I want to tell you about the last three groups to hear about 100 VOICES – AMERICANS TALK ABOUT CHANGE. 

Night before last in a Decatur, GA neighborhood, about 20 women who know each other from the Presbyterian church they all attend gathered the way they do every month.  They come for dinner, community and inquiry at the home of Kent Leslie author and scholar.  Most of the women are in their 60’s and 70’s – all appear to be white women.  A few younger women attended, one in her 20’s (my niece) and one in her 40’s (one of my little sister’s friends since elementary school).

There was privilege in the room.  There was also an unusual awareness of that fact.  These are lives that enact both the opportunity and the responsibility of their access.  They gather together to support and encourage each other.  They gather together to keep learning.

The conversation danced between matters of human relationship and spirit; between ideals and on-the-ground practical questions of how really to do this listening across differences thing.  One woman, retired communications professor Jimmie Meese Moomaw spoke of the difference between starting a conversation with a statement of what “should be” and starting with the question, “what ought to be.”  She suggested that listening across difference can only happen with an approach more like the latter.  “It’s more about dialogue,” she said, “instead of debate.”

This morning, I met my college friend at the Georgia State University School of Social Work.  She is a faculty person there, now and invited me to speak about the book and project to seniors in that program.  The 30 or so people gathered in the room qualify in my experience and observation as urban scholar angels.  They were entirely with me as I read and told stories of the people and journey behind 100 VOICES 

My interaction with this group of people affirmed once again how practical it is to ground our action in our experiences of relationship and community.  Out of their lives, these students and their instructor offered observations and asked questions that served only to fortify the connection we all share in the fact of being alive in the same place at the same time.

The class instructor asked how I’ve been changed by the project.

A man whose internship is with urban homeless people asked, “What have you had to give up or sacrifice to do this?”

A woman working in the schools asked what my personal and professional goals were for the project.

Each of these questions was a gift to me.  That’s the way it is going as I share this book with groups.  The questions are curious about and affirming of the people who lent their thoughts as part of the book itself – but they are also clearly focused on what each questioner can do to be a part of listening and supporting connection and social solutions.  And then, more personally and in a way I had not anticipated, the questions support me.  They help me think with increasing depth and learning about what I have learned and am learning about Americans and change – about people and change – about myself and change.

Then tonight I met with a group of neighbors from what “Anna” (Voice 063) described as one of the most homogeneously conservative counties in the U.S. – Cobb County, GA.  The discussion was lively and curious.  People were thoughtful and energized by the idea that the stories we tell about each other can severely limit what we know and gain from the community resources we have right in our own neighborhoods.

One man said, “Really, the influence I can have on government is right here in my own community.  I want things to change for the country, but my action has to start right here.”  Later, around conversation breakdown related to the words “social justice,” he agreed that we all need to slow down and define our terms.

Afterward, my friend Luanne, who joined w/ her family to host the event, said as people left, all had told her of their interest and appreciation of the opportunity to consider change this way.  Many of them left with books and the intent to let me know what they think.

Listening speaking and risking trust across differences.

Three events…just the last three in a series that started in Santa Barbara.  Again and again – across people who live in significantly different lives; who consider the world, its troubles and solutions in different ways – the folks I’m talking with around the country are energized by the story of EX:Change and 100 VOICES – AMERICANS TALK ABOUT CHANGE.

Conservatives, liberals, richer, poorer, privileged, struggling.  They are curious.  They are inspired.  They want sincerely to try out this listening idea.

I’m not making this up.  They tell me.

It can be a long way from considering a change in the way we interact to actually risking it – to trying it out once, then again and again.  But if there’s any chance of this kind of relating, it has to start somewhere.

Here in communities in and around Atlanta, GA there’s remarkably heartening evidence that people are ready to check out the radical act of listening – to see if the maturity among us right here in our everyday lives can make a difference.

It’s really an empirical question.  What happens if I listen because I really want to know how the world makes sense to a person who I sense is different from me?  What do I learn?  What do we together see as solutions to common concerns – matters of public safety, school finance, job creation?  If we listen to each other a little more than usual, do defenses drop enough to get to some of these good ideas?  Do our ideas complement one another in ways we couldn’t see when we just wrote the other person off?

Check it out.

Once.  Then maybe again.

Let me know.

Imagine a revolution of wisdom and respect in the face of empty witticisms and adversity.  The latter may be entertaining (and more winning of advertising dollars), but the former seems consistently what Americans would like to experience more consistently in matters of leading and tending the wellbeing of our country and its people.

I’ve just spent the past three days crossing the Southern tier states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama into Georgia.  I’ve spent precious time with relatives – kin by birth and kin by choice and community.  Along the slow roll of land falling toward and then rising up from the Mississippi River’s reliable flow I found story after story, learning after learning.

• In the three years since I last drove these Southern highways a few things have changed
  • Gas is WAY more expensive – but y’all probably noticed that yourselves.
  • Radio stations toward the low numbers on the FM dial are both more plentiful and more uniformly Christian and Mexicano/Latino.  And, in the spirit of transparency – yes, I’ve discovered this while looking for NPR (far more scarce the dial near Austin, but pretty reliably accessible in eastern MS and across AL & GA.  I have no explanation, but a few theories of the ilk that only arise when a mind has too many miles and little to do.  I’ll spare you.)
  • More highway work is underway, often with signs indicating funding with stimulus money.
    

