Enough of this Harrowing: Life on the Mobiüs Strip with educator and author Parker Palmer
“Like Jonas himself I find myself traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox.”
—Thomas Merton
Sometimes we feel torn between seemingly opposite truths. Between needing solitude and craving community. Between wanting to fix everything and learning when to say “enough”. Between the darkness of our times and an inexplicable hope that persists.
One person who has helped so many of us live with these feelings and experiences is the educator and writer
, who is the founder of theCenter for Courage and Renewal.
At 86, Palmer has spent decades exploring how we can hold life’s contradictions without being torn apart by them. In a recent conversation for Love and Philosophy with Andrea Hiott, he shared insights that we hope will come like a balm for you, too.
Dr. Parker Palmer is an American writer, educator, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, social change and spirituality. He is the Founder of The Centre for Courage and Renewal and the author of 10 popular books, including: A Hidden Wholeness, The Courage to Teach, an Undivided Life, and On the Brink of Everything.
The Survival Skill We Weren’t Taught
Palmer calls paradox a “survival concept”, an idea that feels especially helpful right now. We live in a culture obsessed with resolving tensions, picking sides, finding the one right answer. But what if the secret to thriving isn’t choosing between opposites, but learning to hold them together? What if that opens another sort of sensuality?
Consider this paradox Palmer quotes in this episode, a favorite idea of his from the physicist Niels Bohr:
“The opposite of an ordinary fact is a lie. The opposite of one profound truth may be another profound truth.”
Parker says we could even take breathing as a simple example of this. You need both inhaling and exhaling. If you decided to be “just a breathing out kind of person,” you’d die. Yet we apply this either/or thinking to so much of life: Are you an introvert or extrovert? Do you need community or solitude? Should you be vulnerable or strong?
Parker explains that both are part of us, and embracing these parts of us is challenging but transformative. Both individually and in community.
Becoming the Darkness
Palmer speaks from hard-won experience. He’s survived three major episodes of clinical depression, experiences he describes with startling clarity: “In the depths of depression, you’ve become the dark. So there’s no difference between you and the darkness.”
But even in that place where, as he puts it, “you either endure or you don’t,” something paradoxical happened. Deep in the thickets of his inner darkness, he glimpsed what he calls “the soul”—like a wild animal that “is able to survive on hardly any resources at all.”
During one of these dark periods, or just as he was beginning to come out of it enough to function again, while walking through harrowed farmland in Kentucky, a poem came to him that captures the mystery of knowing when enough is enough. He recites this poem from memory in the episode. Here are a few glimpses from it:
The plow has savaged this sweet field...
I have plowed my life this way, Turned over a whole history looking for the roots of what went wrong...
Enough. The job is done. Whatever’s been uprooted, let it be seed bed for the growing that’s to come.
That single word—”enough”—was a gentle nudge towards recovery and it can be cathartic to hear it now. Not because it instantly cured his depression, not because it instantly changes anything for us, but because it offers an image of possibility, that we can stop this harrowing and trust that something might grow from this tilled ground.
The Paradox of True Community
Here’s another paradox that comes out in this conversation: Palmer quotes theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s wisdom about community:
“Let the person who cannot be alone beware of being in community, and let the person who cannot be in community beware of being alone.”
When this paradox falls apart, Palmer observes, “solitude devolves into loneliness, isolation and community devolves into the crowd.” Looking around America today, he sees “a lot of lonely people who have joined together in crowds that become mobs.”
Real community requires people who know how to be alone with themselves. Real solitude requires people who understand their need for connection. It can take a minute for this to really sink in. Actually, we’re still trying to really grasp it.
Love That Doesn’t Try to Solve Anything
Perhaps the most moving part of the conversation was Palmer’s description of the friend who helped him during depression—not through advice or analysis, but through presence. This friend came every afternoon, sat with Palmer in silence, and massaged his feet. Rarely speaking, except occasionally to say “I can feel your struggle today” or “I feel you getting a little stronger.”
“He was there every day,” Palmer recalls, “having found the one place in my body where I could feel a connection with another human being.”
This friend understood what poet Rilke called love: “that two solitudes border, protect and salute one another.” He didn’t try to fix Palmer or offer solutions. He simply showed up, day after day, creating space for Palmer to exist exactly as he was.
The Edge Where Everything Becomes Visible
Palmer titled one of his books (from 2019) “On the Brink of Everything,” inspired by his friend
and her three-year-old daughter Maya who was discovering the world with fresh eyes. At 80, he realized he too was “on the brink of everything” and going forward to that brink, he wanted to be committed to what Buddhists call “beginner’s mind.” This is such a powerful way to imagine our lives as we all move forward.
Kurt Vonnegut once wrote: “I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”
Maybe that’s where wisdom lives—not only in the safety of certainty, but also on the edge where contradictions meet, where we can see what’s invisible from the comfortable center but where we care for each other and realize we are more than just our individual lives after all.
Letting Be
What if instead of demanding that people choose sides, we learned to hold paradox? What if instead of trying to fix each other’s struggles, we practiced presence? What if instead of fearing our brokenness, we understood that “wholeness has nothing to do with perfection” but with “embracing our brokenness as part of who we are”?
Palmer spent decades learning and sharing and teaching about the idea that you can’t separate soul from role—that trying to leave your true self at home while you go perform in the world ultimately breaks you. The alternative isn’t easy: it requires what he calls “rejoining soul and role,” bringing your full identity and integrity into every part of your life. That sounds hard, but the quality of life lived is worth it. And letting others do this for themselves in their own ways means is the real spirit of listening.
This isn’t a quick fix or a simple formula. It’s more like learning to breathe—finding the rhythm between solitude and community, vulnerability and strength, accepting what is and working for what could be.
As Palmer puts it: “The desire to feel at home in who we are and whose we are—the two great questions—runs very deep. Just keep your eye on it.”
The full conversation with Parker Palmer is available on the Love and Philosophy podcast on all your favorite platforms. Palmer is the founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal and author of ten books, including “A Hidden Wholeness,” “The Courage to Teach,” and “On the Brink of Everything.”
Parker Palmer is a beloved educator, writer, and activist who helps people find courage and meaning in their work and lives. He writes about universal human struggles, finding your calling, dealing with depression, staying true to yourself in a world that pulls you in different directions, and creating communities where people can be authentic and trust one another.
Some of the key themes in his work are as follows:
Vocation and purpose: helping people discover work that aligns with their deepest values
Inner life: making it okay to talk about the soul, meaning & identity in secular spaces
Courage over fear: practical wisdom about living with integrity despite obstacles
Education as transformation: not just information transfer, but helping people become more fully human
Parker draws from Quaker traditions but speaks to people of all faiths and none. He’s academic (former professor) but writes in plain, beautiful language, combining personal vulnerability with social activism in ways that help others find meaning and connection again.
Follow Parker on Substack at parkerjpalmer.substack.com.
