These songs of freedom. Redemption song.
Bob Marley

It’s the season. Spring. Close to the equinox – that moment when day and night balance their time. When winter lets go its weary grip happy, as most of us are, to let dormancy give way to the impulses of sprouts.

I’m spending these transitional days in Montana – a place of bold crownings of grape hiacynth, fuzzy promises of catkins. And tomorrow is the day recognized by Christians around the world as Easter – the day of resurrection – of redemption.

Like every year, I’m glad for the transition in seasons. Especially this year, though, since I can’t seem to shake the growing sense that so much needs redeeming. From the fact of children still being separated from their parents at out country’s southern border, to the 20th anniversary of Columbine shootings, to the hostilities across lines of identity – politics, religion, gender, race.

The seduction of all this noise is great – sourced as it is in fear, false conclusions, greed, more fear. We all give way to the pull. We forget what is working. We forget who we are and that each of our lives depends intricately one the world we live in – on the wellbeing of all. We fail to see, hear, touch redemption – much less seek it.

My mother is on silent retreat in rural Georgia for this time. A place she goes often in any given year. A place redemption is served for meals, tucked into bed sheets, wafted on breezes, radiant in quiet smiles and easy glances. Redemption need not be manufactured at the Green Bough Retreat. It simply is.

In that, my mother understands this Christian holiday. She doesn’t claim flawlessness. Instead she claims the right to love and be loved, even as she makes mistakes. “Always keep learning,” she says. And she does. Loving kindness – that ancient essence of the Christian faith – she lives it. Imperfect and learning. Being surprised by the variety and grace of life expressing itself through people, circumstances, weather, change. Redemption.

This Easter I’m listening. To my mother’s wisdom – in its words, in its action. I’m listening to the determination of spring here where snow may come again any day. I’m listening to the deep instruction that, as far as I can tell, is only everywhere. The instruction that redemption is more a matter of quiet than of control – more a matter of nature – my nature – than management or strategy.

I’m listening, and, like often at Easter, hearing Bob Marley’s voice weaving through the hedgerows, alleyways, board rooms, garbage dumps, snow-cloaked peaks and greening valleys of my mind.

All I ever have
Redemption song.

Then there’s the tendency time has for cascading. I was pretty amazed this morning to see how long it’s been since I’ve written a blog here. I know there’s been a lot of life going on. Good stuff, bad stuff.

In the former, there’s this: Gary and I have been able to put good effort into making our work together more real – accessible – more out there in the world. We’ve named the initiative: Full Ecology.

Just this week, we launched our website! Please take a look!!

You’ll see that, in addition to working with genius advisors who have helped us describe the what and why of Full Ecology, we’ve also stepped into public service. We’ve had great opportunities to give keynotes together. We’ve provided workshops on teaching Full Ecology and the Nature of Grief. We’ve been deeply engaged with colleges, universities, libraries and faith communities to offer interdisciplinary seminars. Gary’s submitted his 26th book – The Eight Master Lessons of Nature scheduled for release October 22, 2019 (so exciting!!). And now, we’re scheduled to give a TEDx talk in mid April (YaHoo! – and a little scary).

Of course, we’d love it for you to go to the website and get on our email list. And thank you in advance for any input. Full Ecology shows us how we’re really all in this together – and that’s GOOD NEWS.

Let’s do this thing.

And thank you again ~

January 21, 2009, the day after the inauguration of the first Obama administration, I took off driving – south, then east, then north, then back west. I was interested in listening to everyday people. I wanted to know what they meant when they said that word – especially public in the preceding months – CHANGE.

My goal was 100 voices in the first 100 days. Voices across as broad a range of people and ideas as I could collect. I made my goal. With big luck, the collection turned into the book, 100 VOICES – AMERICANS TALK ABOUT CHANGE.

Today, ten years ago, I visited a high school in LA. A public figure of vital mind and heart named Kathy Goodman made the visit possible. She invited me to her infinitely relevant and spirited class. You can read about that time here.

But in this post, in honor of the week I’d just completed back in 2009, I’m reposting my first entry from on the road. It’s long. I hadn’t learned that blogs were supposed to be ~500 words … still haven’t completely gotten that.

Wow – on 10 years! And, no less evidence of and confidence in the essential American capacity for kindness, connection and working hard for the wellbeing of all.