• I drove into Jackson, MS after dark and up to the house where I’ve visited my 88 year old uncle and 84 year old aunt for decade upon decade.  There were daffodils blooming in the front yard.  There was a piece of white paper among an abundance of cookies on the dining table (in their svelte aging bodies my uncle and aunt are eating whatever they want, now).  On the paper was a rough drawing of daffodils beneath the words “Happy Valentine’s day.  I love you.”  My uncle had drawn it for my aunt when he woke up to rain and was afraid he’d sink to his knees if he went out to get the real thing.  Visits with people who’ve seen this many years, visits with people who I have known my whole life, these are unspeakably precious – a value I imagine I’ll only come to understand more deeply as my own time goes by.

• In Montgomery, I found my way to the main offices of the Faith Crusades Montgomery Rescue Mission and my friend Michelle Browder (Voice 053).  Twenty years ago Mrs. Buena Browder (Voice 52) and Chaplain Curtis Browder established the Mission and today they provide safe houses for women and alternative housing for homeless people and food for the impoverished families of Montgomery.  Just as Michelle and I met up at the Mission, officers from the Maxwell Air Force Base pulled into the parking lot.  They had a load of winter coats they’d collected on the base for donation to the people served by the Mission.  This is the way community works.  It happens every day all over our country.  Sacks of fresh food in the arms of family members.  Beautiful coats draped across beautiful shoulders.   Everyone is warmer for it.

• Soon we were downtown and sitting together on a sofa frequented historically by Mrs. Rosa Parks.  The couch is now in the bookstore of New South Books publishing house and bookseller focused on distributing books “which examine the role of individuals in creating or contending with the change and conflict which came to the region in the post-World War II era. We believe strongly in the transformative power of information and knowledge, and we hope that the books we publish offer collective insight that helps the region grow toward ‘the beloved community’ and the fulfillment of the democratic promise.”  These are the words of Randall Williams, co-owner and lifetime activist for civil rights who sat and talked with us for over an hour.  Tuskegee Air Men, the poetry of John Beecher, the traditions of the Civil Rights Movement waiting to cradle new consciousness, new action.  Mr. Williams knows and trusts that the people of Alabama and the entire country have much to learn from the South.

• Then came another profound experience.  Michelle took me to visit an organization for which she has become a committed supporter – the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), headquartered in Montgomery.  Since the early 80’s, Brian Stevenson and his colleagues have given every bit of their energy to litigation “on behalf of condemned prisoners, juvenile offenders, people wrongly convicted or charged with violent crimes, poor people denied effective representation, and others whose trials are marked by racial bias or prosecutorial misconduct. EJI works with communities that have been marginalized by poverty and discouraged by unequal treatment.”  Specifically and recently, EJI has pursued and prevailed in Federal Supreme Court Cases proving the life sentencing of young juveniles to be cruel and unusual conduct, thus violating the 8^th Amendment. In March of this year EJI will take forward a related case to the highest court of the land, again advocating for the rights of young offenders.

• All of this is everyday life in Montgomery.  Right alongside the conversation I heard behind me at a coffee shop – a first-time internet date – the couple speaking in those tentative, awkward and perfectly endearing ways – “I never knew you’d be this pretty.”  “Yes, I’d love a Carmel Macchiato, thank you.”  “My first wife…well, I cheated on her with somebody else.  I apologized but I never expected her back.  I was wrong and I don’t want to ever do that again…that is, if I get another chance…I sure hope I get another chance.”

• Next was my conversation with the man in the thrift shop.  Joseph said, “I came here from the Philippines in 1973 – went all over the country.  Now I am here.”  He looked down at the cover of 100 VOICES – AMERICANS TALK ABOUT CHANGE.  “The only change from here on will be bad change.  There’s no hope.  We’re in the end times.”  “What makes you continue on with that being the case?” I asked.  “It’s the grace – the grace of God that gives us all a chance with these last days to repent and be saved.  Do you believe it?  Do you believe there is no hope?”  “No,” I said.  Joseph looked at me, waiting for an explanation.  “I drove around the country to listen to people.  I know there are good strong hearts out here and that gives me only hope.  Maybe it is the end – the end of a pretty awful time, but I can’t believe it’s the end of the human experience.  There’s too much evidence of resilience.”

• I looked around me at the thrift shop.  I thought of the many conversations Michelle and I had shared that past afternoon and evening.  Michelle wasn’t fooling herself into some illusion that the people of Montgomery are energized and directed.  She knows there is a powerful drag on the dignity and initiative of individuals and the community as a whole.  But she doesn’t give up.  She knows and employs the power of relationship.  She loves the kids she works with in area high schools and churches and they know it.  Michelle can’t do it for them, but she can and does relate directly with the dignity of every person with whom she has business.  The people advocating for prisoners in EJI work to correct injustice, Michelle works to prevent it in the first place.

I am again profoundly moved by my time in the South and, in particular, with the Browder family in Montgomery.  On my drive into Georgia I spent a lot of time wondering how we all support one another to keep our courage.

The Browders have and live deep faith.  They place their faith into daily and generative practice.  And like Kwang Kim suggested as Voice 100 in 100 VOICES – AMERICANS TALK ABOUT CHANGE, they live with passion and with energy renewed by faith and by communion with others.  Their passion is contagious.

And still, there is fatigue.  Michelle spoke of recently visiting the new King Memorial in our nation’s capital.  “I wept,” she said, so weary but never giving up.

I believe in Michelle.  I believe in her parents and in EJI.  I believe in Randall Williams and New South Books.  I believe my uncle’s love for my aunt – in their love for me.  We stay courageous by believing in and loving one another.

