis. He says everybody goes around looking for one big solution to one big problem. But he said that's not how big problems have ever been solved. It's always been one big problem and a million, million little solution. Right. So those groups, the kind of group you brought together, is a good example of that. So the first thing I want to say, which of course, you know and understand, but just to be clear with others, is that those habits of the heart, I think, are inarguably important. If we want a participatory democracy in the best of all possible worlds, they have to begin early. So those habits of the heart are things that should be taught in school, not just as maxims to be memorized, but as actions to be engaged in. So what does it mean in a classroom, even with little kids, to say to inculcate the habit, we're all in this together.
[00:05:31.110] - Speaker 2
I know that there are teachers who are able to do that, but there are also teachers who, for a variety of reasons, some very understandable, don't think about their work that way. And so I think it's important to think about your work that way. What does it mean in a classroom as kids age, and some of these things have to wait for age appropriateness. Right. To then teach an appreciation of the value of otherness, or to teach creative tension holding, or to teach voice and agency, or to teach ways of building community rather than just being in a community that someone else has built. And I think I know that all of these are teachable habits. We teach other habits. We teach competitive individualism really well. We might want to stop and think about that. We teach a fear of the other really? Well, we might want to stop and think about that. Who knows? I'm just saying. But it has to do a lot with what educators talk about as the hidden curriculum, which is about roles, rules and relationships, and what gets played out in the doing of the thing itself. So the curriculum isn't always what's on the surface in the content of the lesson.
[00:07:00.340] - Speaker 2
It's also how we act out the learning of that content in the classroom. Relationships or the absence of creative relationships. Habits are always being taught in the hidden curriculum. The example I've often used in universities, I think, is a good one that you can teach a course on what's required of citizens in a democracy. Right. You can use good content. You can use all the right ideas and references. But if you teach that in a top down manner, sit down, shut up. Here's the deal. Memorize it. Feed it back to me on the test. You are not teaching the habits of the heart that make them citizens of a democracy. You are instead teaching them to be servile students in an authoritarian society because that's what it is in the classroom, and that people learn probably more at that level about these kinds of things than they do from the content of the words being spoken. There's so many depths to this that I think apply to educators of all sorts. And I think, again, I guess I'd loop back, Laura, to some of the things we talked about early in this conversation about humility, for example, beginner's mind curiosity, honest, open questions rather than advices and statements.
[00:08:50.190] - Speaker 2
These are the things that go into listening well to people who differ from us and creating the possibility of forward movement, in your case, around what has been a contentious battle where everyone shares the desire for kids to learn to read. It's not that the goal is different, but there are these kind of really sort of vicious sometimes debates over who's right and who's wrong and who's gumming up the works and who's clearing the way. But let's reboot and start thinking about the fact that we have a common goal and then see where we can go from there by being curious inquisitive about where other people are coming from. Somebody asked me once a question, I love questions because they make me think new thoughts. We were talking about these five habits of the heart at some conference or another that I attended and spoke, and somebody said in this big audience, they said, well, if you had to boil this down to just a couple of things, Parker, what would you say? What would you say about what are the core habits of the heart behind the habits of the heart? Right.
[00:10:24.130] - Speaker 1
I can't wait to hear what you said.
[00:10:27.090] - Speaker 2
And I said, okay, if I had to boil it down to two words, they would be these, which just came to me in the moment. Chutzpah and humility. Boom, bingo.
[00:10:42.270] - Speaker 1
Might drop, Parker.
[00:10:43.630] - Speaker 2
Mike, drop right there. I wish you all hooks.
[00:10:49.050] - Speaker 1
Thank you, Hootspa.