Life Together inside this Paradox with Parker Palmer
Parker Palmer: [00:00:00] In the depths of depression, you've become the dark. So there's no difference between you and the darkness. There's no negotiating it. It just is what it is. The only, choice you have is, and it's, it is not even a choice. You, you either endure or you don't. I've often said, I can't imagine a, a sadder way to die than dying. With a sense that the, in all the years I had on Earth, I never showed up as my true self. with both my light and my shadow, I feel myself to be part of this, sort of, this vast chain of being this vast network of life, which is not only human life, but the life of the natural world in which we're all embedded.
And it sort of sneaks up on us with meanings that are never, you know, fully comprehensible, but that somehow hint [00:01:00] at the vastness of possibilities that, that we need to walk around respectfully as a mystery to be seen and to be observed and to be given a deep bow
the opposite of an ordinary fact is a lie. The opposite of one profound truth may be another profound truth. When that paradox comes apart, solitude devolves into loneliness, isolation and community devolves into the crowd.
And what we have going on in the United States right now is a lot of lonely people who have joined together in crowds that become mobs.
Let the person. Who cannot be alone. Beware of being in community and let the person who cannot be in community beware of being alone.
The, uh, epigraph to that book by Thomas [00:02:00] Merton is, this is his statement as follows. I am traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox, uh, playing on Jonah.
There was something in me that said. you're, you're at a turning with this. What you need to understand is that you've plowed plenty. You, you've plowed enough and more than enough, um, you're not gonna get any farther by harrowing yourself. So, you know, that wasn't a, an instant turnaround in my depression, but it, it gave me an image that sort of holds the mystery.
When to say enough and and when to take that step forward in faith that there's something worth stepping toward.
Andrea Hiott: Hey everyone. Welcome to Love and Philosophy. This is Andrea Hyatt, and this [00:03:00] episode is with Parker Palmer, who is the founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal, which is located in Greenville, South Carolina, which is a city very close to my heart, and maybe that's one of the reasons I connect so deeply with Parker, although I think there are many reasons, including the 10 books that he has written.
In which I highly suggest you have a look at because just by looking at the different titles, I imagine you might find something that's very helpful to you today.
Some of the ones we talk about here are a hidden wholeness on the brink of everything.
the courage to teach and many more. Uh, this conversation, I was really emotional, to have this conversation throughout the entire conversation. And by emotional, I mean in a positive way, I felt very alive, sort of raw at the edge of myself, which is why I start the conversation talking about On the Brink, which is one of his books that he wrote.
When he was 80 years old, [00:04:00] and this idea of being on the brink of everything really means something powerful to me at this time. I mentioned a Kurt Vonnegut quote, when Parker and I are talking, because Parker uses it in one of his books, the book on the Brink, and. I've went and found that quote, and I wanna read it to you, and here it is.
I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over out on the edge. You see all kinds of things you can't see from the center end of the quote, and that's from a 1952 novel called Player Piano. In any case, uh, this idea of the edge and the brink is very important.
these ideas of personal, collective planetary, Brinks that we've been walking on towards what's beyond them, because there's always something beyond them and how my old ways of being.
No longer serve us, what ways of being do still serve us? One thing about Parker is he doesn't try to solve everything. I don't know if you heard the conversation I had [00:05:00] about nature and bio regionalism recently, but one of the things in that conversation that meant a lot to me was understanding we can tend to and care for rather than try and solve.
And that's a message Parker's been writing about for a long time He tries to show how we can embrace these sides rather than try and solve them. And that's, as you've probably heard me say many times, I'm, when I mean by beyond dichotomy is not to solve one side by the other side or for their one side to win against the other side, but for us to somehow let the sides be what they are.
And that's what Palmer's work tries to do is, you know, let the confusion and the clarity and the sorrow and the joy. And the silence and the conversation and the fear and the possibility, and the poetry and the horror all sort of be there and notice them. And it's very hard. I mean, he, he talks about that too, about it will break your heart open to do this, to be present and be alive and feel it.
But he also talks about paradox, which is one thing that [00:06:00] has always drawn me to his work, though I had no idea. His first book had paradox in the title, as you'll hear us talk about, but he talks about paradox as a survival concept, I can hardly think of a more important sentence right now than that.
That paradox is a survival concept because I really believe that holding paradox and understanding things we've thought of as opposites or as either or. In a different way is the key that we're all in many different ways, many different fields, many different areas of life trying to figure out right now, and it's why everything feels so tense and so hard and so transformative all at once.
Parker talks about soul and role in the undivided life and how we can live into our soul, I don't wanna talk too much before this conversation. I really just wanna let it be what it is. But one thing that really means a lot to me is where we get to at the end. Because as you'll hear, he talks about his depression and some very difficult times, and [00:07:00] how when you are in certain places, you cannot feel love He says something about perhaps he was still being held by the love, even though he could not fill it. that idea, the idea that paradox might be a survival concept and that we might be being held by love even when we cannot fill it. Those are two sentences that feel really important to me that I want to speak again here before we go into this, there will be another greening season that also comes to me now as I think about this poem that sort of spontaneously comes in this conversation and the cyclical nature of renewal, but never coming back to the same place where we started. So we're gonna know it for the first time, but it's gonna be a different place I think Parker might also say it here, but he, he does quote Ram Dass sometimes of we're all walking each other home, that is what this conversation felt like to me in some way that I don't understand yet at all. So I just wanna leave it and let it be what it is and send it out to [00:08:00] you with gratitude.
The sentence that came to me after I had this conversation was just, listen, Andrea, listen and have compassion for everyone you meet, and that's what I wanna try to do. And that's what I hope that we can all do today in some form or another. It's not a weakness, it's a real power and it's a survival. It's a way of surviving and it's a way of flourishing and it's a way of finding worlds we didn't imagine could be there.
I really believe that. That's why I'm doing all of this, and thanks for listening and for helping me do this and being part of it. It really means a lot.
Okay, so, hi Parker. It's such an honor to have you on love and philosophy. Thank you for being here.
Parker Palmer: Thank you, Andrea. Delighted to be with you.
Andrea Hiott: [00:09:00] So your work has meant so much to me and to many others around me, so it's gonna be hard to, to even talk about it all in one hour. But I thought maybe we'd start, um, on the brink, on the brink of everything is a, a book that you've published, was it in 2019?
18, right? 18. Mm-hmm. And this phrase on the brink of everything, I think can lead us into a lot of places, especially today. But just to start, what does that mean for you?
Parker Palmer: Well, as you know, Andrea, um, in the book, I, I tell the story of how the title came to me, uh, from a, a, a young writer I, I much admire half my age, Courtney Martin, uh, who had written an essay, uh, about her, uh, then I think 3-year-old daughter Maya, um, who as a toddler was, you know, discovering the world with every step and every movement and [00:10:00] every new experience.
And Courtney wrote about how, um, Maya was, uh, visibly and audibly, um, and bodily on the brink of everything, uh, just full of the excitement of discovery and, uh, you know, learning the world anew e every day. Um, it, and I was, uh, uh, 80 at the time that I wrote the book or close to it, and, um, 86 now. And, uh, it, it just struck me that I too, uh, at the other end of the, of the life span, found myself on the brink of everything.