Today in Decatur, GA I went with my mother to her church.  The minister spoke about a scripture in the Old Testament – 2Kings 2: 1-14.  It was a story of a young prophet and his mentor.  The younger kept saying, “I’m not letting you out of my sight.”  And he didn’t.  He watched and learned through seeing his mentor’s actions and through communion – through their relationship entirely in support of one another.  I will now always support and learn from the people I’ve been with as I’ve journeyed across the South.  All are relatives and all are mentors.  From this I gain courage.

Last night I stood in my friends’  kitchen.  Lori, the mom of the family was working on white bean soup and her eldest daughter, Eliza was sitting on the counter delivering the speech she’d give in class the next day.  Eliza is 14 and a first year high school student at the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders, a public school in Austin,TX.  Her speech was on the life of that great woman leader of Texas, and Eliza delivered it in the way of performance art — in the voice of Ann Richards herself.

I was raised in Texas.  Born in Jefferson County to migrate w/ the family as my father went from post to post in the Presbyterian Church.  That means I’ve also lived in Tarrant, Nolan, Kerr and Grayson counties…always in the County Seat.  Listening to Eliza last night I heard Ann Richards’ voice describing her years navigating the terrain of motherhood woven now closely, now loosely with the emerging political events of the time.  Eliza had looked particularly at Richards’ years leading to and including her important role in formal state and national positions linked with advancing the Equal Rights Amendment.  I remember that time.  I remember being a bit young but paying very close attention to the women in the community.  I heard Richards’ name  then, but it was way before the constant media presence of today, so I likely never saw her in a photo or film until she was governor of the Lone Star State.

This morning I woke up to a gray-skied chill of Portland’s marine mists — here in Austin.  Maybe wherever you go, the places you live in live in you. I thought of Ann Richards’ leadership.  I thought of my women friends in Dallas who gathered to encourage me — all leaders supporting leaders.  I thought of the two women from high school days in Kerrville — the town in south-central Texas where I’m going today at the invitation of the generous folk of that community to talk of 100 VOICES — AMERICANS TALK ABOUT CHANGE.  

Anne and Gail now live closer to Austin.  Anne left her twin 5-year-olds in trusted care, Gail took time off work as a pharmacist and they took me to lunch at the East Side Cafe in Austin.  Our friend Don, a remarkable teacher in St. Francis School in Austin and also a graduate of Tivy High School, joined us.  There were Migas and Blue Plates involved — organic everything grown just outside and in the middle of the city.  As the plates were cleared to make room for the blueberry crisp and chocolate-almond-chocolate chocolate torte (did I mention the chocolate?), our conversation turned to the mystery and practicality of listening and being in relationship — in particular to the relatedness of all people, all beings.

Anne and Gail are Texas women.  They and my Dallas friends are leaders of the most reliable kind.  Some are more public than others — all are leading by the way they live in and with the interests of community close in mind and heart.  That goes for the men who joined us as well — they too are leaders — one way they lead is by working well and closely with women.  We all lead by supporting one another — by being present and paying attention in relationship.

I walked in this morning’s mist to the highest point in Austin, Mt. Bonnell.  I passed cacti on the way, variously cradling and dangling the day’s droplets.  From the crest of Mt. Bonnell, I could see the lake — the one that is down 30% from its ought-to-be levels.  The mist would help, but only a little.  Later in the afternoon, when the sun had coaxed every bit of the blue back into that wide open sky, I met with Jim HIghtower, the former TX Agriculture Commissioner and erstwhile inspiring voice of political conscience.  Hightower is, as he has always been, convinced that our first move is to get money out of the political process.  A formidable critic of the greed in exclusive interest, he persists in his optimism — in  his confidence in the ultimate wisdom, ingenuity and cooperative nature of the people of our country.

My friend Lori is a friend of Hightower’s.  The three of us sat together around a hefty mission-style table in a room with floors, furnishings and sculptures of philosopher wanderers all fashioned from wood native to the region that has stretched forever on either side of the Rio Grande — land to the north known as Texas and to the south as Mexico.  Much like my time with Sara B Moseley, this was a meeting in which I wanted to pay close attention.

Leadership and mountains — a 14 year old, her sister and parents; my friends in Dallas; my friends from Kerrville; Sara B Moseley; Jim Hightower.  Leaders.  All the people who have spoken and listened to 100 VOICES — AMERICANS TALK ABOUT CHANGE are leaders, too.  These are people who listen closely to their neighbors near and far — who trust the essential connection among all of us both to contain and yield wisdom that can guide positive action.  ”It happens all the time,” Hightower said.  ”Just look around you at what’s working.  There’s plenty to build on.”

When we risk the radical act of listening — to the land, to one another — when we take the chance of resting a bit in the trust and optimism these leaders both represent and LIVE, then we too lead.

The weather comes and goes.  The landscapes change.  Books are written and read or not.  Lives begin, proceed and end.  All along the way we have opportunities to engage the change.  Like the cacti in the mist we really have no choice but to be in what changes, and like the leaders I’ve been encountering in Texas, we have the option of standing firm in the strong places and joining with one another to make changes that are good for all of us.

The people I’ve talked with in Texas this week say two things.  My friend Cindy, a white business woman in Grayson County sums up one of those things. “The divisions in this state are so strong, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to talk to each other.  It just starts out hateful with neither side willing to back down.”

