What if you could find meaning and purpose by embracing both your light and shadow? Parker Palmer shares how three profound seasons of depression shaped his understanding of life, belonging, and authenticity. After graduating Berkeley with a PhD in ’69, Palmer’s path took an unexpected turn from academia to activism to an 11-year sojourn in a Quaker learning community. Through this journey, he discovered how letting go of who we think we should be creates space for who we truly are.
In this moving conversation, Palmer opens up about his struggles with depression, vocational uncertainty, and aging with rare vulnerability and wisdom. You’ll learn why asking honest questions matters more than giving advice, how to discern your true calling through life’s challenges, and what it means to show up authentically in both darkness and light.
Palmer explores themes from his books and shares profound insights about:
• Finding meaning through suffering and struggle
• Building genuine community through deep listening
• Embracing uncertainty and letting go of false certainty
• Living authentically by integrating all parts of yourself
• Aging with grace while staying true to your calling
This conversation offers hope and practical wisdom for anyone questioning their path, facing inner darkness, or seeking to live more authentically. Palmer’s gentle guidance shows how our greatest challenges can become doorways to our most meaningful work.
You can find Parker at: Website | Facebook | Episode Transcript
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Episode Transcript:
Parker J. Palmer: [00:00:00] It is profoundly therapeutic to be able to stand up in your world, whatever that world may be, private, public, whatever, and say, I am all of the above. This is who I am. I am my darkness, and I am my light. And that became part of my ongoing healing.
Jonathan Fields: [00:00:21] So what happens when a legendary spiritual teacher and guide finds himself in such a deep depression? He can barely leave his bedroom when the person others look to for wisdom about life’s meaning spends months hiding behind closed blinds with blankets over the windows because he can’t bear to see the light. And what if the path back to that light, and eventually to finding your true calling, requires letting go of everything you thought you should be? These are some of the powerful questions at the heart of today’s conversation as we head into this next season, wondering what might happen if we created space for our lives to show us what they truly yearn to be? This exploration feels particularly timely. My guest today is Parker Palmer, a writer, speaker and activist focused on education, community leadership, spirituality and social change. He’s the founder and senior partner emeritus of the center for Courage and Renewal, holds a PhD from UC Berkeley, and has authored several influential books, influential in particular to me, through really three profound seasons of depression, Parker discovered something surprising that embracing our shadows can become a powerful catalyst for authentic living and meaningful work. And he shares how leaving academia for activism and then spending 11 unexpected years in a Quaker learning community led him to a deeper understanding of what it means to truly listen to your life. And what unfolds is a profound exploration of finding purpose, not in spite of our struggles, but through them. We explore why real growth often requires letting go of who we think we should be, how to discern truth from the inside out rather than the outside in, and what becomes possible when we stop trying to hide our darkness from the world. Parker’s just beautiful, gentle wisdom offers a radical reframe for anyone questioning their path or seeking to live more authentically. So excited to share this best of conversation with you. I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.
Jonathan Fields: [00:02:22] I know part of your the origin story has you coming out of Berkeley, the PhD in 69, thinking that you were about to step into one particular path, but emerging from school at a time where the world was oddly experiencing a lot of similar things to today, and everything changed for you, sort of in the blink of an eye. I’d love to know more about that moment.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:02:44] Yeah, it did. Well, as we all know, the 60s were a time when, at least for folks like me, our heroes had been assassinated. Important social movements were on the rise. A terrible, terrible, unjust war was waging and the racial reckoning in this country, which goes on forever from the get go, was going on big time as well. The cities were burning, and I felt deeply called to use what I had learned about sociology and social change not in the classroom, but on the streets of the city. And so I went to Washington, D.C., and became a community organizer, working with a couple of other people to establish what we called the Institute for Public Life. And I spent five years doing that work, which was a huge education for me. I had grown up in a very homogeneous, white, affluent suburb of Chicago, and I had ever so much to learn about justice across racial, economic, and many other lines, Especially in terms of race. The five years I spent organizing in D.C., fighting, redlining and blockbusting and all of the things that lead to horrible quality of life for so many people segregated living for everyone, economic decline, residential deterioration, fighting all these things, and learning so much about how often our talk doesn’t match our walk. So that was huge. And I burned out at the end of five years, basically. I don’t want to carry the story on forever at 82, I think I could, but, uh, the I burned out. I was a pretty thin skinned guy. My skin was getting a little thicker, but organizing took a toll on me.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:04:44] I thought I just needed a sabbatical for a year. I went to a Quaker adult living learning community called Pendle Hill near Philadelphia and spent ended up spending. Not just a sabbatical year there, but 11 years. Um, I was hired as dean of studies, so in charge of an adult study program that had to do with the inner life and its outward reach in nonviolent social change. And more important than what we were studying was what we were living. Um, it was a life of kind of radical equality, including in terms of salary. Everybody got the same base salary, no matter how many degrees you had or what position you had. And that was a huge learning for me. I mean, I’m white, I’m privileged, I’m male. And so you never completely grind away a sense of entitlement. I think when that’s how you’re built in this society. But a lot of it got ground away during my 11 years at Pendle Hill as I realized distinctions in terms of power, position, income and all the external markers of status really mess us up as individuals and as communities. So that too was huge learning. And to cut to the chase, after 11 years there and five years of community organizing, I had taken up writing as a kind of, you know, midnight vocation and was able to to start working independently around 1985 as a writer and traveling teacher and activist in the fields that I cared most about. So that’s the story, and I’m sticking to it.