Look, looking at the world through the eyes now of, of age, um, and a lot of experience, uh, but really devoted, [00:11:00] um, as best I know how to, the Buddhist idea of beginner's mind and trying to see things anew and not get stuck as so many elders do. Um, in sort of be moaning the passage of time or, um. Becoming frozen in their perception of how things are and often how things ought to be, which is of course the way they used to, they used to be, not the way they are now.
I didn't want to step into that trap. I don't think it's at all necessary. So the title contained a lot of energy for me about how I wanna live out my, my elder years. And it all, it all came from Courtney Martin and her three-year-old daughter Maya.
Andrea Hiott: You found a lot of inspiration in youth and or in those who are at different parts of life than [00:12:00] you.
how, how has a conversation between generations been important for you?
Parker Palmer: Well, it's, um, it, it's because, um, younger generations, and there are several of them, of course, when you're 86, um, stand at, at a different point of human experience than you do.
And they, um, look at things differently. They understand things differently. Um, from my point of view, they may, they may lack a certain experience that would help them reframe things. And, and when I see that as a possibility, I'm always glad to be in dialogue with them about how that, how that same thing looks to me.
Um, how today looks to me in the world, for example, as one who has lived through, um, a lot of apocalyptic moments in US and, and [00:13:00] world history. Before I ever get to sharing my experience with them, I listen carefully for their experience because they're looking at a horizon that I can't see so clearly or well as, as, as they can.
And, but it's the same horizon that's coming at me. Um, and I need their eyes, I need their, their voices, uh, to help me see how it looks through, through the lens of, of someone who's experience is relatively fresh and new as of today. Um, so that I don't get, get stuck in yesterday.
Andrea Hiott: I think you use a Kirk Vonnegut quote about things looking different.
On the brink or at the edge relative to, to the center. And as you were just saying that, I was thinking how I'm almost [00:14:00] too nervous to talk to you because I so want to know what it's like for you right now. And I feel a little nervous to even asks things so personally. so I just wanna say that because I, I feel like I need to, to say it.
And um, within that is that I'm really wondering how things look from where you are now in that Kurt Vonnegut sense. And I, I don't, I mean that in terms of age, of course, where you are in your life, but even today and how you're feeling. And, I would just really love to hear, hear that an expression of, of how things really feel for you today.
If, it's okay to ask that.
Parker Palmer: Absolutely. And, um, please feel totally free to ask those more personal questions. As you know, I've written about deeply personal experiences such as my several bouts with clinical depression over the course of the [00:15:00] years. And, uh, I find it very valuable, you know, to show up in the world as I am, uh, as fully and honestly as I possibly can.
Uh, I've often said I can't imagine a, a sadder way to die, um, than dying. With a sense that the, in all the years I had on Earth, I never showed up as my true self. Um, you know, with, with both my light and my shadow. So today, um, in the midst of, uh, the political. Economic, ecological, societal calamities that are, that seem to be engulfing the US and the rest of the world.
Um, I, I go back and forth between the shadow and the light. Um, you know, I have days when it's, it's really hard, [00:16:00] um, to, to get up and, um, and, and feel energy to pursue the work that I feel I need to be doing as a writer because I still feel very much called, um, to using my writing, uh, as a way to, to shed light if possible, but also to be honest about the darkness of the times that we're in.
And there are days when it's just very difficult to sit down at the keyboard and feel as if, um. Those words might make any difference to anybody. Um, I think where I always come down, um, when it feels like what difference could this possibly make is, is to realize, once again, [00:17:00] um, beginner's mind realize all over again that it makes a difference to me.
Uh, what makes a difference is the, is the feeling of continuing to be engaged with the world, with my gifts and the best of the light I have to offer, and honesty about my own shadow. Um, because in the past that that impulse to, to do what feels whole and true and honest and full of integrity to me. Has, has been what's animated all of the work I've done.
Not, not only the writing, but the, the founding, uh, 30 years ago of the Center for Courage and Renewal, and the work it's doing across this country and, and around the world helping people in, [00:18:00] in my catch phrase anyway, to rejoin soul and role, to bring their identity and integrity, uh, more fully, uh, into the world, into their personal lives and, and into their vocational lives, and into their public and political lives.
Um, because I think we need, um, a, a whole lot of human identity and integrity and to reassert itself in a world where the identity and integrity of so many people is being trampled on and disowned and dismissed. Um, so, so that, you know, when, when you, when language of that sort, um, reasonably well describes the work that you've been doing for many years and the work you'd like to continue to do, um, that, that sets a pretty high bar [00:19:00] for, you know, for getting up each morning and, um, trying to practice what you preach.
Andrea Hiott: Yes. And it's meant a lot. It still means a lot. It will continue to mean a lot, you know, even your substack is meaning so much. Uh, so you're reaching so many people from that, you know, writing as you do. And that brings up gratitude. And, part of what you've said in your books is that part of this feeling alive and staying in this place that you just described is.
Also that you have a sense of gratitude that you are still alive after all you've faced. is that part of, of how you find this way to continue helping all others too and help yourself Of course, in the way you said, but
Parker Palmer: Yeah, very, very much so. Very much so. Andrea. I think, um, you know, if you're not grateful for a life like mine, which in which you've not only been able to survive some deep [00:20:00] darkness, but also find yourself thriving on the other side, um, if you're not grateful for, um, the opportunities that you've been able to make, use of your own privilege.
And so the privilege is structural and, it's not what I would choose. I would much rather have a society where. The distinctions between those with and without privilege are pretty close to eliminated. Uh, but when you do have privilege, the question is, are you gonna use it of for anyone else's good or are you just going to, you know, enjoy it yourself as if you had, you had earned it.
So I'm, I'm grateful for all of those, forces in my life, which have said in regards to my own privilege as a straight white male, well educated, reasonably well off person, Um, [00:21:00] this just came to you for historic reasons that are fundamentally unjust reasons.
So, no, I'm not grateful for that, But I am grateful for the fact that I got some great help along the way in using that privilege on behalf of other people. So when you put it all together, both, both that which, you know, I have had help to, uh, understand and that which I've worked hard, to achieve, and the, the simple fact that the gene pool from which I come has allowed me to, have allowed me to have this many years on earth, what's not to be grateful for?
You know, it seems like ingratitude would be, uh, really gross at, at this point in life and very, very unseemly and sort of not worthy of a grownup, right?
Andrea Hiott: Yes. Do you still feel that sort of [00:22:00] gratitude that I feel in your books gratitude just to like walk in the Douglas first and gratitude that feel life, you know, um, I'm thinking of, maybe we can go into it a little bit.
The, some of the struggles that you've had and that you've written about and that have been helpful just because you've, as you said, just stated where you are right now in that, in that moment, which is so hard to do, you've mentioned the roles and the soul and in the undivided life and, and elsewhere.
You, you help us to understand how we can be ourself and what the soul is. And I wonder how you see that in connection to. Your life, but the life that you are part of and, and are feeling, because that connects too, I think, to why we still wanna write and leave these messages for future generations.
Parker Palmer: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I do, I feel, um, myself, and this is a feeling that wasn't sort of native to [00:23:00] me at first. Um, but as the years have gone by, it's grown in me. I, I feel myself to be part of this, sort of, this vast chain of being, this vast network of life, which is not only human life, but the life of the natural world in which we're all embedded.