As she talks, she describes how community proceeds in spite of the opposition.  Cindy notes that having any success with serving the public means striking a balance between showing up as who you are and what you believe in and staying off the hot spots.  “I mean, people around here know if you’re faking it.  They don’t want service from somebody who puts up some kind of fake front.  It’s better if you’re direct about where you stand, then even if they don’t agree as long as you have a good service they’ll still give you their business.”

“But you don’t have to pick fights.”  Cindy says.  “Sometimes we do, anyway.”

Then there are the guys I talked with on the construction crew this morning in a Dallas neighborhood.  They agreed with Cindy on the presence of divisions in the state.  “Political differences, for sure,” said a Chicano man in his 40’s.  “It’s about who has the money and who doesn’t,” said his African American colleague – the foreman on the crew.  He went on, “but not just that.  People go one way or the other – more conservative or more interested in making sure everybody has what they need – because of the way they live and the way they believe.  Like their church community and what gets said there.  It’s not new.  Texans have always been loud and hard headed about politics.”

Then came the second thing I’ve heard over the past five days in Texas, “When it comes down to it, I can’t complain.  Around here, you just make do – you make friends and you make do.”  The Dallas crew foreman offered those words, but they were echoed what the men I met among the old grain silos in Sherman were saying.  The Chicano man in the construction crew said, “At the end of my day it’s always about my family – my parents, my wife and children, my sisters and brothers and their kids.  As long as we’ve got each other, we’re good.”

The working men and my friend Cindy in her role as a business woman were very aware of division.  They saw it as a threat, but also as a habit.  They all spoke of things they’d like to see different – mostly pointing to the economy – wanting more reliable jobs, but all of them also mentioned schools and health care.  The crew foreman said he wanted to see better public safety.

These folks are paying attention.  They’re working.  They’re providing for themselves and their families.  They worry about the future for their children, and also for the nearer future with our country’s wobbly economic circumstances.  “All I can do is keep showing up and making a go of it,” Cindy said.  “I’d sure like it if we could be more friendly and cooperative with each other in this state.  It doesn’t seem like fighting about it makes any good difference, but maybe fighting it out has to happen so we can listen past that.”

Sort of like weather.

Yesterday I crossed paths with a window washer, carrying a heavy bucket of water in one hand and equipment in the other.  He offered to wash my windows but decided Oregon was too far away.  When we got to talking about change he said, “Most change is weather related.”

He may be on to something.

Later last night, my friend Juliana Perkins (voice 043 in 100 VOICES – AMERICANS TALK ABOUT CHANGE), a nurse here in Dallas, said, “We just get focused on all the noise of disagreement and trouble and forget to look at all the successes in a day.”   She reached down to rub the head of her aging dog, Sandy.  We started thinking about examples.  Things  like waking up, for example; or drawing every next breath.  There are always lots of things going right or we wouldn’t keep going like we do.  The bad stuff, the horrible challenges in the world aren’t going away, but if we spend a little time noticing what’s working and standing there, we might have more luck taking care of the messes.

Here in Texas – here in change – there are no quick solutions to the divisive habits of public and private conflict.  They’re part of the weather.  But just understanding that can make it so we get it that stubborn disagreements and the seeming insistence that they be fortified are attempts to hold the weather still.  Letting it all blow through and seeing what remains on the other side — well, there may be some solid political wisdom in the practicality of nurses, laborers and businesswomen.

Yesterday, well south of the GOP caucus hubbub, I had one of those two-hour conversations you want to remember for the rest of your days.  Not so much the words, although the stories were as precious as sunshine…really, but the feeling of it.  Sara Bernice Moseley has been an inspiration to countless women and men across the 94 and ½ years of her life.  She is and always has been grace in human form.

No kidding.  This is a woman raised in west Texas who developed as a musician, as a deep thinker and, by extension a practical theologian.  She married a young lawyer who became the president of a small liberal arts school in Sherman, TX – Austin College.  While he was quite creatively ushering the college from the brink of financial ruin to the pinnacle of liberal arts reputation, Sara Bernice was raising children and nurturing her heart and mind such that she ultimately led the Presbyterian Church as the first woman to be its elected Moderator in 1978.

I knew this about her, even back then, but what I remember more from that time is what I have with me now, the feeling of Sara B.  Her shining eyes and the total validation of her being – as if even her breath were saying – “Isn’t it something that we both exist to have this time being simply magnificent with one another.”

Sara Bernice Moseley has lived across the street from Austin College, my alma mater, for almost 60 years.  Without any effort, she is this place – she is north and west and central Texas – she is the deep soul of Presbyterianism.  I can’t say in any definitive way what any of that reduces to – not to sky or sage brush, not to bricks or hymnals or phi-beta-kappa certificates.  I do know the feeling, though.  I carried it with me into the talk I got to do on 100 VOICES – AMERICANS TALK ABOUT CHANGE at the college yesterday.  There I was 35 years later (or so) with four dozen citizens of 2012’s Austin College community.  The ever-inspiring spirits of the 100 Voices were most certainly in attendance.  So was the grace of Sara Bernice Moseley.

Then this morning, I went for a walk toward the town square of Sherman.  I remembered my way there from the one time I reported (and was turned down…) for jury duty some thirty years ago.  I was newly married to a German Lit. professor @ AC and was just beginning my own doctoral study at Texas Woman’s University in Denton (one of those 1.5 hour TX commutes – i.e. pretty much nothing).  Something about my ideas on the social situation of human behavior…even way back then…didn’t play well with the District Attorney.

The striking thing today was that I found myself in neighborhoods I didn’t even know existed.  Sherman is pretty small, so this novelty was weird to me since I spent 13 years of my life here – got two degrees, married, had a baby, watched her take her first steps…stuff like that.  How could I not have known of neighbors so near?