“When life has been given to you,
you must take it very seriously.”
Calvin Hecocta

There’s something about the open road.  Something about road trips.  Something about how there is just no way any amount of planning and dreaming can remotely predict what will happen in the way a road unfolds time.

A year ago today I drove out of Portland.  I had organized my small bag, small supplies and impressive stack of maps in the Mini Cooper.  I had turned the key, started the engine and navigated the little EX:Change pod onto the highway headed South.  Seems it was sunny that morning – a decidedly uncommon thing for any day in Portland’s winter months.

Groundhog’s day. Mid-winter.

I just saved this writing to the hard disk – you know, the way you’re supposed to so you don’t lose stuff.  It’s now listed as 2-2-2010, just below 2-2-2009 in the file called <CHANGE Road Trip Blog Roll>.

Yes, there’s also something about anniversaries coming around every year … like Groundhog’s day.

A completion and a beginning at the same time.  A backward gaze across the way dreams and reality matched and didn’t.  A review of the reliable wealth of challenges, surprises, aches, joys and learning that plans and ideas may never anticipate.

My first stop on the way out had to do with coffee.  It also gave me a chance to say goodbye to my friends at the corner Starbucks.  They’d seen EX:Change from idea to launch to getting in the car to go.  I and the project had already benefited so much from their support.

I’m sitting there right now in that Starbucks, writing this.  This morning, Wendy, Dan and Star have all checked to see how the project is going.  They always do.

A year ago, I’d had the opportunity to speak a little more with Wendy, the store manager.  Wendy Lincoln is a White woman in her late 20’s and a manager extraordinaire.  She’s also a chef, entrepreneur, political organizer and a survivor of an adolescence that was none too kind.

About change, Wendy said, “What I specifically wish to see as change will need to happen between individuals.  I wish that someday we could all move past race, gender, sexual orientation and appearance as the ways we judge each other.  Instead, I would like to see people analyzing each other with a different set of measurements – like according to energies, demeanor, respectfulness, body language.  That would allow strangers to get to know each other without all that fuzzy, vague skepticism around how people look and where they came from.”

Wendy’s soon became one of the common themes I encountered all across the country.   Like in my next stop to talk with Lena Baucom.  Lena is bilingual and bicultural.  She speaks Spanish and teaches English language learners.  She is not Latina.  She is African American and European American.  She is well traveled and well educated.  She is also thoughtful and creative in her seemingly limitless devotion to the wellbeing of youth and community.  Lena gives her life to that.  In her teaching and her family she draws on what she’s lived – the roads she’s already traveled as a mixed race woman in her 30’s.

I left the time with Lena and drove to Ashland, Oregon.  There I made my way to the hillside home of my dear friend Dia.  Dia was the first of dozens of generous souls to volunteer space for me to sleep – friends, family and people who had never met me and opened their homes nonetheless on the recommendation of friends, or even friends of friends.

I wrote that night about interviewing Lena, about chatting with a young guy in Roseburg who made me a latte (yes, more coffee – but decaf that time) and about the stars over Ashland.

It was mid-winter.  Half way between the solstice and spring equinox.  More light every day.  It seemed a particularly perfect time to begin a journey.

The next day I would head over to Klamath Falls to interview my long-time friend Calvin Hecocta, an environmental activist, addictions counselor, and carrier of a long span of ancestral wisdom.  For our conversation, Calvin chose not to have his voice recorded.  Instead, he spoke clearly, slowly – the way he’s spoken with me across the 16 years of our friendship.  This time the subject was change.

A few of Calvin’s words seem good to leave here because they point to the way life itself is a lot like a road trip – the universe of beings, the generational progression, or the singular life we each experience as ours alone.  Both lives and road trips are filled with variety, with wonder and with responsibility.

When life has been given to you, you must take it very seriously.  I was raised in Beatty, Oregon by a Paiute dad and a Modoc mom.  I was born on December 7, 1942.  I remember standing on a mountain side looking down on the valley with the Old Man.  The Old man told me I would be a spokesman for my people.  For a short time I thought he was meaning the ones in my tribe – my clan.  My grandfather eventually explained that what the Old Man was meaning was the people that have no voice:  The trees and the people that live there – the swimmers and the flyers that have no voice – the children.