Jonathan Fields: [00:06:36] I’d love to touch down into a couple of moments along that story. Your five years into doing the community organizing in DC and as you shared, that is a type of work where there’s a level of toughness and thick skinned ness that not everybody has or not everybody has built, especially earlier in life. And then you make this decision not to walk away from a lot of your beliefs and values and doing work, but to really profoundly change the way that you’re doing it. In moments like that, I’m always curious how you know that it’s time to do this, because I imagine this wasn’t something that just you woke up one day and said, oh, I’m going to make this change. You know, I would imagine this is something that was brewing over time. But there’s I’m always curious, what was the inciting incident where a decision gets made that really changes the course of things?
Parker J. Palmer: [00:07:27] Yes. And I’m not sure I can name an incident, but I can certainly name a process. I think most change, personal and social change begins to happen when the pain gets too deep. Not to recognize it, not to acknowledge it. And that was certainly happening to me, and thus to my wife and to some extent to our three kids, as my work in D.C. DC went on. Because whoever you’re with intimately and closely and you care about and love is, is suffering from your suffering. And so I think the most important kind of set of triggering incidents was active imagination, saying, what would it be like to live in a radically different setting? And for me, the question was fairly precise. As a community organizer, I’m trying to lead people toward something, namely community that I’ve never really experienced myself in any depth, at any scale. So what would it be like for our family to move to an intentional community of some sort, where we could actually have a year of, of deep immersion in a truly communal life? And of course, at the time, late 60s on into the 70s, a lot of communal experiments were going on around the country. So we went down to Koinonia Partners in Americus, Georgia, which was the root system of habitat for humanity. And we spent a week there. We, a guy named William Irwin Thompson, had set up a community called Lindisfarne.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:09:07] We spent a week there. We did this with three, four, five places that were then available on the American landscape. And when we went to Pendle Hill, we just felt like this is where we belong. And that was partly because there was work there for my wife as well, who was a potter, and they had a crafts program that she very quickly ended up teaching. And after I became dean. So, you know, I think, um, one of one of the sayings that’s always meant a lot to me, I’m not quite sure where I first heard it. Um, is you don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking. And on an experimental basis using active imagination, and then actually getting out and walking into situations of that sort, we began living our way into a new kind of thinking. And I will forever be glad that we did. Even though family and friends and former academic colleagues thought I was nuts, that I could not understand what I was doing. And you know, at that level you pay a bit of a price too. But when someone would press me, why are you doing this crazy, you know, upstream thing? I would say, well, I, I can barely articulate it to myself, so I’m sure I can’t articulate it to you.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:10:34] But I can say this. It’s very, very clear to me that I can’t not do this. So it was a kind of via negativa to that what turned out to be life transforming Decision, which was really an extension of my decision when I left Berkeley not to go into the field that I thought I was getting trained for. So I had a little I’d practiced, you know, I’d exercised those muscles some. And what’s interesting about I can’t not do it is where does that come from? And I think it took me some years to realize that underneath all of that, I was aware in a way that I didn’t even want to name. I think for a while that if I didn’t do this thing, to which I felt deeply called, which seemed, in the words of that old Shaker song, to be the place just right for my soul. If I didn’t do it, I’d pay a soul price for it. I’d lose some chunk of my soul, and I’ll never regret having done it, even though there were many, many, many passages of doubt, anxiety, financial anxiety, among others, I was making very little money, and yet I felt compelled to stay the course. And I’m very grateful that I did one of those things that you can see better in retrospect than you can at the time.
Jonathan Fields: [00:12:03] Like so much of life. Right?
Parker J. Palmer: [00:12:05] Um, yeah.
Jonathan Fields: [00:12:06] And by the way, you’re talking to the son of a potter. My my mother, um, for all of my earlier years in life, was, uh, the basement of our house was this pottery studio with, like, three electric wheels and massive kick wheel with a £300 concrete slab. And then, uh, like, next door, a massive walk in, you know, like gas fired kiln. That would take 24 hours to, uh. Oh, wonderful. Um, so it’s, uh, that that resonate, that devotion to something, to creation, um, is something that has been around my life from the earliest days and has affected me in so many different ways.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:12:41] Yeah. And to have that sort of furnace of creation going on in your own basement, it’s like being present at the birth of the cosmos.