As I made my way down a street toward downtown, several people (white people) stopped to silently gesture through their windshields in offer of a ride.  I smiled and declined, wave back.  After the second person moved on, then turned on the very next street I wondered why they would offer since they weren’t going to town anyway.  I can’t know for sure since I didn’t get to talk with either of them, but I can’t help but wonder if they were concerned for my safety – and I can’t help but wonder if it had to do with demographics – income, ethnicity.

I know that most of the white people – most of the professionals in town, live on the other side of the highway.  That’s the way it was decades ago and that’s the way it is now.  Back then, I didn’t give it much thought.  Today it’s been striking.

I walked south of downtown, then a bit farther east.  When I came back, I found myself in a small industrial district – one that’s been around more than 80 years – grain processing, mostly.  That’s the way it looks and that’s what was verified by the guys who caught me taking photos.

At first the burly African American man in the knee-length purple coat, work boots and hard hat called out to me suspicious of my motives – something about a woman who was coming around taking pictures to cause his company some trouble.  I told him a little about what I was up to and he and I walked together back to the small wooden room off a loading deck where an older African American gentleman and a white man around my age were sitting.  There was a folding table with papers strewn around the table that looked to have things to do with storage organization and inventory.  The older man was holding a newspaper.

We chatted about my history in Sherman and my presence on the streets of the town today.  They warmed to the story of 100 VOICES the way almost everyone does.  I asked about a man who was as kind and dear to me as Mrs. Moseley – Orange M. Hughes.  The man in the purple canvass coat said, “He’s family.  He’s not alive anymore, but he’s family.”  The older man smiled and said Orange Jr. is still alive.  He told me his address.  I think I’ll go by.

As I walked down the steps of the loading dock and back onto the crumbling sidewalks on Houston St., I got to wondering again.  I wondered how the important work and thought and innovation nourished at the small liberal arts school just blocks away could be of more immediate application for the three gentlemen in the tumble-down wooden room next to the decaying structures of an industrial economy that will never likely revive.  Industry of that kind is no longer needed, but the people of Sherman, TX are here and they all have lives and skills and interests and concerns – they have wisdom and ideas.

There’s a conversation that is not happening.  I keep wondering if and how it can.

The years and, these fortunate days, the miles keep teaching me.

Well today there’s the Susan G. Komen flip flop on their relationship with Planned Parenthood, there’s the unreliability in signs of economic recovery and there’s the hideous violence occurring in Syria and on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.  No doubt, the pundits who fancy themselves either political or entertainment, could be and are spinning these stories to fit their agendas.

Last night I finally got off the road with the promise of 36 hours in the same place.  I was on a star-studded hillside in Santa Fe, NM for a visit with my dear friend, Janice Gould (Voice 084).  Janice is gaining note for her lifetime of artistry as a poet.  She is also a musician, photographer and scholar – a professor in the Women & Ethnic Studies programs of University of Colorado – Colorado Springs.  Her writing arises directly from her life as a human being who is also lesbian and Native American (Concow).  She’s in Santa Fe on a residency as part of a prestigious fellowship from the School for Advanced Research on Human Experience (SAR).

All of this is only perfect from my perspective.  Janice Gould is a gift.  She has given from her talent, kindness and quiet determination at least for the seventeen years I’ve known her and there’s only evidence that this has and will always be so.

Janice, too, is a point of note here in life unfolding with the punctuation of the U.S. presidential primary season.  She comes to mind as I write here because of something she said last night.  She was recounting an interview in which a questioner asked her to speak of her theory.  At the time, she came up with a short response, one with which she was not all that pleased, but it passed in the context of academic discussion.  Last night she said, “I wish I’d said, ‘Theory?  I don’t do theory.  I live and I create.  You can do the theory.”

I keep hearing these words.  They become amplified by my experiences over recent days.

• The long walk on the edge of the Pacific at Del Mar, CA with Todd Franklin (Voice 027).  Todd, whose life has been changed most recently by completing a business and rhetoric degree at Berkeley about the same time his birth-mother’s death – whose vision, essential generosity and intense talent have only gained strength in the three years since we last spoke.
• Reaching out my hand to receive the tangerines and avocado I watched Rudy Suwara (Voice 025) pick from the trees in his yard on the edge of a hill south of San Diego.  This after having Lefty, Colleen (Voice 026) and Rudy’s white shepherd join me for morning yoga.
• Spending time in the Cherokee Hills Elementary School in San Diego with SDSU professor Colette Ingraham’s graduate students in school psychology.  Women and men of Mexican, Latino, Asian and Anglo ancestry working to support the learners and families of this school that serves low income and migrant neighborhoods.
• Driving through the stunning Arizona desert into the broad expanses of Dine country.  The route N of Albuquerque took me by the smaller reservations of the Apache, Jacarilla and Zia people – the Zia the authors of New Mexico’s state symbol, the circle of the sun with its rays in each of the four directions.
• Reading from 100 Voices – Americans Talk About Change and sharing ideas with the folks gathered in Farmington, NM’s Andrea Kristina Bookstore – thanks to Allen DeSalme, a college friend I hadn’t seen since we graduated from Austin College in Sherman,TX.
• Touring Farmington the next morning and watching Allen gesture toward the adobe building where the Totah Behavioral Health Authority provides services staffed primarily by Dine mental health professionals.  Then a few blocks farther ahead, nodding in the direction of a parking lot and a culvert where two nights before two homeless folks were found frozen to death – all Dine people.
• Stopping on the way out of town for the world’s-best-car-wash-ever.  Really.  Never has my Mini known such a cleaning.  A quality and relief impossible to diminish – even with the road spray on NM550 as I headed back to ABQ through the slightly predicted snow shower.