I was told that by the Holy Man and every day I live with respect for that responsibility. 

How many young men have received such instruction around the world?  Too few.  This has led to our psychosocial unrest and illness.  In this country and others individuals, families and communities have become profoundly deprived of spiritual connection because of the absence of rites of passage for youth.

An important change would be to look at these rites of passage again as a blessing – as a mainstay of strong community and good government. 

At the end of our time together Calvin gave me a necklace strung with beads made of shells and hematite.  Hanging at its center is a large flat bone shaped as a spiral, the direction of a journey – from inside out.

Then Calvin hugged me and wished me a safe trip.

I drove down Highway 97 toward Mt Shasta.  Less than two hours later I ran off the road taking a photo of the white mountain resting against the pristine backdrop of that day’s blue sky.  The car required a few patches and limped a bit the rest of the journey.  I stopped with the multitasking thing.  I take this life seriously.

Today, as I write, I sit here pretty awed.  Grateful, for sure.  Beyond any blog or book. Beyond any retelling of any of it.

A year ago I got in the car and drove around this land abundant with diversity of geography, weather, people, circumstances, opinions, dreams.  It likely was, for me, a rite of passage.  Those 100 days were also a rite of passage for our country.

By topic and experience the journey was defined by change.  It was ushered by the wisdom of the people I spoke with along the way like Wendy, Lena and Calvin.

Change, I found out, looks as vastly different to the people with whom I spoke as does the land across which they live and through which I drove.  Different and remarkably the same when it comes to things like valuing liberty, justice, peace, clean water and air, good relationship, and the cooperation and kindness all of that takes.

It seems to me that each of those values, like life, is a road.  We can’t know how traveling them will look, but we know we want and are willing to risk trusting the change guaranteed by the trip.

We’ve just passed the winter solstice. It’s dark. Still, we all know the next stop will be spring. The path is clear, but we’re tired and the way seems very long. We also know the turn to spring will not be a solid stop. From there we’ll proceed to summer, through autumn, back to winter. All we have for sure is change.

No one has been able to say the singular thing about change that makes it finally ok. Now and then change seems great. But we tend to remember when it’s not so. So, all in all, there’s a pretty generalized resistance.

Whole political agendas, whole religious doctrines, whole technological advancements are established on the rationale of control – of minimizing change. Surely, we can select and manage circumstances we want against those we don’t. Surely what each of us would change or retain is of highest value and therefore ought to be agreed to by everyone.

But change and our inescapable vulnerability to it keep being right here. As poet David Whyte suggests, the fact of your being born – your incarnation – leaves no perfect choice other than to “simply be here with life’s fierce need to change you.”   

Outside unpredictability, we can never know certainly what is next. And we can find no one who does. No wonder we feel lonely, desperate, lost.

But in reality, we are not alone in this. Lonely – yes and too often – but not alone.

The fact is, we are nature itself. We are as much of the Earth as any other thing we see here. As much as mountains or tortoises or tulips or mayflies – as much as raindrops dancing their way down our window panes. But no more. We are not more than nature – even with our capacity for thought, for speaking, writing or reading words. Every bit of that capacity is possible, and thus expressive of nature.

Check it out for yourself. Maybe instead of “nature” you prefer to speak of God’s hand – of the Creator – or even of physics. Still, at the core of it, every being is interdependent with every other. Directly or indirectly, we all need the being of everything to live. And this: each and every being becomes incarnate, exists for a bit, and passes away – into and out of the mystery that renews itself in seasons, in years, in universes. In our interdependence and our finitude, we make up the world – together – today.

Still, feelings of being lost have nipped at my consciousness a good bit in recent days. Part holidays – the over starched expectations for perfection built in since childhood. But also, part grief at the loss mid-month of my dear friend Tod Sloan. The memories of him behaving as memories do at times like these – mined for the good and joyous, the undeniably laudable; irritated only at how early he’s gone.

I can imagine a conversation with him. Woven into and through its fabric would be strands of psychology and philosophy, of social justice seasoned perfectly to our tastes with personal anguish and resolve. Its conclusion: Yes, Tod deserves the great appreciation of each memory winging his way. So will each of us. So do we. Right now.