Jonathan Fields: [00:12:49] It was. It was pretty magical indeed. Um, you know, it’s interesting. It occurs to me that the process that you’re describing has got to be so resonant to what so many people these days are experiencing. You know, we’re hearing this phrase, the great resignation thrown around all over the place. And that phrase that you use, the thing that you can’t not do, it seems like that happens almost like in there are two things that it relates to. One is the choice to leave the thing that you’re currently doing, and then the other is to walk into something new. And it sounds like you were very clear that the thing that you couldn’t not do was leave this thing like that was the right choice, but you didn’t have clarity around exactly what you were stepping into at that moment. So you ran a series of experiments, which again, I see so many parallels to what so many people are moving through in this moment in time.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:13:43] Yeah. Well, thank you for mirroring that back, Jonathan, because that’s an important image to me. I remember when I ran across Gandhi’s autobiography, which he titled My Experiments with truth. And I thought, yes, of course, truth is pretty complicated stuff. You get to it slowly and you take one step forward and two steps back about truth on most levels. But it’s most especially the truth of your own life, your own gifts, your own vocation. Why you’re here, the meaning, human meaning itself. And so it’s a series of experiments that you conduct in hopes of getting there. And, well, in hopes of getting there eventually. And you do that fully aware that in science some experiments fail and you will have failed experiments as well. But what a scientist knows, and what I think we need to learn in life, is that you learn really more from a failed experiment than you do from one that succeeds. Because a failed experiment eliminates a set of variables pretty decisively. That is not who I am. That is not what I’m meant to do. And you proceed with learning step by step.
Jonathan Fields: [00:15:00] Yeah, I remember reading a book by Eric Ries called Lean Startup a number of years ago about sort of applying a kaizen approach to starting up businesses. And, and the thing that stayed with me is, is very similar to what you were just sharing, which is if you step into this next season of choices, not with the expectation of succeeding by having whatever the experiment you’re running, be a, quote, capital s success. But rather the primary metric is is learning, right? Then no matter what happens, you’ve won because you’ve gotten more data coming out of that. Even if you’ve closed down a path that you thought might be interesting.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:15:37] Yeah, I think that’s absolutely key. And again, I’m glad you noted that a lot of people are struggling with. Well, you know what? What about this pandemic? What about walking away from my job? What about this? What about what about all the deaths? What about the suffering? What about all the racial injustice? What about the pathological politics? And we all want to solve cure all of those things. It’s not within our reach individually, certainly, although I think it is collectively, if we have a will for it. But the one thing we can do is adopt that learning modality and keep saying, what am I learning here? Not only about who I am, but about what the world is like and how the two can most fruitfully intersect. A very small example, because it’s just very personal about such a learning. Those learnings often come from the shadow side of our experience, and I think that’s important to note. And you fall into your own shadow. And if you can recognize it, which means learn about it. You can go somewhere with it. And what happened to me, Jonathan, was I had worked in a series of larger and smaller organizations, institutions including Pendle Hill, which was not only a commune, but it was an educational organisation as well, with a board and a director and the whole nine yards. And I started coming to a realization somewhere toward the end of my time at Pendle Hill, which was my mid-forties, was the end point. I come to a realization that my hobby was constantly getting conflicted with whoever number one in power was. And as Dean of studies or any of the other positions I’d had, I wasn’t number one in power. It was either shared or I was subsidiary.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:17:37] I was, you know, down the organizational chart. And I had this moment of revelation when I really took a serious look at that shadow that always had me expending energy on being embattled with the lead person. Mhm. Um, and I the moment of revelation was Parker. You could spend the rest of your life using that energy toward no good end and for no good reason. Or you could do the obvious, which is to get out on your own where you are your own boss, you call the shots. You have no one to blame but yourself when you make bad decisions and use that energy in some form of creative endeavor. And that was one of the things that took me from Pendle Hill into an independent career, where I’ve been for the last, you know, nearly 40 years as a writer, traveling teacher and activist. And that’s, I think, an important piece to note. I’m sure that people who are engaging in the Great Resignation, which I applaud. I mean, I think it’s one of the things that needs to happen to shake up our highly dysfunctional institutions in this society, including workplaces. But I think one of the things that will happen inevitably is they will fall into their own shadow. Most of us do. Most of us step right into that pothole because we don’t even know it’s there. And so then the task is okay. What’s to be learned here? And what does it, in a sense, dictate about my next steps in life? Because if you learn something like I did on your shadow side, you’d be foolish to continue to put yourself in a position where that can be your hobby for the rest of your life.
Jonathan Fields: [00:19:34] Yeah, it’s so interesting, right? Because I wonder if sometimes we focus so much on what am I being pulled to when there’s really interesting data on the other side? Um, not that you would completely discount what you’re being pulled towards, but but I think we spend so much time just wanting to pretend the other side doesn’t exist, because it’s their struggle. Like, there there is. You know, discovery doesn’t often come easily there. And yet there’s so much value in spending not living there, but visiting and exploring and examining that space as well.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:20:07] Yeah, absolutely. I sometimes think, Jonathan, that, you know, that we, we have tropisms like plants, and that means that we’re attracted towards certain things and we’re repelled by other things. And it starts happening very early in life. You can watch a little kid closely and find that same tropism at work, which actually has some interesting predictors for the future life of that human being who doesn’t come here in a totally malleable shape but sort of has a character already, a shape already. And those those things are really, really worth paying attention to.