[00:10:50.710] - Speaker 2
Of course, being that great Yiddish word, that a language that has so many great words that says, have the moxie to speak your truth. Right. To know you have a voice. Have the chutzpah to tell people how it looks from your point of view. Don't just lie back and try to avoid being unpopular or something. Have foot spots. We need everybody to speak and at the same time simultaneously in paradox with that. Have humility, have humility. So that the inner attitude has to be. I think I know the answer to this. I think I know the right position on this. But you know what? I've been wrong before. Maybe I'm wrong again. And humility. Humility always involves looking at yourself honestly and saying, you know what? I haven't always been right in life, even when I was dead certain that I was right. And so maybe this is another such moment, and I need to, after speaking my truth with boldness and clarity, not yelling or screaming, just laying it out there, I then need to back off and say, okay, let me hear how this looks from your point of view. And then I need to listen.
[00:12:25.050] - Speaker 2
One of my favorite parts, and I'm sure this is true for you, Laura, of the Circle of Trust process. Is that because we are forbidden to fix, save, advise, or correct each other, we can't do any of that. As long as the retreat series lasts, the burden is lifted. That has us listening in what I think of as a preoccupied or even adversarial way in normal conversation where we think we have to fix advice, save, or correct each other. Like, that's why we're here, right? We listen, but always with a parallel track running in our minds in which we're saying, okay, what am I going to say to this? How can I fend off this attack? Or how can I fix this problem? And that just distracts us from the simple job of listening. And if we listen, we're going to understand more. But if we've got this second track running, it gets muddled and it gets messy, and it sometimes moves somewhere in the direction of violence. Not a fist fight, but a combative stance adversarial listening. But if we're relieved of all those burdens, I don't have to fix saveadvisor correctly. I have no idea how to fix save advisor correctly.
[00:13:58.550] - Speaker 2
So lose that notion. It's so you don't have to be a big time philosopher to know it's just silly to think we can fix save adviser, correct each other. If we can rid ourselves of that burden, then we do the listening that gives us the data we need. And for me, Laura, that statement is very resonant with a lot of my journey as a teacher. I used to think like everybody thinks when they start, because this is how we were taught. That when I walked into a classroom, my job was to start delivering information, fill the 50 minutes, fill their notebooks, and do it again the next time, test them on it at the end of the term. But that was numbing for me. Mind numbing, heart numbing became painful because I clearly was not connecting and they weren't doing as much learning as I knew they were capable of. And so I started to realize that if I could learn to listen deeply to what they say in response to a prompt I make, they would provide me with everything I needed to know to take the next step in teaching them whatever this particular session was meant to be about.
[00:15:33.810] - Speaker 2
And as I listened, things would come up inside of me that didn't even factor into my preparation for this lesson. Because the longer you live, if you pay attention, the more you know and you have to trust that it's there to be retrieved when you need it, but it's more likely to be retrievable if you're listening and not trying to anticipate what you next need to grab hold of in order to respond. I walked into a University. I was a guest. I guested for a session at a big University, actually, University of Wisconsin Madison here where I live. And the professor warned me in advance, now prepare a good lecture, because that's what these students are used to. 50 minutes of lecturing. And I said, well, we'll see. And I walked in and I said to the students, I know you're used to a 50 minutes lecture, but here's a little heads up. I'm going to talk for about 15 minutes. That's it for my talk. And I'm going to say things that I hope you find interesting and challenging. And the rest of this class, which I think we all would like to be fruitful rather than a waste of time, is going to depend on what you have to say after I do my 15 minutes.
[00:17:04.930] - Speaker 2
And so questions, comments of any sort are welcome, but that's what we're going to build the session on. So I talked for 15 minutes. I think it was a pretty good 15 minutes. And then I said, okay, floor is yours. And a lot of teachers know what happens then. You just sit there looking at blank faces in a classroom that's as silent as the tomb. I didn't say anything. I just smiled at them and got relaxed and leaned up against the blackboard or whatever it was in this big sloping room with chairs. There's maybe 100 students in it. And finally, it's always one brave soul in the back. And it's usually a woman who kind of raises her hand. Yes, please. What do you have to say? And she said something and I received it not only with respect, but with gratitude, because otherwise we're all dying on the vine there. Thank you is real. And we started to build and the class just took off and it sang. So what you just said reminded me that this professor, when we walked out, she walked me out to take me to my car. And she said, wow, that was amazing.