This is how we can become found when we are lost. Or, at least, less troubled by the state of not knowing exactly where we are.

Try this. Recognize and admit to yourselves your value here in the ecosystem of all life. And, if that’s too challenging for now, recall the good and generous, the gifts embodied in people you know. Tell them about it if you are able. Each entirely unique, each belonging exactly where she or he is, where they are.

Years ago, in woods of the Pacific Northwest where my friend Tod most certainly walked, a poet listened to an Elder tell a teaching story of his Native American tribe (records don’t indicate which one of the 57+ tribes in that region). The non-Native poet did his best to share the story as he could.

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

David Wagoner, now 92 ½. He was half his age when he was found by this teaching. Now so are we, found again by the forest – by the companion who’s been with us every step we’ve taken.

Grief is the price we pay for love.
Queen Elizabeth II –

Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today,
and creates a vision for tomorrow.

Melody Beattie –

This morning, a dear friend posted a photo of his 5-year-old granddaughter in honor of her birthday. Five!! Already.

Earlier this month, the day passed that marked a year since the death of my friend and mentor, Roy Sampsel. Too soon.

So it goes with time. And so, with being in these wild and precious lives.

There are joys – the celebrations of birth, of anniversaries, of success, the startling beauty of a dawn. And we know there are as many sorrows – lives ending, break-ups, failures, Paradise, Sandy Hook, Katrina.

The sorrow can appear to outweigh the joy. The weight of darkness and confusion – the isolation in memories, questions, emotions. We look around and see only wasteland. No one with whom to admit, or even share our fear, our concern, our fatigue, our deep-deep grief.

Even as we give in to the crazy-making seduction of believing we can control outcomes (that we ought to – that we’re losers if we don’t), the whole cascade of life circumstances mostly feels like endurance – popped from paddle to paddle in the giant pinball machine of our fate. And so we move through day after day, each our own version of Debbie Downer.

Oddly, there’s merit in just going there. In being entirely consumed by the helplessness and despair. In its time, it’s actually the healthiest response we can make.

Rabbi Earl Grollman is 93 now. Across his life he has developed and honed his understanding of grief. He has done this by supporting himself and others in the fact of grief. As the Rabbi advises, “Grief is not a disorder, a disease or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price you pay for love. The only cure for grief is to grieve.”

If we don’t grieve, we don’t grow. If we don’t let go, risk and embrace the ache of losing, we can’t see what remains. We can’t see the reliability of dawn, the promise in every birth, the miracle in anniversaries, built as they are on one step – one day – at a time. If we don’t grieve, we have no way of recognizing our lifelong skill with improvisation.

Here’s the good news. If you’re reading this, you have successfully lived every single minute of your life with uncertainty. You are here. Already you are a lifelong improvisation artist. You can’t escape it.

The moments that emerge as nodes for joy or sorrow, contentment or distress – those moments are not of a single piece. Check and see. There are gaps. Perhaps way more space – more quiet – than discrete events to which emotions attach.

Survivors who do best in the face of traumatic events come to know what the rest of us may find uncanny. Right in the center of the shock and confusion, an uncommon quality of attention can reveal the presence of – well – presence itself. The broad reach of peace and quiet as the stage upon which great loss plays out. A capacity to hold it all, and a gratitude for the inexplicable quiet – the love – weaving it together.

I still ache with the loss of my mentor, Roy. But my grief is now the sweet measure of my gratitude for the decade we knew and worked with each other. Taught together, saw together the vast goodness and brilliance of the people in our classes. Circumstances were wildly unpredictable across that time, but the friendship grew, the students enrolled. And the learning went exponential as together with those students we came to ways of seeing and knowing none of us could have gotten to alone.

Then there is my friend’s 5-year-old granddaughter. Eyes lit up with the wild precious life that is hers alone. Already, I’m certain, her days have held joy and sorrow. I am also certain she was born, as all of us were, into the infinite gratitude of a planet ready and waiting for the particular brilliance each one of us brings.

Grief and gratitude. We have the opportunity to pay attention. To feel it all. To improvise. And, as Joanna Macy suggests, “to be fully present to what is happening in the world.” Including the constant peace and quiet beneath and between.