Jonathan Fields: [00:20:45] Um, yeah. And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. I think we’re sort of we’re talking around a little bit the notion of calling, which is something that you’ve written about, you know, quite a lot and spoken and thought about, which is interesting, a lot of different ways. Also, there’s because I think a lot of people ask the question like, how do I find this thing that dwells within me so that I might devote more of myself to it? And very often we go looking for it outside of ourselves. And it sounds like you were really strongly influenced by more of the Quaker philosophy that that this thing may be influenced by what lies outside of you, but it’s much more indwelling. And that’s where you go searching.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:21:28] Yeah, I do believe in the notion of calling. And by that I, as you know, I don’t mean any loud and clear external voice from the top of the heavenly vault. It seems to me that it more often comes from within. For me, it’s always come from within, and it’s always come in interaction with the world around me. I’m a big believer in what I’ve come to call life on the Mobius strip, and I’m sure that many of the folks who listen to this program know what a Mobius strip is. You can Google it if you don’t. Mobius. But it’s this really, really interesting three dimensional object. It lives in three dimensional space, which has only one side. It’s a form that mathematicians can crank the numbers for, in which what seems to be inside the Mobius strip comes around and merges seamlessly into what seems to be the outside of the Mobius strip, which then comes around and merges seamlessly in what seems to be the inside. So you have to keep saying what seems to be, because the truth of the Mobius strip is that there is no inner and outer. There’s only these two joined surfaces constantly co-creating each other. And when I first saw that it physically represented by holding a Mobius strip, I thought, well, life is like that too, that we’re constantly standing at the intersection of what’s going on inside us and what’s going on outside us.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:23:04] And two things are happening. We are making choices about what from inside of us, we’re going to put out there. And in that process, we’re co-creating the world in some small measure. And the world is constantly throwing back, throwing stuff back at us in response to what we put out there. And in that measure, the world is constantly co-creating us. So I think the message is be cautious, be careful, be thoughtful About those moments of exchange between the inner and the outer. And somewhere in that mix is the discovery of vocation. Again, it’s experimental. You put certain parts of yourself out there and you start to feel, okay, I’m good. This is really me. This feels authentic. It may not be easy, but it feels real and it’s life sustaining. You put other stuff out there and say, oops, that wasn’t what I wanted or expected. And I think maybe I’m running crosswise to my own nature here. And so the Quaker principles that I learned in depth during my 11 years at Pendle Hill, this Quaker living learning community, those principles very much support this notion, because two things are important to Quakers. One is that we each have an inner teacher, an inner light, some kind of indwelling guidance that is ultimately our best teacher in life. But it’s also true that we have other voices within us.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:24:40] Ego, greed. Fear. All kinds of voices where all of us are, I think complex cities inside and a lot. There’s a lot of cacophony that calls for our attention. And so we need community. We need that external engagement to help us sort and sift which of the voices that we hear from within is real and true and trustworthy. And it takes time, because sometimes the voice of fear is so compelling, or sometimes the voice of ego is so compelling. But sorting and sifting in a community that knows how to listen, that knows how to ask you honest, open questions, that does not attempt to save, fix, advise, or correct you, but simply lets you work it out in dialogue with other people. That was one of the huge insights that came to me at Pendle Hill, and a lot of my life work for the last 40 years has been translating that that kind of approach to life into things like the nonprofit that I founded called the center for Courage and Renewal. Um, taking it on the road, as it were, because most people aren’t going to be able to end up living the life someone in intentional community. But there are ways to replicate critical elements of that with ourselves, our families, our friends, our colleagues with trustworthy circles of folks.
Jonathan Fields: [00:26:18] I mean, it’s so powerful when you bring in the notion of community, you know, but also in the context of not asking the question, like, not not posing this, this thing, saying like, here’s what I’m thinking about. What do you think? But. And then expecting back some sort of answer or advice, but rather just having a community that sort of understands the construct of listening deeply and reflecting back intelligent questions that might allow you to keep the exploration inside. I think a lot of people would look at community and say, you know, so effectively you’re using them because now you get all sorts of different points of view, but you’re talking about something very different here, right? You know, which I think is an important distinction.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:27:03] Right, exactly. So thank you for pinpointing that. I mean, isn’t it a blow to the soul when you share, let’s say, a very deep grief with someone and they say, oh, I know exactly how you feel, and here’s what you should do, because this worked for me or this worked for my uncle, or there’s a great book on the subject or a diet that would really help. Those are the things that make us feel unseen and unheard, which are the great wounds of a lot of humankind, or among the great wounds of a lot of humankind. Nobody can get inside of me and know exactly how I feel, or exactly what I ought to do, or anywhere near what I ought to do, even if they have what technically turns out to be the right answer. That answer means zippo until it arises within me and becomes operative, embodied in my own life. And so a lot of the stuff that I work with, and they work with at the center for Courage and Renewal, the circles that we sponsor around the globe, have to do with teaching people the skill, the art of honest, open questions so that they can evoke a sort of deeper and deeper truth in the person who has the grief, or who’s struggling with the decision or the problem, whatever it may be.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:28:33] Rather than saving, fixing, advising or correcting them, trying to straighten them out in one way or another. It turns out that asking honest, open questions is a very high art. Most of us are trained to ask questions that are really little speeches in disguise. Like, have you ever thought about seeing a therapist? That’s not an honest, open question, but there are all kinds of ways to help people understand what an honest, open question really is. And the phrase that I love on this comes from a feminist theologian named Nell Morton. Years ago, she said, our task in this time is to help hear other people into deeper and deeper speech. And I love that very much. I often tell a group that I’m working with, We have a strange conceit in Western culture that just because we’ve said something, we understand what we just said. And that’s a real conceit.