And I think unconsciously, even, even before I had that personal bodily awareness of connectedness with this, with this largeness. Um, I, I was using metaphors from the natural world, for example, the metaphors of the four seasons that I used to frame the retreat work that we do at the Center for Courage and Renewal, where we explore what it means that a human life gets lived through, [00:24:00] metaphorically through the seasons of, uh, of fall, winter, uh, spring and summer.
Um, in, in ways we can track very directly, and of course we do because we are creatures of that world. Those aren't just seasons in, in the, in the, in the woods or the mountains, or the desert or the across the waters. These, these are seasons of our lives. So, you know, even before I had a consciousness of being.
Joined with all of that, um, I was drawing on those metaphors out of some instinct that, um, this is true. And if we, if we can touch that bedrock truth. Um, as we began doing 30 years ago at the Center for Courage and Renewal, we can frame, um, the search for meaning and purpose in [00:25:00] life in a way that accommodates a huge range of philosophical convictions, uh, religious beliefs and, um, worldview, which has always been my intent.
I, I, I've never been a person who thought, okay, my particular way of looking at the world has it all wrapped up, and I don't want to hear about others. I, I've always seen wisdom traditions, spiritual traditions, religious traditions. As, as just one turn of the prism. Uh, but when you turn it again, the light gets refracted in another way.
And, and it's the, it's the sort of totality, um, the, uh, you know, uh, uh, the, the, um, there's a word here that I'm losing or lost for the moment. I'll, I'll get back to it. That's [00:26:00] right. The holographic, the holographic principle that, you know, in the microcosm you can see the macrocosm and if you keep turning and looking for those microcosmic instances of a larger view of things, you can, you can begin to put together something that.
It doesn't, it never exhausts the truth of the whole, which is inexhaustible and ultimately a mystery. But you can come into a deeper appreciation of the vastness of that in which you're embedded. I even wrote a poem about this called Everything Falls Away. That, that maybe, uh, at some point I could read.
I think I can find it here on Oh, I would love that. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: I noticed, and I mean, it's, of course I noticed because you write poetry in, in, in the book we already discussed, and [00:27:00] poetry comes up often and it's very important for me too, that I just wanna notice that, that, that that's a very important source too, isn't it, of connection to life.
yeah,
Parker Palmer: yeah. No, you're right. I, and it's good to know that you're a fellow poetry lover. Um,
Andrea Hiott: because
Parker Palmer: that's such an important lens for me. The poets are just kind of remarkable. Well, just flat, flat out remarkable.
What, what they, what they pick up, um, out of the corner of their eye and then somehow communicate to us.
I'm a, um, Emily Dickinson has a great line that I've always loved. She says, tell the truth, but tell it slant. because if you try to run headlong at it, it'll, it's, it'll blind you. Um, and you know, you'll be wiped out. But if you tell it slant the way, you know, the way astronomers say there are, if, if you, if you're not using a [00:28:00] telescope, there are some heavenly bodies that you can only catch out of the corner of your eye because the receptors there are more sensitive, to light that you cannot see if you look headlong at it.
Um, is, is I love the fact that poetry tells the truth, but tells it slant. So, and it sort of sneaks up on us with meanings that are never, you know, fully comprehensible, but that somehow hint at the, the vastness of, of possibilities that, um, that we need to walk around, uh, at, uh, respectfully as a mystery to be seen and to be observed and to be given a deep bow while still, you know, remaining curious.
What, what is that and what's it all about? Um, be, and I think that curiosity is a [00:29:00] huge energy for life that somehow the poets manage to capture with, with very few words.
Andrea Hiott: Yes. And that what you were just saying makes me think about. Other parts of your work that I love so much. What, and I know that's been important for you, the idea of paradox and living the tension, and even, I think you've talked about writing the contradiction or, you know, writing like R-W-R-I-D-I-N-G, um, and poetry does that in a very special way.
But I wanna put that word out there as I wanna talk about it with you paradox, and hear what you, what your feelings are of it. But also before I, as you were talking, I was remembering there's so much nature even early on in, you know, the sunrise, the sunset, but also wildness. This word wildness that I remember you using, when you were in deep depression, I think you said it showed it to, it, it showed the wildness of the world to you or something like that.
So I just wanna put those two things there. and you can [00:30:00] go wherever you want with them, but they both came up as you were.
Parker Palmer: Talking
Andrea Hiott: about poetry.
Parker Palmer: Yeah, no, you're, you're, well, you're absolutely right. And those, I think those are very, um, insightful connections that, that you're making that actually helped me think about my own work in a new way, Um, so I'll try to keep them both in mind. But let me start with the, the wild piece or perhaps original wildness that I sometimes maybe have talked about. So I've often said about depression, um, the kind that I've experienced on, on three occasions in my life, deep dives into months of, uh, debilitating clinical depression.
Um, it's not like being lost in the dark because. If you're lost in the dark, there's a difference [00:31:00] between you and the darkness. And you can imagine yourself in a dark room still there as someone separate from the darkness, able to grope around, maybe find, uh, a shade to pull up or a switch to turn on a light or a little opening somewhere.
Somehow you, if you're just lost in the dark, you can somehow negotiate the dark. But in the depths of depression, you've become the dark. So there's no difference between you and the darkness. And this, there's no negotiating it, it just is what it is. And, um, the only, the only choice you have is. It's, it is not even a choice.
You either endure or you don't. Um, but it was [00:32:00] under those circumstances that I was sometimes after a lot of enduring able to see a tiny, tiny possible spark of life deep, deep in that darkness distant from me. But there a, a, a kind of micro reminder of a possibility that I'd almost forgotten about, which is the possibility to live again.
Um, and I came to liken that in a rough metaphor of being lost in a very dark wood. Um, but finding. Back, back in the thickets, the far thickets of that wood. This, this thing called the soul, which sort of came to me as a, as a wild animal. [00:33:00] Um, that original wildness of, of the human soul, which, uh, which is able to survive on hardly any resources at all as wild animals do.
And, and that somehow was, you know, calling me to reconnect with that original wildness and feel again, that pulse of life, that possibility of life, um, over against all of that in me, which said, there's no life left for you. And so do the obvious, you know, uh, get it, get it over with. And, and that that became, um, you know, not instantly curative, but it became, uh, a source of, of hope.
And so in, in some way, I think that [00:34:00] connects back to the other piece that you mentioned, Andrea, which is the notion of paradox. And paradox is something that the power of paradox, the importance of paradox came to me very early in my career as a writer and, you know, earlier, still in my own personal journey to understand what life was all about and how to frame it in a way that opened possibilities.
In fact, my very first book was, was titled The Promise of Paradox. Um, and, um, how
Andrea Hiott: have I missed this? Oh my goodness. Whoa. That's, that's very exciting for me. Actually. I did, I, there's a book I didn't know, sorry, but that's, now I have something to find.
Parker Palmer: Not at all. You obviously know the other books well, and I I appreciate that.