[00:18:33.750] - Speaker 2
And she said, I noticed you used a technique that I hadn't thought of since I'm allergic to techniques. What was it? I have no idea. She said, well, whenever somebody would raise their hand, you'd say please. And whenever somebody said something, you'd say thank you. I said, that was the technique. That was me begging for help and expressing gratitude that you just didn't save my bacon. Right? So there's no technique there. It's just a human thing of help.
[00:19:09.810] - Speaker 1
And gratitude, pleading and gratitude.
[00:19:14.560] - Speaker 2
Exactly. That's all it takes that actually builds relationship, as we all know in our personal lives, if we go to somebody and say, you know what? I need your help, that's a compliment. And if we then say thank you so much, that really was helpful. That's a human exchange, and it deepens a relationship.
[00:19:37.470] - Speaker 1
Yeah. I love all this. When you were talking about a way of listening that allows you to be fully present as opposed to using that time to formulate what you're going to say next, I used to refer to that as deep listening, but really it's just good listening. In other words, there shouldn't be a differentiator between listening and deep listening.
[00:20:04.540] - Speaker 2
Right.
[00:20:04.900] - Speaker 1
It should just be good listening.
[00:20:07.010] - Speaker 2
Yeah. Listening with your whole mind, your whole attention, whatever. Yeah, exactly. That's good listening.
[00:20:15.450] - Speaker 1
Yeah. I can't wait for the peace mix to hear this. And for us to talk about the intersection of humility in Chutzpah, that pretty much sums it all up.
[00:20:28.570] - Speaker 2
I'm grateful. You know, these things come just from.
[00:20:31.280] - Speaker 1
Out of the blue.
[00:20:32.010] - Speaker 2
And you say thank you.
[00:20:34.810] - Speaker 1
Yes, please.
[00:20:36.490] - Speaker 2
Thank you. Live by it in any moment. I'm asking, so what hutsba is required here and what humility demanded of me.
[00:20:49.620] - Speaker 1
I love that because one thing I think we have found in this perpetuation of this kind of reading wars is that we can't just keep talking research at each other. We can't just keep talking facts at each other. It's not working. Otherwise things would have changed over 40 years. Right. So how do we create those habits of the heart that allow us to be present and really listen with a humble heart in order to realize we all have the same goal? And how are we listening to one another so that we can build a bridge that allows us to work together in the educational community toward that goal?
[00:21:36.170] - Speaker 2
Exactly.
[00:21:36.900] - Speaker 1
Yeah. And that kind of makes me think about mentorship, too. And I know that you've mentioned that actually a couple of times in our conversation. I know that's been very important to you. I read about you being a mentor to a founder of an organization called Breathe for Change. And so I just wondered if you could just talk for a minute about the importance of mentorship and how important that is for teachers to have mentors.
[00:22:01.190] - Speaker 2
Yes. In my life it's been absolutely critical. And I was very lucky in my early years in College and in grad school and in my early professional years to have older mentors who they very much helped my work along. And this was usually in collegial relationships. So I was invited into partnerships of various sorts. And in this case, it was all older men who wanted to help me develop whatever gifts had. And they changed my life eternally grateful to them. In College, as a first generation College students at a competitive College, I always felt out of place, and I felt out of place at Berkeley in graduate school, I was kind of running scared as what I can imagine to be a pseudo intellectual or flying false colors, the kind of feeling of fraudulence that I think a lot of academics are accustomed to or have known in their own lives. The thought is if they ever find out how dumb I am, they'll kick me out of here. I've gotten away with it so far, but surely I can't get away with it for much longer. And I never imagined myself writing a book.