Jonathan Fields: [00:29:40] And I’m raising my hand like I’m a part of that conceit. Like every day of my life. So.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:29:46] Well. Me too. Man. It’s a hard habit to overcome.
Jonathan Fields: [00:29:51] Um. Yeah. It’s so powerful. And, you know, I think one of the one of the assumptions that that underlies sort of like this conversation, too, is that somebody is ready and willing to step into a place of examination, that they’re at a moment in their lives where they’re willing to look for for truth, not for validation. And so often it seems like we only come to those moments after enough suffering has pushed us there.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:30:21] Yeah, I think that’s really, really true. At least it has been for me. Various forms of suffering across the 82 years. And of course, that would be the case. But it’s an amazing moment of turning toward vulnerability, toward, as you say, a search for truth rather than anything else, like self-justification or self-affirmation. Um, yeah, we all need to practice self care, but we don’t want to bandage over those places that are really bleeding in us. Those deserve examination. And what I love about the whole theme of self-examination and vulnerability to it, you don’t have to revert to any of the formal, spiritual, or let alone religious traditions to go there. The great tradition of secular humanism, which I’ve always regarded as a form of spirituality, gets kicked off by a guy named Socrates who says the unexamined life is not worth living. And right there is the nub of what we’re talking about here. People have also flipped that in an interesting way. The unlived life is not worth examining, and I’m not sure it’s not worth examining, but it tends not to get examined if you’re not really living it. But the motive to go to self-examination is present in every tradition that has ever supported anything vaguely related to what it means to be human. And that takes us right back, I think, to life on the Mobius strip, where that self-examination then yields maybe something new flowing out into the world, and we discover, oh, now I feel more like myself. Now I feel more real and more authentic. I’m going to stick with this and then see what the world feeds back to me, and then make good decisions about how to internalize it. What is it that I just don’t really need or want to listen to? What is it that may critique me or interrogate me in and some helpful ways that the world is coming back with. It’s a really fascinating process that becomes a project called Living Your Life or, to coin a phrase, living a good life. Mhm.
Jonathan Fields: [00:32:39] Um, you know, in that process of examination, uh, there is so much power and as you mentioned, you know, it involves your own discernment, it involves your own experience, it involves other people who are sort of like hold you in a certain context. Um, I wonder sometimes when we’re in that process of self-examination, if we look at certain things and they’re not easily measurable or quantifiable, we dismiss their importance in the weighting of their value. And we say, well, if I can’t quite figure out if I can’t place a number on this in terms of how it factors into this, we ignore it. When so much of the data that is that really is valuable to us is often, at least in my experience. I’m curious what your experience is really difficult to quantify.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:33:29] Right? No, absolutely. I mean, the image that comes to mind when we talk about that particular shadow side, and I think it is a shadow side, because the urge to quantify is somehow a bogus impulse towards absolute certainty and security, which is not a good basis on which to live one’s life. You’ll never get there except through, um, you know, paralyzing ideologies or other traps of the mind, heart, spirit and even body. Um, the image that comes to mind is it would be like walking into a magnificent forest with a shoebox and saying, I’m going to come out of this place with a report on the forest, but I’m only going to report on whatever fits in this shoebox, you know, so you’d come out with a few acorns and you come out with some leaves and maybe some pretty wildflowers and a few stones, and it would fill up pretty soon, and that would be it. You’d miss the giant redwoods. You’d miss the the soughing of the wind in the trees. You’d miss the sky and the clearing that just opened into infinity. When you get there, out of the thick, thick woods, you’d miss so much. And that sort of narrow understanding of empiricism applied, you know, a double problem because it then gets applied to the wrong things is a real problem for a lot of people. And if you know, the drive for certainty is is huge, isn’t it? And it’s deeply paralyzing of the human experiment I cannot think of. And I’ll just use this a value judgment, but I’ll use it. I cannot think of any form of pathological religion or pathological Politics that isn’t driven by this need for certainty and this kind of conclusion that people quickly reach, especially when certain kinds of leaders persuade them of it, that, okay, now I haven’t nailed everybody else’s wrong, and I can get on with my life with a sense of safety and security that ends up distorting everything.
Jonathan Fields: [00:35:50] Yeah. And I mean, doesn’t that also speak to how pervasive and how deep the yearning is to just lock as much of our lives down as possible? You know, like not realizing a it’s actually not possible no matter what anyone else tells you. But also, I mean, there’s life is is in the lockdown all nooks and crannies, you know, that’s where the magic happens or the places where you don’t actually know what’s about to happen next.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:36:19] Exactly.
Jonathan Fields: [00:36:20] You know, and we, I think unwittingly, you know, closed the door to those just because we feel like for a hot minute it’ll let us breathe a little bit more easily.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:36:30] Absolutely. I think, you know, the everyday word for the locked down life is death. And, uh, you don’t have to extend that image too far to see a lot of that happening in our world.
Jonathan Fields: [00:36:43] Yeah, I mean, that that Mobius strip that you speak of, you know, on one scale, we’re talking about our own lives, but really, it’s it’s not just intrapersonal, it’s interpersonal also. I mean, I think couldn’t you look at indeed all of society as living on that Mobius strip?