On her MoreThanTours, Michelle Browder tells the truth. She starts on the banks of the Alabama River where the lands of the Alabama Tribes were stolen, by hostility or trickery: Apache, Caddo, Alabama-Quassarte, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Arapaho, Cherokee, Cheyenne. Where black American slaves were marched from ships to storehouses to market. People descended from the Africans stolen into involuntary servitude.

After 1808, when stealing people from outside our country was banned, domestic trade sustained the brutality of enslavement. People from around the U.S. were marketed through Montgomery.

Michelle tells this truth. And then she conveys the charge.

Here we are, living all together. The task is ours – to look after the dignity and wellbeing of each and every one.

The truth – this truth of stolen land, of slavery – is hard to take. But more and more, Michelle is hearing people say, “Thank you for telling it straight. Thank you for respecting us with what really happened.” No sugar coating. No softening the blow.

And blown out we are – all in different ways, depending on how and where we were raised, depending on whether we were born black or white or brown.

All of us know that race remains an issue. Even if we, or our public leaders pretend it isn’t.

One of our most difficult challenges as American people shows up every day in our differences. We define ourselves by the stories we tell of the people we’re not. We take as reliable the smallest signs of political difference, of things we call “elitism” or “deplorable.” But without any effort at all, we see race. And the stories underlying the meaning America places on skin color are stitched deep into the fiber of how any of us makes sense.

Today I spent in Montgomery, Ala. I was with my mom and husband – two white people like me. We visited the National Peace and Justice Memorial where the lynching deaths of over 4000 people are acknowledged. It is a place of mourning, of grief, of telling the truth. Of feeling the awkward uncertainty of how to be, now. White people feeling the weight of this real and present legacy – not knowing what making amends means or how it looks in action. Black people seeing public validation of the pain they carry, from the fact of racism – racism seeded in their ancestors’ brutal extraction from home in Africa, and in the trading of their grandparents and great-grandparents domestically like farm animals.

This could only have happened within a constructed and maintained lie that, when it comes to people, some are more entitled to freedom and dignity than others.

Look at that sentence.

There are too many ways it applies, but today, in Montgomery – every day in Montgomery and throughout the entire country, there persists a deeply unconscious story that threatens our humanity. A story that has, in our history and in events around us every day, shown up as the most hideous of human indecency. In the late 1800s, early 1900s – the lynching of innocent people. Today, the grossly disproportionate imprisonment of black men and women and the police killings of one innocent black citizen after another.

Those of us who are not black do not wake up wondering if we will be shot dead before we come home in the evening. Because of our skin color, the thought doesn’t have to cross our minds.

In that way, the lie of some people being more important than others persists. We white people don’t have to do anything about it. Our opposition to racial brutality is an option. We don’t have to respond. Our necks aren’t on the line. “Yeah – it’s awful and everything, but what can I do? I didn’t own slaves. It’s not my fault.”

And we keep running that until we really listen. Until we see that, not only could it be us – it was. It’s still us – watching, saying and doing nothing. And in markedly different circumstances, it is many – maybe most – of us terrified, without defense. It is possible to understand the horror of lynching and other terrorism – the cruelty of our own bodies demolished for someone else’s furious insecurity. And the hardest part: It has been and still is too many of us who, furiously afraid, become the active tormentors.

None of this feels good. It shouldn’t.

But it is time to listen. It is time to feel. Time to grieve. To grow in that wisdom and to act.

Go to Montgomery. Spend time with Michelle Browder on her uncommonly truthful tours. Listen to the dignity her words support – the clarity with which our history gives us graphic instruction. Do not kill. Do not steal. Do not covet or exploit. Instead listen. The brilliance is everywhere at hand to repair tormented and tormentor. The practice is kindness. It’s actually the trait most central to human nature.

But. Do not believe me.

You shouldn’t. Yet, do consider that grief is normal and necessary. That it is a process that is long and that is not paralysis. Rather, grief is necessary to go through even as we act to stop the terror – act to reclaim kindness. Grieve and act we must. Alone and together.

Go to Montgomery. Go to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Go to the Legacy Museum. Grieve. Let the story sink way in. It’s just the truth.

The question from here – how do we go forward with each other now? What do we want for ourselves and our country?

Together – with everyone living here, living now on this land.