And, um, yeah, the Promise of Paradox, [00:35:00] excuse me, was published in 79 or 80, and it was really, it was really stimulated by, um, the reading I was doing at the time in Thomas Merton, uh, the Great Trappist Monk and Mystic who also became patron saint of, um, folks in the, in the Civil rights movement and in the peace movement of the mid 20th century.
Really remarkable guy who spanned two worlds.
Andrea Hiott: didn't he say that undivided life, or maybe it was, um, hidden wholeness or something that you talk about a lot, but I feel like there's a paradox there, or a kind of holding of contradiction in, in some of his words that you
Parker Palmer: have used quite often.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. He was, you're right. He, he was the originator of the phrase, a hidden wholeness. Um, but earlier than that, what sparked me was a journal he wrote called The Sign of Jonas, [00:36:00] um, based on, you know, bouncing off of the book of Jonah in the Bible.
the, the, uh, epigraph to that book, um, by Thomas Merton is, this is his statement as follows, I am traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox, uh, playing on Jonah, traveling in the belly of whale.
That's
Andrea Hiott: wonderful.
Parker Palmer: And, uh, I thought, wow, that's it. I
So I started, you know, opening myself to understandings of paradox. And I think for me, a breakthrough was reading, um, about the, the great Nobel Prize winning physicist Neil Bore, um, who, uh, once said, and he was such an interesting guy and himself, he, he once said, um, I mean, one of the reasons that I found him so interesting was that there was this story [00:37:00] about how he had visitors in his lab one day, this Nobel Prize winning fellow, and.
Somebody noticed that there was a horseshoe hung on the wall over his work table, and they said, well, Dr. Bore, you're, you're great physicist. Surely you don't believe in hor that horseshoes bring good luck. And he said his response was, oh, no, I don't believe that at all. But they say, it works whether you believe it or not.
So I just love the looseness of that mind and that imagination and that, that humor.
Um, so he said, Daniel, this was the phrase that really opened my mind. He said, uh, the opposite of an ordinary fact is a lie, but the opposite of one profound truth may be another profound truth.
And I, I loved that understanding of paradox, partly [00:38:00] because he says, it may be right, there's discernment involved here, but I got to thinking about, about ex, you know, human realities that might fit that, that sort of formula of one profound truth being the opposite of another profound truth. Um, and of course the bodily, the bodily, uh, piece that came to me pretty quickly was, well, breathing in and breathing out is a paradox in, in that sense.
Um, we, we need both, you know? And if I were to say to you, you know, I've decided I'm basically a kind of breathing out kind of guy, so I'm, that's all I'm gonna do from here on out. You know, we'd be, we'd be saying goodbye to each other. Uh, it, that's just not the way things work at that level of reality.
But similarly, I can construct, uh, a statement like this. Uh, [00:39:00] is the human self made for community? Absolutely no question about it. We come from community. We're sustained by community. We, we go, we return to community. Is the human self made for solitude? Absolutely. No question about it. We all have to come to terms with ourselves and what's going on inside of us and embrace ourselves in a way that no one else can embrace.
Um, and we all have a solitary journey to make from life to death, which no one can accompany us on, no matter how well we've been accompanied in earlier journeys of our life. So I got to thinking how, how right on target Neil's Bohr was with that notion of one profound truth may be, uh, the opposite of another profound truth.
Andrea Hiott: [00:40:00] That's beautiful. And it relates very much to what we were discussing about the brink, but also this wildness that moment when you were really depressed, I'm not sure which of the episodes it was when the wildness came, maybe the first, in any case. that feeling being the darkness as you express it so well, I remember you wrote about it as being in the dark and then you sort of realize no, you, you are the darkness. when you're in that place, there's no real way to describe it or, or whatever.
actually, it, it's funny because you, what you're talking about with the individual in the community, I was just with a group of philosophers. I don't know if you know the philosophers of like embodied cognition and enactivism and this, this idea of what is a self is a relation and so on. And we were talking about how at the same time that that's so true.
There's something in you that is so individual and so unique and maybe you're even here to express it. or I'm sort of put, I'm, I'm saying that, but. That can go the other way too, like when you're depressed, um, or when you're in pain and there's something that's so only [00:41:00] individual that you can't express.
And I guess I'm trying to see how, how do we, how did you, how do you understand or hold that, that paradox of, of the self being relation and the self being so sometimes painfully, um, unex, expressible.
Parker Palmer: Yeah, it's a great question and, but, and it takes us in, it could take us in so many different directions. Um, and of, and of course the philosophers, like you are still working on it because it's one of those, uh, I don't know. It's one of those questions that Rilke wrote about. questions.
We can't answer questions. We just have to live, uh, in, in hopes that some distant day, he said. We might live our way into an answer, um, which sometimes does happen.
Andrea Hiott: is that what happened when you were seeing the light and the way you described it, when you are the darkness, but the light comes? How is that possible,
Parker Palmer: it's, it's, it's, it's such an interesting conundrum. Let me, let me, uh, quote, you know, we get [00:42:00] along with a little help from our friends and I've tried to read, uh, friends as it were, uh, who be intellectual, spiritual, philosophical friends, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Andrea Hiott: Mm-hmm.
Parker Palmer: The great, um, the great German pastor who, uh, who found the courage to wi stand up against Hitler, for which he paid with his, his life.
Um, he wrote a book called Life Together, which, uh, is about community, and it's one of those books that. I've, I've trusted deeply because if you know the story of Bonhoeffer building community under the, under the Third Reich, um, underground community, resistance community, community that put people at great risk, you, you really think, okay, this guy has a right to talk about community.
Um, and I should pay [00:43:00] attention to what he says. One of the things he says in, in his book, life Together goes like this, and Neil s Bore would've approved. I think Bonhoeffer says, let let the person who cannot be alone beware of being in community and let the person who cannot be in community beware of being alone.
And I think there's just a deep wisdom in the way he puts that particular paradox because. If you, when a paradox falls apart, when you don't hold these, these life-giving poles in creative tension with each other, community, solitude back and forth, what I sometimes call life on the Mobius strip, um, co-creating each other as you go.
When, when that paradox comes apart, solitude devolves into loneliness, [00:44:00] isolation and community devolves into the crowd. And you know, what we have going on in the United States right now is a lot of lonely people who have joined together in crowds that become mobs, uh, that become third rike kinds of mobs.
And it's not good to say the obvious. Um, but when that paradox is held together and people in community understand what it means to protect and nurture their own solitude, and people in solitude understand that their need for community and the availability of community, the whole dynamic becomes very life giving.
So it is, it's that mutual resourcefulness and again, that life on the Mobius Strip where you, you can't really distinguish [00:45:00] between the two. 'cause they keep co-creating each other as you travel the Mobius Strip.
Andrea Hiott: It's one of those phrases I think of a lot about, because a lot of this is being able to become aware of that and to, to hold life in that way, to understand that when things are happening, it's a whole different way of, of thinking. Which, and then as you were talking, I think somewhere you even say paradise is a sort of paradise paradox is a sort of, um, survival concept.