Parker J. Palmer: [00:36:59] Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And you bring to mind, Jonathan, when when you opened up that idea, you bring to mind the fact, I think that one of the reasons some people have a lot of problem with embracing diversity for the life giving And reality that it is, is that it makes certainty harder. And you start looking at life through other people’s eyes, the eyes of of people of another gender or, or sexual orientation or religion or race. And suddenly you see some things like, oh, well, okay, that that makes at least a little sense. Do I have to now bring that into my worldview? No, because it just complicates things all over again. And I’ve spent the last 40 years simplifying, so I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to have that experience. I don’t want to have that conversation. And again, that’s that’s a path toward death. You know, one of the ruminations that is so I know you’re an outdoor guy as well as an indoor guy. Me, too. Big time. And, um, one of the ruminations that I find so engaging has to do with Comparing what’s going on in a homogenized society or homogenized segments of our society with what goes on in a restored prairie, which can help us see how that virgin prairie looked and operated. I live in the Midwest and I live in Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, and the state I live in, and the states around us are just filled with agribusiness, where you get maybe 1 or 2 species of plants per thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands of acres.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:38:51] Beans and corn. Soybeans and corn. And the consequence of that is the soil gets depleted. You have to add chemicals to enrich it. It gets thin. It’s subject to drought and to insects and to other forms of biological degradation. But a restored prairie had something like 160 180 species of plants on it and God knows how many species of creatures. And that gave it resilience, that gave it creativity, that gave it the capacity to weather through this storm or that. Because while some plants wouldn’t make it in the drought, others would. And on and on it goes. The parallel, I think, is very direct. We’re coming apart right now as a social system, because we don’t have the capacity to really embrace and affirm. At least a lot of Americans don’t have the capacity to embrace and affirm the kind of diversity that would actually teach us how to be resilient, give us the resources to be resilient, help see us through if we could learn from one another, because there are people whose life story, very different from mine, have known about resilience for 12 generations. This is not true in the life story I’ve lived, which is the story of white privilege. So I think the the metaphors are rich. I think the connections are quite direct. And I think what we’re talking about is important stuff.
Jonathan Fields: [00:40:36] Yeah. I mean, I think it really speaks to the moment that we’re in and you hear some variation of the phrase like striving for unity these days, um, which is always landed as interesting to me because what’s the assumption underneath that is that we are not all the same in many substantial ways, is that unity is not the natural state, is that we have to fabricate this thing rather than step back and allow it to return to what it always was.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:41:05] Right, right. That virgin prairie again, or that restored prairie and create the conditions for it to flourish? Absolutely. And in an earlier generation, it was the melting pot, you know? Okay, all these different people can come, but we’re going to melt everybody down to, you know, come out in the in the same way. It’s again, I think that fear of unpredictability and that pathological desire for control that does us in every time. And, you know, if there’s one thing that you learn as you age and if there’s one thing that we all should be learning right now, there’s a lot that’s not under our control. And it drives some people nuts because they have not nobody’s helped them develop the capacity to say, okay, that’s true. There are some things that I can’t control. So what is it that I can control that will make the situation tolerable not only for me, but for everybody, and maybe not only tolerable, but actually improve the situation. The agricultural cultural metaphor. Metaphor works again, because that’s how a good farmer operates does a lot of work to plant a crop. The hailstorm wipes it out in the spring, but it’s right back to work and prepare for the next thing. Controlling what you can while knowing there’s no way to protect against another hailstorm. You. Just as John Lewis liked to say, keep on walking. Keep on talking. That’s the way you build a better world.
Jonathan Fields: [00:42:45] Mhm. And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. It’s funny, there’s a couple of years back we had someone in conversation on the podcast who had left this very successful career in the entertainment business in Hollywood and moved north with his wife and taken this piece of property that people said was unfarmable completely arid and over a period of 7 or 8 years turned it into this biodynamic farm, and it was a process of reintroducing over a period of years, all of the things all of the animals, all of the plants, everything that would have just occurred naturally in that space a couple of hundred years ago before we sort of got involved in the picture. To simply restore to the way that it naturally was, where everything sort of worked harmoniously together.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:43:38] Beautiful.
Jonathan Fields: [00:43:38] And yeah, the the metaphor is alive and well in a lot of different ways. We just very often we choose, we choose a different path. You know, I often wonder, what if we devoted the same energy that we devote to certainty, to instead skilling ourselves in finding equanimity in the face of uncertainty? Mhm. What possibilities would that allow to flourish? You know, if we literally invested differently in that way, um, both as human beings and, you know, climate and everything around us.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:44:13] Absolutely. And one of the reasons I’m loving this conversation, Jonathan. And you know this because you’re helping us do it, is that it’s it’s been moving between the inside of the Mobius strip and the outside of the Mobius strip, even as we’ve talked. And what you just said, I think takes us back to the inside, because the question then becomes, who is helping young people, especially develop those inner skill sets that will allow them to discern well as to when to embrace it and when to try to change it, when to accept it, but what not to accept because it’s unacceptable. Um, those are viable questions. Those are answerable questions. But it’s very rare to find in our spiritual communities, in our religious communities, and in our educational Additional system that kind of attention paid to the inner lives of young people, where we’re equipping them with the very kinds of inner life skills that you just were touching on and that I so deeply believe in. I’m pretty clear that I wouldn’t be alive today if I hadn’t gotten some help along the way, both before the bad stuff hit and while the bad stuff was hitting in developing inner tools for holding life’s complexities.