This is Dan Wenk. He’s a dad, a husband, a grandfather, a friend, and a profoundly wise and effective public servant. Today marks the first day following his 43-year career with the National Park Service. Today – too early and in circumstances disrespectful and baffling – Dan is retired. His last post – Superintendent of Yellowstone National Park.

You can read in this June 7 Washington Post piece a bit about those circumstances. Toward the close of the article there’s also a small sampling of the countless contributions Dan has made across four decades of leadership with the NPS.

Dan is a true man of the world. He is also a man of the people. He deeply understands that the wellbeing of nature and the wellbeing of humans are fully intertwined.

Few will match Dan Wenk’s contribution to the National Parks. Many in the NPS and across the many communities he’s served are saddened at his departure – at the circumstances – at the prematurity.

Get to know this man’s work and career. Take a look at his leadership. In these days when integrity in public leadership can be so very thin, we all stand to learn a great deal from Dan.

For one big thing, considering Dan’s career reveals clearly that, right in the midst of embattled political arenas, integrity can work with great and positive effect.

Dan listened, spoke, thought carefully and led at the intersections of vastly varied interests – from land developers to environmentalists, from Native American Tribes to ranchers to animal rights advocates to snow mobile enthusiasts. And for 43 years every one of us benefitted from Dan’s public service through our National Parks.

Dan Wenk does not perform integrity, he lives and acts directly from the respect and encouragement he values.  I’m honored to have had the chance to work with him.

In that time, I got to see this generous and brilliant man in action. And based on what I observed, I’m betting that in retirement, Dan will not cease from his advocacy and care for the lands and their people.

Watch what he does next as his life continues to teach. Watch. Be inspired. And let’s all get active!

“A lot of listening has to be done.”

Being in positive, healthy, reciprocal relationship is the most powerful predictor of mental and emotional wellbeing. Friendships, love partnerships, neighborhoods, community groups.

This fact is increasingly worth considering given the evidence that loneliness in the United States is on the increase. Perhaps the most profound symptom – suicide.

Last week, we learned of the suicide of a young man we know from a rural Montana town. Montana has the highest suicide rate of any state, and by an alarming rate. No one really understands why.

Montana also has the healthiest people, the most high school graduates attending college and the highest level of support for public lands. That’s all good stuff, so what’s up.

I don’t know that the answer can ever be found. Some experts point to the long, dark winters and the low population (implying an attendant limitation to social contact). Others consider the relatively high rate of problematic use of substances – alcohol mostly.

What defines loneliness? What makes it so people at every age are more likely these days to end their lives than ever before? What is missing?

Over the past decade, two groups get tagged generation lonely. Older people, the classic group researchers have associated with loneliness, have been joined by millennials. And the trend doesn’t seem to be stopping with the next younger ones.

One informative correlation showing up in the data is between isolation and loneliness. While it’s unclear whether one causes the other, it is increasingly evident that people who are socially isolated – which is the pretty objective situation of not being with other people – are way more likely to report the more subjective feeling of loneliness. And, both isolation and loneliness are frighteningly associated with mortality.

The antidote to loneliness is relationship. But it’s not so easy to apply just do it to making friends, finding community, or falling in love. And each of us is different when it comes to what friendship means. Some of us survive by taking time to ourselves. Being alone doesn’t always mean being lonely. Others do best with loads of social connection, but can get to a place of feeling lonely even in the  middle of massive parties full of friends.

The first group – the introverts (and I for sure tend in this direction) – are more at risk of over-isolating, choosing again and again not to be part of social gatherings and ending up losing the courage to even try. The extroverts – well I have to speculate and really lean on literature here – come to know isolation in a far more paradoxical way when they begin feeling emotionally, intellectually, spiritually lonely in the middle of energized social situations. Eventually, even people who tend toward extroversion may isolate themselves.

As far back as the late 1940’s, in the wake of WWII, Hannah Arendt, a Jewish refgee from Nazi Germany, and a profoundly insightful political scientist and philosopher identified loneliness as a primary symptom of a society in trouble.

Arendt revealed a powerful predictor of people in communities reporting loneliness: Rampant “us vs. them” narratives. She clarified this condition as not simply the isolation of being alone, but an intensification with “isolation against each other.”

This is exactly where we are right now – every day – every single news hour – every mediated minute.