It's about surviving. And I wonder if that relates to, if it even can relate to when we're really sick, you know, when we are in those moments. Can we still hold that paradox there? Um, I know you've, you don't have an answer for how you've gotten through all these hard moments Exactly. But
Parker Palmer: Well, one of the first things that comes to me is, um, Carl the wor the work of Carl Jung, um, who's been another, um. Influential thinker in, in my life and [00:46:00] young was very big on saying that, that, uh, that the, the cure, the cure is in the disease. so that we make a mistake if we simply try to eliminate the symptoms of the disease.
Andrea Hiott: Mm-hmm.
Parker Palmer: Um, the, the, the secret is to go deeply into the disease to find the cure, um, which is a big, big paradox. Um, the, the, the western medicine generally, uh, tends to ignore or, or, or roll right over. Um, we, we are involved in the symptom relief business. So the whole metaphor, the whole medical metaphor is take a pill or.
Undergo a surgery that just gets rid of the symptoms [00:47:00] without looking deeply at the, the disease for its sources in which there will also be a cure. I mean, that applies more directly to psychological and spiritual pathologies than it may to physical pathologies. But I don't think that there's that, that they're all together different, um, medicine in, in Western, even in western medicine and in western medical schools these days, there is a recognition that mind, body, spirit healing is a real thing and that there are things that allopathic physicians can do to invoke the mind and the spirit as they work with the body that actually enhance healing is.
As determined by laboratory studies and observations. So it, I'm just, [00:48:00] I, I, for, for me, um, how to put this as, you know, this is such subtle stuff and language. Some is, language is sometimes not subtle enough to, to, uh, really express it well. But there, it's, there's something for me about working my way through depression, um, that that has to do with respecting the mystery of depression and walking around it with that respect rather than demanding an analytic understanding that will fix me.
Right?
Andrea Hiott: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So,
Parker Palmer: so once I let go of. Of that, of that sort of empiricist demand.
Andrea Hiott: Mm-hmm.
Parker Palmer: I want an analysis, I want an answer. I want a pill or whatever that will fix this thing. And I'm [00:49:00] not, I'm not speaking against medication. Some people need medication. I needed it for a while. I haven't needed to, to stay on it.
So if that's what you need, please do it. But it seems to me that a posture of respectfully walking around a mystery is more likely to lead to healing than, than not that I do have a poem that I think I've memorized. I'll see if I can. Oh,
Andrea Hiott: please. It's a fairly
Parker Palmer: brief poem. I think I can, uh, quote it from memory.
Um, that has to do with a moment, with a curative moment, I guess is what I'd call it. Andrea. Um. Uh, with regards my depression. So, and maybe it will, um, speak a little bit to this idea of holding the mystery without demanding a, a fix. Uh, so this was based on an experience I had, and [00:50:00] I think I was probably halfway through or a little more of the way through one depression when I decided to, I had enough energy to take a trip, uh, out into the country in, in another state, into a rural area where there was a, uh, community of Roman Catholic sisters, one of whom I had gotten to know earlier in life who was a very trustworthy conversation partner.
Uh, deeply empathetic and understanding person, uh, with whom I could, uh, speak about my depression, maybe an hour or two a day. Meanwhile, just. Um, rest at this retreat center, this religious retreat center in the middle of this, this, uh, farmland. It happened to be in Kentucky. And, um, one day, um, halfway through that week, I was out [00:51:00] walking down a country road where there were farm fields on both sides of the road.
No, no human beings in sight, no buildings in sight. Just acres and acres of farmland, which had, which had recently been, been plowed. Uh, a stage of plowing that, that's called, that farmers call harrowing, Disc harrow is dragged through the fields to bust up the earth prior to finer plowing and prior to planting.
And I was suddenly struck with, I, I have enough of a firm background to know that I was looking at Herod Fields and I was suddenly struck with the multiple meanings of that word. I, I I, my, I was feeling Herod myself. Mm-hmm. And here were these Herod fields. So a, a poem began to emerge, which I worked on over the rest [00:52:00] of the week while I was there.
But a lot of it came to me just out walking. And I'll see if I can get it by memory. Probably would be, would help if I close my eyes. So I, yeah, I
Andrea Hiott: was gonna close mine too. So it was kind of, yeah,
Parker Palmer: called harrowing. The plow has savaged this sweet field. Misshapen, claudes of earth kicked up rocks and twisted roots exposed to view. Last year's growth demolished by the blade. I have plowed my life this way. Turned over a whole history looking for the roots of what went wrong until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred enough, the job is done, whatever's been uprooted.
Let it be seed bed [00:53:00] for the growing that's to come. I plowed to unearth last year's reasons, the farmer plows to plant a greening season.
Andrea Hiott: Wow.
Parker Palmer: And that that poem, I've sometimes felt like the most important line of poetry I've ever written was that single word enough.
Andrea Hiott: Hmm.
Parker Palmer: That there was something in me that said, you know, you're, you're at a turning with this. What you need to understand is that you've plowed plenty. You, you've plowed enough and more than enough.
Um, you're not gonna get any farther by harrowing yourself. So, you know, that wasn't a, an instant turnaround in my depression, but it, it gave me an image that sort of [00:54:00] holds the mystery of, of, uh, of when to say enough and, and when to take that step forward in faith, that there's something worth stepping toward.
Andrea Hiott: Thank you so much for reading that. That's, I think that will be very important to a lot of people who hear it. It was important to me and to hear you read it like that, um. And it made me think of the roles and the soul and its soul and soil, you know? Um, there's a lot in there, but also I think it's so helpful to be able to hear that it's okay to that enough, you know, to, isn't that connected a bit to being your soul.
Letting yourself see your soul, feel your soul isn't, is there something about, I mean, I'm thinking of the writing process itself and how important it is in your [00:55:00] life and how that was kind of an expression of how the writing was a way of surviving, but also holding this paradox. And also, I don't know how to put it exactly into words, but when we think of soul and role.
It. How, how can you, how can we express that It's for people who don't, haven't read you yet and don't, are just listening here. Um, that it's okay to be the, so the soul, the soul and the soil and the, the power too. And also to say that it's enough. I, I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here, but there's some connection there that I, I wanna bring out with the soul and the role in the soil.
Parker Palmer: Yeah. Um, no, it's a, I think that that's a great kind of force field question, you know, which is what we're do really doing here to explore sort of force field that's hard to pin down because it can't be pinned down. [00:56:00] Um, but what my, what, what, what my mind turns to when, when you, um, asked that Andrea, uh, was, um, was the word, um, humus, um.
Or earth or, or that which fertilizes the seed, um, that, that, that rich compost in which the seed begins to grow. It's, you know, it's closely related to the word humble and humility, and it's closely related to the word humiliation. Um, so in, we live in a culture that regards all of this as humiliating, right?
Andrea Hiott: Yes, yes. Um,
Parker Palmer: I, I, you know, when, when I started writing and speaking publicly about my experiences of depression, which incidentally I didn't do until [00:57:00] almost 10 years after my first experience of depression, when I felt like, okay, I can talk about this in a way that that is integrated into my sense of self.
That I'm no longer ashamed of it. I'm no longer embarrassed by it. And I, and until that point I wasn't ready to talk about it. Um, and, and I'm glad I waited because until it's integrated, you, you can't be a reliable commentator on the experience. It's still sort of other than who you are. And it's like you're reporting on an enemy rather than on a piece of your complex wholeness.