[00:23:44.780] - Speaker 2
And indeed, the first book was an accidental book, which kind of got me started. That's another story that we don't need to tell here. But the mentor, I think, is, first of all, a friend who understands that there's a particular kind of relationship here of an older person, the way I'd put it, who saw more in me than I saw in myself. I think that's the key to mentorship. So just as there's good listening, there's good seeing. And if we look at a lot of younger people and I've done this over the years who don't see in themselves what I see in them, it's a joy and a privilege to have an opportunity to not just give them a Pep talk, but to invite them into a work that will evoke what I see and help them understand that there's more in them than they see often in this culture and in academic life. We get kind of abused, really, by the culture, and we run scared and we run with a sense of fraudulence, and we are blinded to the gifts that we really have. But the mentor comes along and says without saying it, I see something in you that I want to help bring into being, and then often does that by saying, as my mentor said to me, I'd like to bring you into this research that I'm doing, or I'd like to bring you into this project development that I'm doing.
[00:25:52.610] - Speaker 2
I'd like to get your point of view on this or that or whatever. So it wasn't just like a Pep talk. It was an invitation to share in the work, which itself evoked more of me. And it wasn't like falling off a log for me to do those things. I had to do my homework. I had to work hard, and I worked hard partly because I didn't want to let down this person who had taken an interest in me. It wasn't about financial gain or professional advancement. It was just that there are some relationships that are so meaningful to you. You don't want to let the person down, and that's a big human motivation. So I think mentoring is an Interestingly, simple but complicated formula where all of those factors are at play and it gets recognized for what it is by the people involved. So most of my mentors, these older men, were people that I stayed connected with at the end of their lives. And as I said earlier, I'm still connecting with 195 because these are real relationships and not some kind of utilitarian exchange.
[00:27:23.070] - Speaker 1
So do you think that being well, mentored yourself has contributed to your placing importance in your life on being a mentor.
[00:27:32.730] - Speaker 2
Yeah. There's actually a very distinct point in my life, Laura. It's a good question. I remember the point in my life where no new mentor had come along for a while, like five or six years, because every time I stepped into the casino, some coins came in, got you sometimes hit the jackpot, and this stopped happening. I was treating it like my run of luck in Las Vegas has ended. And then I thought, oh, that's a dumb way to look at it, Parker. The message here is quite clear. It is now your turn at age 50 or so, 45, whatever, to turn around and look for those young people coming up behind you on your life journey and extend to them the gift that was extended to you. And so I began actively to do that to keep my eyes open. And I've been very fortunate to have a number of those relationships, including with Elana Nanken, who founded Breeds for Change, who was a graduate student here in Madison and read something of mine and reached out to me and asked for a conversation. And I really liked her and her spirit and her vision for teachers a lot.
[00:28:58.870] - Speaker 2
And it's her testimony that I was helpful to her in developing that project in its early stages. It's grown way beyond anything I imagined or I think she imagined at the time. But it's just a joy to do mentoring of that sort, where eventually the fruits of the mentoring go out to other people and in Ilana's case, a lot of other people in very lifegiving ways. So I just treasure a journey, the journey I've had where older people were so generous with me. And these are gifts of huge proportion in life. And there's only one way to pass a gift like that along. There's only one way to keep a gift like that alive and that's to pass it along to someone else, pay it forward, as they say. So it's been a joy to do that and continue to do that to this very day.
[00:30:05.270] - Speaker 1
I love that. And I agree. I think that you do come to that moment where all of a sudden mentors stop, because I'm experiencing that now, and I have been for quite a few years now. And I do think that's kind of the arc. I think it's part of the arc of our lives. And those things happen as a natural course of moving into the wisdom years. Let's maybe put it that way.
[00:30:32.610] - Speaker 2
Yeah, I absolutely think I agree with that complete. It's kind of an evolutionary arc. It's like the continuation of the species in some ways.
[00:30:41.930] - Speaker 1
And you write about that so Eloquently, in Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old, which I love very much. And I just love the way you speak very openly and candidly about this time of life. This book is to me. It's a very Frank look at aging, and I just wondered if you could share with our listeners some of the greatest lessons that you're continuing to learn in this chapter of life.