Jonathan Fields: [00:45:45] And I know you referenced the bad stuff. I’m sure there have been many things along the way, but I know you’ve also spoken and written, um, in a very open way about what I’ve heard you talk about earlier in life as, as as two fairly profound seasons of depression in your 40s and then again in your mid 60s. And I’ve also heard you describe at least the earlier ones as more situational than biochemical. And I’ve been curious both what what you mean by that, but also how you discern the difference between the two, especially when you’re in it.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:46:19] Yeah, well, that’s a great question, and I’m always glad to talk about it. Jonathan, as you know, I’ve written and spoken a lot about it because when you’ve had an experience like that, not just once but 2 or 3 times, where for months on end, you’re wondering each time whether it’s worth living another day, um, if you’re fortunate enough to come out of it, what you want to do more than anything is make meaning out of it. And one of the ways you make meaning is making it available to other people. Because there’s an epidemic of depression going on, lots of people in it, lots of people living with folks who are in it. So when you’re in depression, you don’t know anything about the way out. I’ve come to say I didn’t originally. My metaphor was it’s like just being lost in a very deep darkness. But after a while I realized, no, that’s not quite right. It’s more like becoming the darkness. If you’re just lost in the dark, you make it. You’re still making a distinction between you and the darkness of the place you are. And you can grope around and look for a window or shade or a light switch or something. But if you’ve become the dark, there’s you can’t negotiate your situation that way. You’re it. You’re in it. And it’s it’s it’s an ineluctable no way, no way out.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:47:46] Um, and at that time, you don’t know is this situational? Is this genetic? Is this biochemical? So my hunch is about that come from the particulars of my own situation, as they must, because depressions are widely different. And even the experts, the psychiatrists with whom I’ve consulted don’t know a lot about it. And I think the sign of a good psychiatrist is that he or she will say that, um, they won’t pretend to have a panacea. Um, I examined my own family history. I found some genetic depression there. The situational elements had in part to do with what we were talking about earlier vocational decisions that I made, which have worked out for me wonderfully well. But that was not at all clear at the time. There were moments of sheer terror, passages of sheer terror, and it’s very hard to discern what’s what situational and what’s biochemical. Because if the situational depression leads you to radical insomnia, as I had, you just can’t get sleep for days on end. That creates chemical changes in your body and your brain chemistry at every level of your being. And who’s to say what’s the chicken and what’s the egg? What’s the cause? What’s the effect? Nobody can say, but to the best of my discernment. And here was me looking for something over which I might get control, which had to do with some of the decisions I was making in life.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:49:29] Here was me saying, well, if it is genetic, there may not be a lot I can do about that. Beyond medication, which I was on for nine months to a year, year and a quarter during each of those three. I’ve been fortunate. I’ve been able to get off. Um, I don’t want to say fortunate because some people are on them for the rest of their lives, and they should be. They need to be, um, whatever puts a floor under you, living your life without falling through. Um, but I needed to take what was in my control, which wasn’t the genetics, but it was the situations and find a couple of things. One was better ways to hold whatever I was in better ways of interrogating myself about whatever I was, in better ways of seeking a path forward if the way seemed impassable. And then more discernment about who I was and what the world was like, that would allow me to make a next vocational decision that wouldn’t take me right back to that kind of misery. So I think the two in my 40s were very much vocation related, and I’m glad to talk about that, because sometimes we tell a hero story about making a countercultural decision, and wow, isn’t that cool? Well, not in my experience.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:51:01] It’s not all cool. Uh, And there’s, there’s there’s a certain quality of resolve that I needed in a way to see it through. In my 60s, I think it was more about aging and some unexamined fears about getting old and dying. And also here comes vocation again, knowing that I was on a collision course between aging and vocation, in my vocation for the better part of 40 years was flying around the country, appearing in front of audiences, hosting retreats, workshops, giving lectures. Um, you know, a lot, a lot of folks do that kind of thing. That was my bag. And it became increasingly clear as I got deeper into my 60s and then into my 70s, that the old body and even the old mind wasn’t going to be up for that for a whole lot longer. So I how do I sort that out? And I actually used some of those Quaker processes to try to discern best answers to those questions, so that I wouldn’t have to go back to the misery of having made a decision in, let us say, in old age, that was all about pretending I was still 55, when in fact I was 75. And as you well know in this culture that this age and valorizes youth, uh, there are a lot of temptations for us to do that to ourselves.
Jonathan Fields: [00:52:38] Um, indeed. You know, so much of this also. So this is during a broader season of your life, this, this period of four decades plus, where what you’re flying around the world and speaking about in the books that you’re writing about are deeply grounded in in a blend of social consciousness, activism and also deep questioning on an existential level and spirituality and, and you’re sort of making your bones in as somebody who has something to say in this spiritual domain. And I’m wondering when you inhabit that identity and maybe I’m assuming that you did, and then you find yourself in your own existential darkness, does the temptation to layer shame on top of this experience enter the equation?