Um, that's where I started coming up with a notion, with this notion that wholeness has nothing to do with, with perfection. Wholeness is about embracing our brokenness as part of who we are, along [00:58:00] with our strengths and, and our light. But when I first started writing about depression as this sort of, you know, mid-career professional.
Who was trying to establish himself as a writer and a speaker, and a workshop leader, and, uh, soon to establish this nonprofit that's still going strong. 30 years later, people around me said, no, no, no, don't do that. That that'll make people feel like you're weak. You know, that'll make people feel like you're, you're on the edge of collapse.
Who wants to follow anybody who's on the edge of collapse? And, and my my response to that was simply, um, this, this is who I am and I'm no longer at a point where I feel a need to hide out, uh, about that. But people felt like that would be humiliating. Um, and of [00:59:00] course a lot of women will get the same advice.
About anything that involves emotional vulnerability, you know, don't go there. Um, you're, that would be showing weakness. And a man wouldn't do that. Well, I'm here to say men should do that. Um, and we need, you know, everyone who's willing and able to model what it means to, to live, uh, out loud in public a whole life.
Um, not overemphasizing or overstressing and any of it. The humility, the humility that comes with, with one's struggles is, is, is an essential part of what we were talking about at the very beginning of this conversation, which is beginner's mind. Which is the willingness to say, uh, yeah, life [01:00:00] is about getting up and then falling down and then getting up and then falling down and getting up and falling down again and getting up again.
That's what it's about. And it does no good. Um, if, if, if we're interested in authentic community and relationship, it does no good to pretend that it's otherwise, because at some level, uh, even the folks who don't wanna talk about this stuff realize we're faking it. Um, when, when we, you know, talk in an unbalanced way about who we are, I think that's one of the big problems, isn't it, of a lot of social media, is that people are presenting themselves in heroic.
Uh, championing ways all the time, and there's a terrible distortion of reality for everybody.
Andrea Hiott: Parker, I'm so happy that you [01:01:00] brought that word humiliation in, in with the homeless, with the earth, with the soil that's so that's so rich in so many ways. I mean, not only in where, where we are right now in terms of what you said about men needing to get in touch with that and, and wanting to get in touch with that side of themselves, and also women also. I think of it in academia, this word humiliation is such, or shame is such a big, you know, monster kind of chasing everyone around.
Nobody wants to be humiliated. and yet we're all sort of always at the brink. that beginner's mind is where we, where the best stuff comes in science or in, in life and anywhere. And to be there is a kind of humbling place to always be. So it makes me think about your early years and how you learned those lessons.
and that's like that holding the paradox that we were talking about that now at your, where you are now, it seems so easy that you can, can hold this. But then here's me like half your age and around a lot of people right now who are really trying very, very [01:02:00] hard to figure out how to hold what you just expressed in so many ways.
It doesn't, we don't have to go into all of them, whether it's a man, a woman, an academic, whatever. But that feeling that you expressed, I feel like is really. The thing we're trying to figure out how to hold right now. Mm-hmm. Which relates to the paradox and so on. But, when you think about yourself, when you first went to, when you, when you sort of set off out of academia, which also was you were told not to do, I think, uh, in a similar way, right?
Like with the humiliation, how, how did, when you think of that person who did that, and where you are now and how clear in a way or calm you can be about these things, I wonder what, what that feeling is for you.
Parker Palmer: Yeah. Well, it's, um, yeah, I think it is probably worth mentioning that, as soon as I put in all the hard work and the years necessary to get a PhD at the University of California Berkeley, I looked around the world where our cities were burning because of racial injustice, and I decided that.[01:03:00]
I didn't wanna use my training in the social sciences in the academy, but I became a community organizer in Washington DC and I did have, uh, friends and colleagues who thought right away, well, that's humiliation right there. You know, why, why are you not taking, why are you not taking one of those academic jobs that you've been offered with a, with a great PhD from a great university?
Mm-hmm. And all I could ever say Andrea was, um, I can't not do it. Um, that there was something in me that, looking back, I would say, there was something in me that said if I didn't follow that, that imperative of my soul, which is how it felt, um, to get engaged with racial injustice in this, in this country, if I hadn't followed that, I, I would've paid a real price, uh, at the level of soul.
[01:04:00] In years down the road. Uh, so it was tough and it was tough for probably 15 years, um, as things unfolded, but eventually it came together in a sense of vocation that I, at this point, clearly treasure.
Andrea Hiott: and that so many treasure. I just have to say, I mean, thank goodness you were able to hear that and go with that back then, you know?
Well, everything we talked about at the beginning comes from those decisions, right? That you You, you really went a different way. I think you went to Linda's farm, by the way, and then to the Quaker community and so on. So it was a whole other path in this. But anyway,
Parker Palmer: yeah, I got to know a lot of the communal experiments of, of the, of the, of the sixties and seventies. That's, that's for sure. and I have to say, Andrew, that I. I, I did none of it by myself. You know, there was always a, a, a community, um, either either coming together or forming around me. I mean, [01:05:00] again, that's on the Mobius strip, right?
Mm-hmm. You lose, mm-hmm. You lose some connections, you gain others because of the whatever magnetic field we have, uh, in which we attract or repel one another as life moves along. So, you know, I think, I think really all I can say is that, um, to, to folks who are midstream with, with that, um, is, is just hang on and, and keep, uh, uh, tracking the unfolding of your consciousness.
Of your feelings, um, of your sense of self as, as time goes by and, and find a path that allows you to feel, I guess the phrase I want to use is more and more at home, in your own skin and more and more at home, on the face of the earth. [01:06:00] Um, for all its complexities, still a good place to be. Um, and I think those, the, the desire to feel at home and who we are and in who we are and in whose we are.
The two great questions. Who am I and who's am I in community. I think that the desire to feel at home in both those regards runs very deep and just keep your eye on it. Um, and. You know, take your temperature on a regular basis on both of those counts and make those mid-course corrections that you, that you need to make.
There's, there's no one size fits all, that's for sure. Um, I know people, I had colleagues at Berkeley who, unlike me, stayed in academic life, and I'm glad they did because they made a great contribution, a [01:07:00] transformative contribution from the inside that I couldn't have made my work as a writer eventually brought me back to the academy.
Writing about the academy I've not in, not in terms of employment. I've worked largely independently for 40 years, but I wrote about, and spoke about and, and, uh, agitated for education reform in a way that brought me back to the academy. So even that. Um, piece of the Mobius strip, you know, returned me to where I thought I'd, I'd left.
Andrea Hiott: courage to teach. We, we were gonna talk about that. Courage to teach. Yeah. Another time.
Parker Palmer: Yeah. So I'd just say, um, some physicians will talk about the tincture of time as, as a, uh, as remedy, you know, and I think it's true. I think if you stay alert and aware and make [01:08:00] those mid-course decisions that, that, uh, may feel risky, but also feel true.
Andrea Hiott: I wonder about this word love. And as you're talking about community, by the way, thank you for saying that about academia, because I don't think it's that you have to leave academia. It's more what we're talking about of getting to that clarity that.