[00:31:09.050] - Speaker 2
Yeah. Well, thank you, Laura. That means a lot to me, because when people ask me, so what's your favorite book of the ten you've written? I've always had to say, well, the latest one, that's the update on where I am. I started writing that book, I think, when I got into my mid seventy s. And as I said, I'm almost 82 now, and the book has been so helpful to me. It's like I opened that book from time to time and say, oh, right, that's what you believe. How did you forget that? But it really codified some things that I'm glad I can return to. So the big picture for me on aging is not despair about the growing limits of time, energy, all of that. It's instead a sense that I'm truly one of the lucky ones on the planet. There are so many people who didn't have the privilege of getting to 82, and I never lose awareness of that. There's a deep sadness around the fact that around the world, the age of death is so much lower in some places, half of my life's time. And how could one possibly or complain about being 82?
[00:32:47.630] - Speaker 2
I understand that there are physical diminishments. I have some of those. There are mental diminishments. I have some of those. I don't multitask the way I used to. I'm at that point where I have an urgent need to come upstairs to retrieve something I need. And once I get up there, I forget why I came.
[00:33:09.010] - Speaker 1
Hey, I do that, too. And frankly, I don't think we're losing anything when we lose the ability to multitask. I think we're actually gaining when we lose the ability.
[00:33:17.290] - Speaker 2
I totally agree. That's the next blessing, the blessing of just saying, okay, just do one thing and do it well as well as you can. So there's that. And at the heart of that is kind of the cultivation of gratitude, which has become a very big part of my life. I'm sure there are things that slip by me these days, but I'm aware of much more that I have to be grateful for than I was in earlier years, where I was moving so fast that I didn't notice or value things to be grateful for. A quick example that actually means a lot to me is that in our backyard, right out our kitchen window, we have a lovely, lovely small Maple that is just glorious in the fall. And then when its leaves fall off, it's obviously just the bare frame, the skeleton of that tree. But this year, for the first time, I noticed in the late fall and early winter that that revealed this really interesting bark all up and down this tree. And that when the light was at a certain angle, which it was for several hours as the sun went through its arc after following the autumnal Equinox.
[00:34:49.830] - Speaker 2
That bark was just gorgeous. It glowed. It had variation in shadow and shape and form. It was like a sculpture. And it was just as beautiful as when it was fully leave. And there's a metaphor there for all kinds of things. The surface lesson is be grateful for this new kind of beauty, even though it's not the one that you had for three months prior to this. It's beautiful in its own way. And then there's the larger metaphor of yeah, so age strips you down. It takes some of the leaves away, but there can still be a lot of beauty there if you look at it from the right angle. So there's that. I think gratitude just permeates my life in ways that my life has never been without gratitude, except when I've been deeply depressed and you can't feel anything. But this is a new level. And then one of the kind of half stolen aphorisms or maxims in the book is old is just another word for nothing left to lose. So get out there and take some risks on behalf of the common good. Well, I really believe that in my political statements over the last four years, I've gotten out there and taken some risks on behalf of the common good, as I saw it.
[00:36:22.530] - Speaker 2
And not everybody has been real happy with me about that.
[00:36:27.910] - Speaker 1
But Parker, you've exercised your husband. It's been hudspa, and you've been on your growing edge. The growing edge never. It doesn't stop. It's not like all of a sudden you turn 80 and it's like I'm done with my growing edge.
[00:36:41.620] - Speaker 2
No way. No, it keeps growing. It keeps growing. And there's a lot of places we could go with that, but it does. It truly does. And there's another deep realization that came to me, actually, before I started aging consciously, which is that in the long run, it's really not going to matter to me what anybody else thought of me. Part of the developmental task is, I think, to claim your own right to own your own words and activities, author your own words and activities, and care mainly about whether they have integrity for you. Because if you're doing that step by step, day by day, this whole notion of other people's opinion just fades and you have a chance to show up in the world as who you really are rather than what you hope other people will think you are. Because really, there's no way for us to get inside each other's skin and figure out the whole puzzle of being human. We're inside our own skin, and our task is to feel more and more at home in that skin and more and more at home in the face of a very diverse and complicated Earth.