Each of these, a point of note.

Yes. Of note in my life experience here on the road with 100 Voices.  Points of note are there in each of your lives, too.  Different from my experiences, but real and present in the business of being alive and paying attention.  And beyond that, as experiences that point both to what nourishes and to what calls for immediate action.

It isn’t theory.  It is living.  And it is (or can be) creating.

The headlines on our nation’s presidential primaries and their star players leave me cold by comparison.  I’d like to be hearing life and creativity from the people vying for the country’s highest office.  I’d like for all of us to demand that from our leaders.

Nothing wrong with theory, really – but if it is to have any relevance, it must arise from real human experience.  These days as I drive again through the richly astounding landscape composing our country, the distance between the theories touted in this primary season and what American people live and care about seems as vast New Mexico’s sky.

Better than you believe; stronger than you seem.
Carol Ackerman

“What we know is that the more people affiliate with other people, the more their sources of positive experiences and possibilities for energizing and purposeful activity in the world.”

This is my best shot at something my mentor, Jane Conoley said to me yesterday morning.  We were sitting in her living room, the Sunday morning light breathing itself across the bamboo floors, onto the white walls with their quiet and happy art forms, and into our conversation.  Jane and her husband Collie (Voices 020 & 021) are active scholars in positive psychology – taking the ideas first articulated by humanist philosophers centuries ago and moving them into practice.  When they spoke with me three years ago, Collie said, “The wonderful thing about being a psychologist is that you know you’re onto a good theory when your own life is good. “

Jane and Collie have known me more than half my life.  Over that time, I have looked to them consistently as models for what it looks like to live an honest life.  Their integrity, like the integrity they show in living the tenants of a theory they support and teach, is what led me to this great appreciation for these two.  I hadn’t seen them since the first drive around the country.  This visit I learned again from these scholars I know as friends.

Last night, Jane and Collie had asked ten of their friends to hear about 100 Voices – Americans Talk about Change.  In the same living room people from professional backgrounds as diverse as special education, journalism, international business and higher education administration listened and spoke with each other about change.

The privilege in the room was substantial.  In the time we spent together, every single person was willing to be moved.  Each one has the capacity to make considerable differences in her or his community and work.  Each engaged in the conversation as a newcomer willing to place their privilege and access toward the listening for which the 100 Voices call. The questions were real, probing and seemed aimed at what we all want to know – how can peace and cooperation actually happen?  Even in their fresh insight and curiosity, most of these people have been thinking about this in one way or another as long as they’ve been working.

This morning, Jane’s comment made me think of the conversation last night, and it made me think of the 100 Voices again.  It reminded me of the essential pull toward affiliation, cooperation and community that was so evident in so many of their words.

Among the friends gathered in Jane and Collie’s living room last night was Marshall Ackerman (Voice 018).  Marshall has just turned 87.  He is recovering from a fall that broke his hip.  His life has seen great change since I interviewed Marshall and his wife, Carol (Voice 019) three years ago.  In addition to his fall, Carol has died.  The couple was married for well over 60 years.  Last night, Marshall brought photos with him.  One showed of him when he entered WWII as an infantryman – a young and optimistic face atop a military uniform.  Another photo showed Marshall with Carol decades ago, striking in their formal attire.  Carol was smiling beautifully in a white dress with an enormous photo of her face embossed on the dress from waist up.  In that image, she was smiling in exactly the same way.  Who does that except a woman of vast character – I’d say, goddess quality!  Even three years ago – in her mid-80s – this was so.

In Sunday evening’s gathering I read some of the Ackerman’s interview.

Marshall:  Carol is now listening to CNN all the time.  I find it not offensive, but not entertaining either.  It’s just a bunch of people talking and then they go back and say the same thing over and over again but they don’t tell me anything.

Carol:  It’s opinions.

Marshall:  Well, what do I care about Anderson Cooper’s opinion?  Does he care about my opinion?

Carol:  I don’t know.

Marshall:  I know.  I know.  He doesn’t care about my opinion.

Carol:  He has a job to do and he’s doing it. 

Marshall:  He’s an entertainer.

Carol:  People watch television because they want to communicate with people similar to them.  They want confirmation that they’re not unique or isolated.  They want to know that other people are doing the same things and having he same problems.  They want to have companionship.  They want sympathy.  That is why there are questions and answers and, partially, why Mary is doing this.  She’s going to write a book about people and what they think.  Someone’s going to buy it and say, “Gee, that’s what I think.” 

You and I maybe don’t care what other people think of us.  This is because we have a job and we’re comfortable.  We don’t have the worries other people do.  But most people want to see other people with the same worries.  They want to read about it, too, to know they’re not alone.

Marshall:  What benefit is that?

Carol:  It makes them feel better – makes them not want to kill themselves. 

Marshall:  But that doesn’t really do anything for society to give people some comfort.

Carol:  Yeah, but society is made up of individuals.  If there are enough people who feel better about something, they’ll become a group and maybe there’s action.  People want to be one of something.