Holding that place wherever you are, whichever. And then you can see which path feels like the one you can't not do as you so well expressed it, but how does love come into this for you? Just to kind of go out of this, I know somewhere you wrote some, somewhere at the beginning you were asking, how can I love, you know, my family, how can I love my job?
Like that was a question I think for you earlier in those years that we're talking about him. how would this communion and community and One of the philosophers I was just with Hannah de Jager, writes about loving and knowing, being sort of.
Really close together. in a way we were holding there and she said something to me and she, she gave me permission to say it, but just this past [01:09:00] week we were at a conference or at a science thing, and, and she, we were talking about depression and she's felt it, and she said, there's a place you go where there's no love anymore.
You know? And it reminded me of what you said about what you just said. where you become the darkness, I just wanna put that there and see what you think about that, because I find it very hard. You know, I'm thinking about love a lot and love is really hard.
It's that hu humous. That earth, soil, soul, humiliation, all of that too. So I just wanna put that there before we go and see, you know, if you have any experiences about love that you wanna share or just whatever might come up. as I say all of this.
Parker Palmer: Yeah, yeah. Well first of all, let me say your, I think your friend and colleague is exactly right that you do go to a place in deep depression where there is no love and you can't imagine that there ever was or will be.
Um, and, and yet, you know, on the other side, I have to say that, [01:10:00] that one of, one of the things I glance at out of the corner of my eye is the possibility that maybe even in that deep darkness, I was somehow held by a love I couldn't feel, uh, 'cause in depression you can't feel anything. It's. Depression isn't sadness, it's the deadening of all your emotions.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Parker Palmer: Um, so yes to what your friend and colleague said. Um, uh, it, you know, it's, it seems to me that a, that there's such a, a continuum of kinds of love, uh, that it's a hard thing to talk about under one rubric. At, at one end of that continuum, I think is, um, a sort of common understanding of love, which is the desire to be intimate with, to get close to, to grow in, in intimacy with a person, with a, [01:11:00] with, with the natural world, with ex experience, maybe with a subject matter that you love very deeply.
And the link, I think, between knowing and loving is exactly in that, that that knowing becomes a way of. Of understanding and thereby entering into a more intimate experience with whatever the loved one may be, um, human or or otherwise, at the other end of the continuum, you know, without trying to tick off all the stops in between.
At the other end of the continuum is, is a definition of love that comes from Rainer Maria Rilke, um, that I've always loved. He said, love is this, that two solitudes border, protect and salute one another. That's a, that's a quote from his book, uh, [01:12:00] letters to a Young poet. Um, and I think it's a, it's a brilliant insight in the, in the, you know, and, and both can be true at the same time.
I think in a, in a good. In, in a good loving relationship between partners, um, human partners, um, there's both this desire for intimacy and an absolute need to, to border, protect and salute the other person's solitude. Uh, because when we don't do that, that intimacy becomes, uh, segues into a desire to fix and, and save and mold and shape the other in a way that's not at all loving, but that maybe fits our comfort zone, uh, better.[01:13:00]
Um, that's an old story, isn't it? In intimate relationships that we get to a point of destroying the intimacy by trying to. Alter the other person in ways that make us more comfortable. Um, so it's, it, it, it, it love. I think partakes in, in the, the essential nature of paradox that we were talking about earlier, and when you don't hold those poles together, both of them devolve into, um, unhealthy, um, uh, um, forms of themselves.
Andrea Hiott: that reminds me when you were depressed that you didn't want advice and people trying to fix you and all of this. That's a kind of related to what you're saying too, the maybe love with what was holding you and when you felt it was when the people just were also there holding it right.
Or even [01:14:00] maybe with touch or whatever, but somehow just not what you just described, withholding the solitude.
Parker Palmer: Yeah, yeah, exactly. There was this one person who really broke through in a way no one else did. A man a little older than me, a friend who came to my house every afternoon when I was in deep Depression and was, and in a very, he had asked my permission of course, and I trusted him enough to do it, to say, yes, he would.
I would sit in a, in a, uh, easy chair in my living room. He would take off my shoes and socks, and for half an hour he'd massage my feet. And he'd very rarely say anything. Uh, he was a deeply intuitive man who, um, occasionally would say, I can feel your struggle today, but nothing else. Or, I feel you getting a little stronger, nothing else.
But he was there every day with [01:15:00] having found the one place in my body where I could feel a connection. With another human being, somehow intuitively knew that and had the courage to walk into a situation that most people try to avoid as if a depressed person were contagious. Um, and instead, um, be present to me in a very non-analytical, non-judgmental way, connecting me with the human race, uh, in a way that I think really helped save my life.
So I think let, let that stand as testimony to, um, some of those simple ways we can love by practicing presence, um, that is unafraid of whatever's going on with the other, with the other person. And that's aimed [01:16:00] purely. Um, supporting them in a, in a way that can be, can be curative.
Andrea Hiott: Thank you for sh for sharing that.
That is exactly, that. That's a lot of what we've been talking about right there. That paradox, but also that beyond the humiliation and the, humbleness even, it's, uh, I always, I often wonder, you know, knowing that story from your writing, how, how he knew and how we get to a place where we can do that for each other, you know?
Yeah.
Parker Palmer: And I don't know. I don't know, but I do know that having had it modeled has made a huge difference to me
Andrea Hiott: and to a lot of people. he's helped a lot of people from that act.
Parker Palmer: Yeah. His name was Bill Tabor and, and, uh, bless his memory, he died a few years ago.
Andrea Hiott: Well bless Bill for, for giving and I'm sure he'll continue giving.
Yeah, I think let's, let's just let that be because that's powerful. Uh, is, is there anything else that comes to [01:17:00] mind or you, anything that you wanna express, please?
Parker Palmer: Well, I would, um, just one, one final thing, Andrea.
Um, I've done a lot of interviews, as you can imagine, and this is one of the very finest I have ever experienced. Oh, I'm so grateful for, uh, the homework you did and, and for your, not only, um, attention to what I wrote, but your way of having internalized it and, and, um, coming to the conversation with your own authenticity, which I hope has also evoked evoked mine.
I've just, it, it, it would be a mild thing to, to say I've enjoyed it tremendously. I have, but there's more I've learned from it. I, I think I will grow from it. And I just want to thank you very profoundly, uh, for [01:18:00] your investment in this and for inviting me to, uh, be with you this way.
Andrea Hiott: Thank you Parker, for saying that.
That means really a lot to me. And to connect back to that first part of the conversation, that life that we are, that we're sharing, that we're uniquely giving, it means so much, it's so important, right?
These, these things we create and give to one another. So yeah,
Parker Palmer: absolutely. The world is in great need of exchanges of this sort and connections of this sort. And I'll just say that if, if you'd ever like to talk again, I'd be delighted to do it and also to wish you and yours the very best in all that you're doing.
Andrea Hiott: Thank you so much, Parker. I really appreciate you and uh, yeah, let's talk again. Okay. Have a beautiful day.
Parker Palmer: Thank you. Take care.
Andrea Hiott: Take care. Bye bye. [01:19:00]