[00:38:17.110] - Speaker 2
I think those are two great human yearnings. So one thing that really comes to me has to do with mortality, which is a topic that's a little more in your grill when you get to my age than it was 40 years ago. And here's just a flat out fact. I can't imagine a sadder way to die than with a feeling in the last minutes of my life that I never showed up on this planet as who I really am. I can imagine painful ways to die, but I can't imagine a sadder way to die than with the sense that I wasted 80 plus years of life not showing up with my best approximation of fullness of self. Thomas Merton, one of my heroes, wrote a brilliant line once. He said, most people live lives of self impersonation, which I think is an astonishing insight. And I think the life task is to stop impersonating yourself and to be yourself, because we impersonate out of fear for who we really are. And we shouldn't have that fear. We are who we are. And self is the main gift we have to bring to the world. So anything we can do to care for true self, not ego self, not false self, but true self, we're eventually doing on behalf of other people, in service of other people, because that's really the only gift we've got to offer.
[00:40:04.370] - Speaker 2
And to blow that by trying to live in the reflected mirrors of other people's eyes just makes no sense at all. And it deprives the world of whatever gift we might have to offer. So these are things that come clear with age, and I think that the whole business of I got onto it, I think years ago, even maybe when I was in my late teens. This advice that's found in many wisdom traditions, which St. Benedict, the Benedictine monastic tradition, says daily keep your death before your eyes. And if you stop and think about it or just go ahead and do it, that's not morbid. If you daily keep your death before your eyes, you realize what a gift life is and you want to use it well, as long as you have it. And I'm grateful for that insight.
[00:41:11.490] - Speaker 1
Wonderful. Showing up as who you are is the greatest gift to the world.
[00:41:20.010] - Speaker 2
Yeah. That's really all we got.
[00:41:22.750] - Speaker 1
Right. As we kind of wrapped this up a guess, which I don't want to do, but I do want to hear about what are your hopes for the work you're doing now and actually for the work you've done, kind of. What are your hopes for all that?
[00:41:42.940] - Speaker 2
Yeah.
[00:41:44.230] - Speaker 1
And what are you working on now, Parker?
[00:41:46.990] - Speaker 2
I'd be glad. Thank you. I love this. And I, too, wish it could go on for a long time. I'm actually going to have to cut off in about five minutes.
[00:41:56.200] - Speaker 1
I was here. Okay.
[00:41:58.450] - Speaker 2
Which I regret. So maybe we can do it again. Laura. I'd love to. So what I'm doing right now and what was the other part?
[00:42:09.680] - Speaker 1
Just kind of what are your greatest hopes for the work you've done and the work you're doing?
[00:42:17.070] - Speaker 2
Let me cut to the second question. I think a lot of what I'm doing right now is with Kerry Newcomer on the growing edge and with my own frequent posting on my Facebook page, where I do a lot of my political expression. I have a Facebook author page that now has a pretty sizable audience. And I know that I'm reaching an older crowd there. But I have other platforms run by other people, such as the revolutionary Love platform or the Onbeing platform that reach a younger audience, or the work of Greg Ellison, a black scholar who runs a program called Fearless Dialogues, with whom I also partner. So those are some of my major engagements at this time. I guess the thing I want to say truly, Laura, about my own work over the years is that while I own and I'm grateful for the work I've been able to do, at the deepest level, I don't think of it as my work. I think of it as our work. It's like if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? And what I feel most grateful for about this work that I call our work is that other people have found value in it, and they have brought their own insights and sense of priorities and engagement with their own truth and with the world.
[00:44:10.750] - Speaker 2
They've brought that into play in a way that has created something larger and richer than I ever could have created by myself. So I really think of people ask me, So what do you want your legacy to be? And I said, well, I don't want to have my own legacy. It's our legacy. It's what we've created together. It's in community. And yes, some of that has been planted by my own long hours in the solitude of writing. And I love that rhythm between solitude and community. I love holding that paradox. But in the long run, it's our work. I'll give you a couple of just, I think, homey illustrations of that. People come to me, and they thank me, especially in my writing, around vocation, education, medicine, whatever, and around depression, which I've written a fair amount about out of my own experience. And they say, thank you so much. You saved my life with that book, that chapter, whatever. And I say, well, thank you so much for giving me this affirmation, but I didn't save your life. You saved your life. I had the good fortune to be able to put words on paper that you appropriated into your own reality, a reality I can't possibly know.