Carol was a mom, a wife, a school psychologist, and an engaged citizen.  The banter between Carol and Marshall sang with the affection they had for one another.  It is no surprise that they both offer great support to people they believe in – and to actions in support of community.  And it is only fitting that, as one symbol of their affection and respect, Jane and Collie donated a beautiful wooden bench to sit in front of the Gewirtz School of Education at UC-Santa Barbara.  On that bench, Carol’s word’s read, “Better than you believe; stronger than you seem.”

The Ackermans are and have been CHANGE in ways that serve as models for people like Jane and Collie who serve as models for untold thousands (me among them) who in turn serve as models for countless lives beyond themselves.

Like my mentor Jane suggests, this is the way positive change works.

It looked like a done deal to lots of folks who are paid to make authoritative calls on such things.  Chances were slim, they said a week ago, that Gingrich, Perry or Santorum could stage a comeback in the

South Carolina primary that took place last Saturday.  It’s heard of, but none of those campaigns appeared anywhere near as strong as Romney’s given the current playing field with its corporations=people, money=free speech rulebook.

Enter Gingrich’s Super Pac (remember the rulebook?).  Mega money and mega mean.  But that’s entertainment these days.  And enough people in South Carolina took as evidence of leadership whatever meanness could come forth from the podium and over the airwaves.  Newt Gingrich took the numbers on Saturday and the pundits and commentators in their ultimately astonishing capacity to wing it are at no loss for sound bites and spin in the name of political analysis.

So, of the hundreds of thousands of people pumping observations on the electoral caucuses into the media ocean, why read these 100 VOICES blogs?  Really?  What possibly could shed light on or even elevate these times and their conversations.

Maybe this.  It is terribly easy to follow the seduction of cynical opposition. “I’m the good one here, because you’re a jerk.”   The vying for moral ground in a discussion with little value or relevance has easy entertainment value because that’s a fundamental dialectic in which most of are engaged way more often than we’d like to see or certainly admit.

Two days after the SC Caucus, the Monday NYT lead headline read, “Gingrich and Romney Trade Jabs as G.O.P. Race Rolls On.”  Romney accuses Gingrich of being capricious, incapable of showing the stability needed for leadership.  Gingrich, who seems way better at the look-at-the-waste-of-a-human-being-I’m-opposing-and-pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain game went for Romney’s tax returns, and has now turned to his erasing all documentation of his 2009 positions on health care policy.  Romney has wealth and access.  So does Gingrich (maybe a little less wealth).  Both have demonstrated capacity to use people for their own material and personal gain.  Both may have seriously strong and well-reasoned ideas on meeting the actual circumstances facing our country and its people, but we can’t know what those ideas are because there is not time, and perhaps little desire, for them to come forward.

We of the reality show decade appear to love the dirt on other folks.  People who can talk smack about other people stand as our models in most popular arenas.  Whether the vitriol is reasoned or unreasoned, we the viewing and buying public (i.e., the ones who respond to the advertisements accompanying the mud slinging) seem unable to curb our appetites for this fast food of civic discourse.

I’ve been reading this stuff.  I can even amp up my own sarcastic and cutting edge – prose with a critical bite that can only be generated from a sense, not only of a better way but of a better way that, of course, only the better people (i.e., people like me) take.

This is the problem.  This is why read (and write) this blog.  We’ve got to think closely about this.   Together.  And with our hearts.

While we’re distracted into this iteration of immature adults playing who’s-the-bad-assest-cool-kid real challenges to our communities persist.  Our neighbors are still without jobs and homes leaving too many of the children in our country going to school distracted by extreme uncertainty they can’t help but pick up at home.  We continue using manufacturing and transportation that seriously advances the damage to our water and air.  Every day, too many people are going without health care.  Too many people are leaving school or getting lousy educations.  Too many people are going to prison.

The litany of social ills can also easily become part of the game.  List the problems, blame rich people and corporations, and be done with it.  I mean, isn’t complaining doing something?  Where’s my smart phone?  And, by the way, even though the Democrats aren’t doing the primaries this time around, they are no less overtaken by the pettiness than anyone else.

The 100 Americans who speak in 100 Voices – Americans Talk about Change, were already saying “STOP THIS!” way back in 2009.  When I met Kim Wade (Voice 047) in a coffee shop in Jackson, MS, he spoke of a group that would be meeting the next week to come up with nonviolent ways of seriously influencing the mid-term elections.  Mr. Wade, an African American talk radio host none too pleased with the election of Mr. Obama, shared the opinion of many of the 100 Voices that the leadership of this country must come back to the best interest of the people.  As long as the combat was going on, Mr. Wade would not soften the bully pulpit of his conservative talk show, but most of the other voices along the way were ready to try listening.

That was 2009.  It’s three years later now.  We’ve had the formation of the Tea Party, the then unnamed group to which Mr. Wade alluded, and we’ve had the emergence of the Occupy movement.  Both of these assertions of democratic voice call for change in government.  With organization and demonstration, with use of social media and public discourse (especially the mic check and general assembly work of the Occupy groups) these citizens are going beyond complaining to taking actual action.  They are articulating both concerns and solutions.

Certainly, we are still divided.  We still allow ourselves to write others off pretty quickly once we get a sense they’re “one of them.”  For me it’s difficult to tell if here in 2012 we’re less ready to listen, or perhaps more ready.  We may be more ready because we are increasingly frustrated with the alternative we default to again and again.  In its most extreme and destructive version it goes like this – I’m right, you’re wrong.  I live, you die.

We and our ancestors before us have run this kind of thinking for a long time.  Why even hold out the possibility of anything more harmonious?