So it’s time to get on this! To stove up our collective Mama Bear impulses (no matter your gender identity) and start taking very active care.

I’m committing to keep exploring this challenge here in this blog – for one thing. Especially since I can’t write if I’m not living what I’m writing – I’ll be out there in the world and in here with my habits of thought, fears and all, learning more about what it means to bring individual and collective loneliness out of the critical danger zone where it’s lingering now.

Here’s a start. A story.

Long ago there was a village – a long-time community located on the fertile banks of a river. There came an extreme and frightening time when one of the villagers drawing water from the river looked up to see a baby flailing as she tumbled downstream. Rainfall had been unseasonably high so the river was fierce.

The alarm spread quickly. Young and old came to the river bank to see not just one, but dozens of very small children being swept downstream in the roiling current. Of course, many jumped in to save all the little ones they could. But panic and chaos limited success.

A very old grandmother made her way into the throng. Stooped, her eyes clouded with cateracts, she looked past them to the crisis. Her voice was not as strong as in her youth, but she spoke nonetheless.

Please continue here. Save as many as you can. But a team of you must travel quickly upriver. You must stop whoever is throwing these children in.

Isolation. Loneliness.

What is throwing us in? What circumstances can we stop or change to address Arendt’s warning of “isolation against each other?” What social circumstances can we change? What can we change in our own tendencies to isolate? And, perhaps most immediate, what can we do inside ourselves? To consider the choices we are making. To watch the reflexive ways we make sense of the world that may be keeping us separate from other people out of fear or even a kind of aggression. How do we listen in here so we can get stronger – more at ease – with listening to people who know the world differently than we do?

Maybe a first thing for our inner Mama Bears to check out is right here – most local. Inside the ways we talk with ourselves. Do you even know what you think about being in social settings? Have you listened to what you have to say about that to yourself?

Doesn’t matter how weird it sounds. Give it a try. See if you’re surprised. See if you like what you hear.

It just makes sense doesn’t it? If we’re isolated from ourselves on the inside, if we’re not listening there, how can we really listen to anyone else? It’s easy to get anxious in the face of the huge range of experiences, concerns and insights other people have. Each person is different. But, is that difference always dangerous?

Can’t know if I can’t listen. And it’s lots harder to be lonely when I’m listening to the rich amazing stories other lives tell.

I did not vote for John McCain in the 2008 presidential election. But because of his candidacy, I got in my car early in 2009, and began what would be a 10,000 mile circumnavigation of the lower 48.

I did this because, by the time Americans got to the polls in November 2008, no matter who we voted for, everyone was using the word change.

So, because of McCain and Obama, because of the clear American desire for change, I got in my car the day after Obama’s inauguration and set out to ask everyday people what they meant by that word: change.

My goal was 100 voices in 100 days – voices from as many different perspectives as possible. Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Independent – ranging across age, income, work, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation. With every person, I asked what they meant by the word change. I asked, too, what they most wanted to remain the same. And I asked them how they would recognize positive change when they saw it.

In the end, there was no way I could cover the vast diversity of this country’s people, but I was able to get the 100 voices from 100 different ways of seeing and knowing. They became the book, 100 Voices – Americans Talk about Change.

The book also holds road notes on what I learned – how I was changed along the way. The book opens and closes with the list of my essential lessons from listening to citizens of our country.

One hundred days, one hundred voices. This is what I learned about change in America:

We are always free to focus on our differences.

We are free to fear one another.

We are free to be at war.

We are free to oppress and to resist oppression.

We are also free to ground public action in the strength and endurance of our vast similarities.

We are free to love.

Being alive demands courage, whatever our choices.

In life, we may never avoid change and we may never avoid connection. In this we are not free. We are, however, free in our responses given these realities.

….

That was 2009. This is 2018. And just last week, John McCain died at 81.

I want to share his open letter – released today by has family. I know there were many votes, opinions, legislative agendas that McCain supported with which I disagreed. But, particularly in recent years, it is clear to me that I not only agree with, but am inspired and comforted by this man’s essential understanding of what the American citizenry most fundamentally values – what I heard from everyday people on my drive in 2009.

Here is how John McCain said goodbye to Americans:

My fellow Americans, whom I have gratefully served for sixty years, and especially my fellow Arizonans,

Thank you for the privilege of serving you and for the rewarding life that service in uniform and in public office has allowed me to lead. I have tried to serve our country honorably. I have made mistakes, but I hope my love for America will be weighed favorably against them.