[00:45:40.450] - Speaker 2
And you work with it in a creative way that turned out to be life giving for you. So at best, let's say we did it together. But my part in that was small. I was simply telling my story and I'm glad that you found your story in it and we may be able to rewrite your story as I've been able to rewrite mine. So to me at a very deep level, with all sincerity, that's why I say it's ours. That's the communal piece. There's another story that relates to the solitary piece. It's kind of funny, but it's spiky, but it's true. I don't know where I got this instinct as a person who didn't ever think he could write a book. But the very first time I sent a manuscript to a publisher, they responded to me with the same thing that every publisher since then has responded through ten books, which is, we like your manuscript, we want to publish it. But now you have to get on the phone with our promo person. And the question from the promo person is always the same, who is this book for? Who is this book for?
[00:47:01.030] - Speaker 2
Cause these are the sales people, the advertising people. And my answer has always been the same. Well, it's for whoever buys it. Oh, their response is always the same. It's like, come on, Parker, don't be a wise guy. That's not helpful to us, who's it targeted to. And I've said, look, honestly, this is an honest answer and it's the best answer you're going to get out of me. I didn't target this book at anybody. I cannot tell you who it's aimed at, because that's not what animates my writing. I can only tell you where it comes from, not where it's going to, and where it comes from is the deepest place I can reach in my own life around issues of vocation, discernment, community, democracy, leadership, whatever. But in the confidence that if I'm able to write from that deep place in myself, I might have a chance of touching that deep place and other people. And I'm so grateful for whatever the source of that original insight was that had me saying whoever buys it, the only thing I can tell you is where it's coming from, not where it's going to. Because I've been very lucky and I've got demographic data to show this, that I'm a white, straight, well off male human being and now an old male human being.
[00:48:40.050] - Speaker 2
But my books have had an audience in the LGBTQ plus community. They've had an audience among people of color. They've been translated into Spanish for that population. There are a dozen or more translations into languages all over the world, from Serbia to Vietnam to last year, there was this big Courage to Teach conference in China, an online conference in Beijing with the cover of the book and taped videotaped interviews with me done by a professor from Beijing University who came to Madison with her graduate student to record me talking about questions that she asked in Chinese. And her graduate student translated for me and then translated my answers for Professor Woo, and this thing has reached thousands of teachers across China. Now there is no way that a person like me could have sat down in whatever it was the early ninety s and said, you know what? I'm going to write a book about education that's aimed at Chinese people under Communist rule and people in Serbia and people in Guatemala and LGBTQ plus folks and people of color and Hispanics. That's what I'm aiming at. And there's no way that a promo Department at a publisher would have found that helpful.
[00:50:19.510] - Speaker 2
So I stand by my answer. It's like if you can do it from your own depth, you have a chance of reaching others. And then, of course, comes the craft of writing, where my job is to say things clearly enough, compellingly enough, and maybe even beautifully enough to deliver a book to the reader. I don't really want to read this because there's nothing attractive about it, and B I can barely understand what the guy is saying. I need to do that work as well as I can, making a space for the reader, because that's the work that only I can do. As the author, I need to do it well so that the reader can do the work only the reader can do, which is to find out how his or her life intersects with this book. Life and work intersects with this book and then deploy it and employ it in whatever creative way they can. So that's the deal I have with my readers, and I love that kind of relationship, which I've been very lucky to have over the years.
[00:51:40.770] - Speaker 1
I can't help but think this really kind of takes us full circle because we started our conversation today talking about how when you and this was specifically in regards to teaching when you can mine your deepest trueest self and bring that it liberates others to find their deepest, truest self in your same deal. It's kind of when you're when I'm reading your deepest truest self, it allows me to be liberated, to interpret and use and enrich my life from my deepest truest self. Yeah.