Parker J. Palmer: [00:53:26] Absolutely. And I would say that especially about the depressions that I experienced in my 40s, where, you know, to some extent, most of us, as we try to build a career, are still doing a certain amount of masking about, you know, I’m just fine. Don’t worry about me. I’ve got everything under control. I know exactly what I’m doing, even though it looks crazy, uh, as it did to many people in my case, and I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. And so the shame comes like. And it took, you know, very precise forms, as you just suggested. So I’m regarded by some as a spiritual leader. And now I want to take my own life. How is that going to pan out in, in public? And that terrified me for a long time. Just to take one example of the kind of shame that we’re capable of loading on ourselves. But here’s what. Here’s the short story about what happened. I was able to survive by good luck, grace, privilege, tenacity. I don’t know what enabled me to survive. As I have written, don’t ask the question why did so-and-so kill themselves? I can tell you why they were. They were exhausted. They needed the rest. It’s depression is first and foremost. After it’s isolating is exhausting. The mystery is why some people come through and not only survive, but thrive on the other side. So I was able to survive. But then I started saying, how do I make meaning out of this? Do I just tick that off as a nine month bad movie in my life? I can’t because it has some sort of meaning.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:55:17] What is the meaning? And I began to realize the meaning of any suffering, if possible, is to put it at the service of other people. To put it in support of other people. Just as if you have gifts galore. Hand them around to other people. Engage the community with whatever you’ve got. Point I want to make is that it took me ten years from the time of my first depression, to the point where I could talk openly about it. And the reason for that was very simple. Something in me knew I needed to wait until that horrible experience was so fully integrated into my sense of who I was, that I could stand before a group and say, without shame, yes, I am my gifts and I am my potholes. I am my light and I am my darkness. I am the guy you see standing before you who wants to join in community with you. And I’m also the guy who lived for months in a bedroom with the shades pulled down and blankets over the shades because I couldn’t stand light, and nor could I get outside for risk of running into another person. The world was full of knives. That’s how it felt. And here I am, you know, in San Francisco, talking to 1500 people.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:56:48] Um, but that’s all me. I am all of the above. And what I started to learn, Jonathan, is that it is profoundly therapeutic to be able to stand up in your world, whatever that world may be, private, public, whatever, and say, I am all of the above. This is who I am. I am my darkness, and I am my light. And that became part of my ongoing healing. And I never wanted to put this out, let’s say in a retreat setting, let alone an audience setting in a way that was so quivery and so filled with ambiguity about myself that people would start to think, are we going to have to take care of this guy? You know, is he about to fall apart? I needed to wait till that to that point where I could do my work, which includes a certain form of leadership as a teacher, as a speaker, as a writer, whatever, without scaring other people off while still inviting them into the reality of the human experience. Which I know they share. I’ve often told people, after long conversations about what they’re struggling with, I’ve said, you know, I feel ready to say a word to you. That has always meant a lot to me when I’ve heard it from someone else. After sharing my vulnerability and that word is welcome to the human race. Welcome to the human race. That’s what we’re talking about here, the experience of being human.
Parker J. Palmer: [00:58:31] And there’s no shame in it. The shame in the sense of it’s a shame is when people feel they have to tuck all of that away and pretend to be something or somebody they’re not. And the last word I’ll say about that is that it has really come to me, especially as I’ve gotten deeper into my 80s. While I can imagine a lot of painful ways to die. I can’t imagine a sadder way to die than with a sense that I had all these years on the face of the earth, but I never showed up as my true self. I always hid it away because I was fearful of what other people might think, and therefore I was also playing my cards close to my vest and not sharing my gifts. I never showed up as my true self. That just seems ultimately sad to me. And I’m grateful that a lot of drivers in my life have taken me to a point where I think that, you know, I, I won’t, I won’t take my leave with any sense. I did it perfectly. I’ll take my leave with a sense, I hope. I think that to the best of my lights It’s cutting myself slack for my many faults and failures. Um, I did the best I could, and I showed up as who I really am. Shadow and light. And I think that will bring a certain sense of satisfaction.
Jonathan Fields: [01:00:11] Mm. You know, I was about to say that this feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation. And I generally end these conversations with a simple question, which which is not necessarily a simple answer, which is in this container of Good Life Project.. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? But I’m getting the sense that you just answered that question.
Parker J. Palmer: [01:00:32] Thank you. I think that’s the best answer I can give, John.
Jonathan Fields: [01:00:36] Yeah. Thank you so much for this conversation. I so enjoyed it.
Parker J. Palmer: [01:00:39] Thank you, I did too. It’s been wonderful and I wish you and your colleagues and your audience all the best.
Jonathan Fields: [01:00:45] Thank you so much. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet, you’ll also love the conversation we had with Sharon Salzberg about mindfulness, loving kindness, and inner resilience. You can find the link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by, Alejandro Ramirez, and Troy Young. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music, and of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you’re still listening here, do me a personal favor. A seven-second favor is share it with just one person. I mean, if you want to share it with more, that’s awesome too. But just one person even then, invite them to talk with you about what you’ve both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter, because that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.