For one reason – the quiet wisdom and willingness to drop agendas in service to real community solutions that showed up in the 100 Voices.  I was not all together surprised to find such wisdom, but I was amazed by its consistency.  We are far wiser and more ready for cooperation than we are led to believe.

Another reason – Well, it’s the reason to stick with this blog, to read this book, to have your own conversations, to practice listening, speaking and acting together across differences.  We tend only to notice the bad news, the bad behavior, the flaws and faults.  It is not bad to see what’s wrong and work to fix it, but it is a giant problem when there is never any sustained and encouraging attention paid to what’s working.

All those eons of human cruelty to humans (and animals and the land…), included what were likely way more instances of human kindness and creativity.  Wise leadership has come from countless nameless women and men across all human time.  It has come from our saints and sages as well, but they are very few in number.

We continue, not because of the destruction and pettiness we perpetrate, but because of the kindness – because of the heart.

Like I say to my students and have written before here, Don’t believe me.  You must check all of this out for yourself.  As you do, watch how quickly you can go (I can, too) to the posture of the primary candidates here on the doorstep of Florida – the “I’m the good one here, because you’re a jerk” posture.  When you next encounter someone you want immediately to write off, just listen and watch and see if there are more points of absolute counter values, or more spaces of shared interest and concern.

You won’t hear that suggestion in the run up to next week’s vote in Florida, but based on the Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Independents, Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Native Americans, Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans and European Americans – rich, poor, young, old, gay, straight, able-bodied, and people living with disabilities making up the 100 Voices, we’re more than ready to give it a try.

We have the capacity.  We need the courage and confidence and, it seems to me, we need each other.

Sounds like democracy.

Gong Hey Fat Choy!  A most auspicious New Year to each and all.

I just saw the link to an International Business Times article on my friend Valerie’s facebook page.  She put this quote from the article in her post, “The Dragon is larger than life and its appearance means that big things are to come.”  Then she wrote, “I can get into that! ”  Me, too!

So here I am 500 miles down the road in the Bay Area.  Given the grassroots nature of the journey, I’m waiting to hear about classes and community groups to speak with about 100 Voices – Americans Talk about Change.  Meanwhile, I did manage my first Tweet last night (I need all y’all to follow me!!) and I’m hearing today from folks in Texas, GA and WI for 100 Voices events there, so as the DIY publicity process goes…well…it’s going somewhere – “big things are to come.”

Here are the big things I pick – Americans listening to each other.  Yeah.  And I pick getting our democracy and our country back.

From the standpoint of traditions behind the Chinese calendar, the Dragon is a symbol of good fortune and intense power.  The Year of the Dragon comes around every 12 years and represents the culmination of first 11 years of the cycle.  In that cosmology, this 12^th year is the time of everything coming together in expression.  The expression can be flamboyant and emotional – like Lady GaGa or like Stephen Colbert at the opening of every show.  Excess are expected with lots of love and pain and passion.  Some of my Chinese American friends say this is the year where things explode into fruition.  Big visions can come to life, they say.

But there are cautions.   Flamboyance can be flimflam.  Emotionality can backfire.

It’s hard not to think of recent campaign slurs and shouting.  It’s also easy to remember the consistent theme among the 100 Voices calling for wise, visionary, cooperative leadership grounded in the interests of we-the-people.  Flamboyance and emotion in fulfilling that call would be very good.

My friends say, watch for unwise use of the power of the dragon – in others and in yourself.  At the same time they say, go for it.  If you’ve had something you’ve been nurturing into being, this is the year to implement.  This is the year to make it big and bright and real.

And, it’s the year that sets the pace for the next round of 12.

At the end of the article Valerie posted, Peter So is quoted regarding the year of the Dragon for the U.S.  “Sometimes luck depends on the country itself, rather than an individual president,” he said.

OK.  Let’s do it.

Three years ago today, I began the EX:Change project.  Our new president had been inaugurated the day before and January 21 was the first of my 100 days for learning from everyday U.S. citizens what they meant when they said the word,  change.  My goal was to interview 100 people in 100 days and one result was the publication of the book 100 VOICES – AMERICANS TALK ABOUT CHANGE.  Now it’s three years later.  The people of the country are still looking for change.  And I’m driving again — this time to get these voices back out to the public they came from — but also to do what I can to support one of the primary themes from the EX:Change project — listening and speaking across our differences so that we can make the changes we all want in our country.

So, here we go.  It is ours to do — and it’s ours to do together.

Somehow I am packed again.   The house is in the great hands of the best housemate ever, the car is happily tuned and fueled, and this time I’ll even have a GPS.  All of that and I also have the priceless companionship of every one of you.

Not a bad start to a year already overworked in anticipation of transformation forecast as everything from cataclysm to eternal bliss.  No matter the predictions, here in the living of it the time and the circumstances are ours.  We are a democracy and, even knowing how contorted the practices touting the banner of that ideal has become, our country and its function remain ours to reclaim and sustain.

In support of making democracy real I am getting in my car to drive as one of the 350 million – one of we-the-people.  I’m bound to be blogging here, posting on Facebook, even Tweeting…! (yes, my very first smart phone arrived yesterday evening and I’ll be live on Twitter by Monday).  The idea is to make it so you can see when I’m coming into your area.  Let me know where you are.  I’m open to spontaneous gatherings and formal gigs.  When I know, I will for sure also let you know of any specific venues and such.

Thanks to each and all of you for coming along on this journey.  I’m looking forward to seeing you and to watching as our numbers grow.

Please be in touch (email – mary@exchange09.com).

See you soon –

Let’s make this happen –
Joining together in the radical act of listening!