[00:52:17.470] - Speaker 2
Yeah. If you can find your story inside of my story, that's all I want. And that's huge. That's a huge gift. Or if I can just simply trigger you to find your own story outside of my story, that's a joy. And I think it's so interesting that you would say that that we came full circle. We did. And that's because all of life is a fractal. It's like every piece of it replicates every other piece. And I don't think there's anything we can name that doesn't follow the same logic.
[00:52:52.110] - Speaker 1
So true. And I do want to thank you for the depths of truth. You've brought too many subjects. You mentioned the depression, and I appreciate your honesty and frankness about that. I know you've probably impacted a lot of people with that writing. You're writing about habits of the heart and community and authenticity and all of these different areas that are really, truly enriching. The title of this podcast is Teaching Reading and Learning. And this has just been an opportunity, I think, for all of our listeners to really engage with learning, with true learning. What does true learning mean? And how do we, again, as we're teachers, bring that truth in order to really engage our students in discovering their truth as well? So thank you. Thank you for all of these gifts. And I know our time is short. It makes me sad. But I did ask you if you would mind ending with a poem today and it said that you would do that. I know poetry is very important to you and poetry is so important to the work. So if you could end with that, we would be so happy.
[00:54:04.120] - Speaker 2
Yeah. Thank you, Lauren. Before we sign off, let me just say what a joy this has been for me. If you'd like to do it again, I'd love to. And all guests and blessings to you and your listeners.
[00:54:17.570] - Speaker 1
Thank you.
[00:54:19.050] - Speaker 2
I really appreciate this opportunity. So this is a poem I wrote and it's actually about an experience of depression. And it's a poem that helped me come out of it and emerge from that very dark place over time. It's a poem that means a lot to me and I've written a bunch of poems for me. This is one of the best in the sense that it's true. And it tells a story that I think is very relevant to our times of many kinds of darkness and depression around everything from the pandemic to politics. And that's why I chose it, because I think it maybe leaves us with something to think about, at least in terms of images. So it's a poem called harrowing. And since not everybody these days is close enough to the land to know what harrowing is to a farmer. Harrowing is when you plow up the field in the spring. It's a rough plow that leaves fields looking very rough, that precedes a finer plow. And then the planting of seeds. And I was struggling with depression. I was down in Kentucky to talk with a person whose wisdom I value about this experience.
[00:55:44.490] - Speaker 2
I was out walking a country road and I passed a harrowed field. And this is over a few days. The poem that emerged called Harrowing, which moves from the outer scene to the inner reality. The plough has savaged this sweet field, misshapen clods of Earth, kicked up rocks and twisted roots exposed to view last year's growth demolished by the blade. I have pod my life this way, turned over a whole history, looking for the roots of what went wrong. Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred enough. The job is done. Whatever has been uprooted, let it be seed bed for the growing that's to come. I plowed to unearth last year's reasons the farmer plows to plant a Greening season. I think that's what we need to be doing right now. We've done a lot of plowing. What went wrong? We've turned up a lot of stuff. It's there for us to work on. We need to start planting a Greening season. I sometimes think that the most important word I've ever written at that depth of my journey. Is the word enough? The job is done. Let's move on. Thank you.
[00:57:22.140] - Speaker 1
Thank you for that, Parker. I appreciate who you are in the world. I appreciate your wisdom and your kindness and your compassion and just my gratitude is to you today.
[00:57:36.550] - Speaker 2
Back at you, my friend. Take good care. Bye.
[00:57:40.230] - Speaker 1
Thanks. Bye. I hope you enjoyed today's episode with Parker Palmer as much as I did and I hope that you'll tune in for new episodes each month. We are going to continue to explore teaching, reading and learning and celebrate these wonderful guests and their contributions to our profession and to our professional growth. Speaking of that, the reading League is committed to offering you high quality resources and professional development along with a robust and growing community to support your work. If you are enjoying this podcast please go to itunes and rate us we are so glad you're here and we want to spread the word. Also, if you haven't done so already please check out the readingleague at www.theradingleague.org we encourage you to become a member and join our community again. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.