I have often observed that I am the luckiest person on earth. I feel that way even now as I prepare for the end of my life. I have loved my life, all of it. I have had experiences, adventures and friendships enough for ten satisfying lives, and I am so thankful. Like most people, I have regrets. But I would not trade a day of my life, in good or bad times, for the best day of anyone else’s.

I owe that satisfaction to the love of my family. No man ever had a more loving wife or children he was prouder of than I am of mine. And I owe it to America. To be connected to America’s causes – liberty, equal justice, respect for the dignity of all people – brings happiness more sublime than life’s fleeting pleasures. Our identities and sense of worth are not circumscribed but enlarged by serving good causes bigger than ourselves.

“Fellow Americans” – that association has meant more to me than any other. I lived and died a proud American. We are citizens of the world’s greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil. We are blessed and are a blessing to humanity when we uphold and advance those ideals at home and in the world. We have helped liberate more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. We have acquired great wealth and power in the process.

We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.

We are three-hundred-and-twenty-five million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates. But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country we will get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before. We always do.

Ten years ago, I had the privilege to concede defeat in the election for president. I want to end my farewell to you with the heartfelt faith in Americans that I felt so powerfully that evening.

I feel it powerfully still.

Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We make history.

Farewell, fellow Americans. God bless you, and God bless America.

Rest well, Senator McCain.

Yesterday, I learned of a word. A Portuguese word. Saudade.

Saudade reveals its meaning in context. Something like the English words longing, yearning, and love when it’s about a quality of ineffable missing. Like many words in other languages, there’s really not a direct translation. This is because the word holds more than its parts. A noun that’s bigger than we English speakers think nouns can be. Bigger than person, place, thing – but holding all of them together along with a touch of verb-ness – a translucent action.  Homesickness, kind of.

Saudade is what you long for that you believe you’ve had in the past – but may not actually have had. A salve of memory – melancholy and gentle at the same time. A quality of awareness that gives ground to a measure of confidence that circumstances hold the possibility of making the longed-for present again.

The smell of Georgia rain on magnolia leaves dusty from summer will always be one in the same with my grandmother’s unconditional love. The surprise of goosebumps at something said, or read, or sensed.

How accurate is my memory? Can I truly recall moments of pure perfection?

Life is improbable. A complex mix of physical bits with personalities and situations.  Yet here we are in it. And from time to time we feel longing. Saudade.

Consider lemurs.

They’re among the most endangered of species. Left the primate line 60,000 years ago to strike out on their own – genetically speaking. Range in height from 2.5 inches to 2.5 feet. They take their guidance from reason in the context of relationship and feeling – the intuitive. In that way, lemurs live very well balanced in what we tend to think of as feminine and masculine traits.

The only place they live outside zoos, is high in the tree canopy of Madagascar. This, a shrinking homeland due to un-regulated logging.

Still, they persist. For now.

And I, having never been a lemur, can’t know if these beings are even fussed by their circumstances. I’m the one who’s troubled. Lemurs aren’t always on my mind. But since I’ve heard of their vulnerability, I’ve had a vague yearning – an ache for their being returned to those better circumstances of before. The absence of thriving is present for me when I think of lemurs.

Life was never altogether easy for lemurs, what with their vulnerability to being taken by predators for food, their association with evil spirits by groups of humans over time. Then there were the everyday dangers of walking the planet at all.

In that way, we can all admit that it’s never been altogether easy for any of us.

Along the way, English-speaking zoologists came up with a term for a group of lemurs (think covey of geese, pride of lions, murder of crows). A conspiracy.  A conspiracy of lemurs.

So, saudade – this longing for a peace and comfort we believe we remember – may actually have arisen from nothing wholly easy or uneasy. Nothing wholly great or un-great. But from presence.

Presence in a conspiracy of lemurs. In the conspiratorial matter of fact that is lemurs living their lives against a good many odds – right now. Nothing absent.

And that constant pull to presence – the eternal invitation to be in what is right now – maybe that is saudade. A precise homing mechanism, lending us courage and focus, to be here, when our minds alone are less than 100% sure about … well … anything.