Coming Home to Each Other

Renewing "the bonds of our affection" on the streets and in our hearts...

[With this post, I’m launching my new Substack page, “Living the Questions with Parker J. Palmer.” I hope to post here at least once a week, as time and energy allow. If you want to leave a donation, thank you. But everything I post will be available to all subscribers, whether or not they donate: please pass the word. I’m grateful for your interest and your comments. Above all, I’m grateful to know that we’re all in this together, helping each other survive and thrive in hard times. Thank you!]

The April 5th “Hands Off” rally on Capitol Square in my hometown, Madison, Wisconsin, felt like a homecoming to me. After a hard winter of isolation in the Upper Midwest—where both the weather and the politics were cold enough to kill—I needed the reassurance that comes from seeing the green shoots of community coming up through the ice and snow. That’s exactly what I got on April 5th as I spent a day in the presence of thousands of sisters and brothers, greeting old friends, laughing and chanting and singing with strangers, drawing energy from the crowd, and learning that I’m not alone with my fears and hopes. As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton famously discovered at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky, it’s a grand and glorious thing to be a member of the human race!

A vital public life is key to the health of any democracy, a way of exercising people-power and demanding accountability from our leaders. That’s why every wannabe dictator is hell-bent on making us so afraid of each other that we hide out behind locked doors. They know that the more deeply they can divide us, the easier we are to control. They know that people who hunker down in their houses are more afraid of “the alien other” than folks whose daily rounds take them out and about. As long as my 86 year-old body allows, I want to spend time in the company of strangers—a topic I first wrote about forty-plus years ago—an experience I’ve always found enlivening and empowering, whether I’m at a rally with thousands or in a coffee shop with a few.

At the same time, I want to remember that you and I have access to an inward experience of homecoming that’s long been a source of power for social change. Study any social movement fomented by people who’ve been stripped of all forms of external power—women around the world, enslaved people of color, folks in the LGBTQ+ community, subjects of authoritarian regimes, etc. What you’ll find is political action animated by the power of human identity and integrity, by an inner resolve to live divided no more, a soul-deep refusal to behave outwardly in ways that contradict the truth we hold inwardly: that each and every one of us is worthy of respect. The moment we refuse to “conspire in our own diminishment,” we start to get leverage on the world around us. It begins when we come home to ourselves—our true selves—the Archimedean point from which we can move the world.

In one of his most remarkable poems, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about this inward homecoming, warning us not to get cut off from “the law of the stars.” That law is simple: whether we know it or not, like it or not, honor it or not, we are inextricably joined to each other—we rise and fall together. When the physicists tell us that nearly all of the elements in the human body were made in a star, they’re saying we’re intertwined with each other (and the rest of the cosmos) in the root system of reality. So Joni Mitchell got it right when she translated quantum physics into the language of the heart: “We are stardust/We are golden/And we've got to get ourselves/Back to the garden.”

Poetically and literally, spiritually and materially, we are members of one another—and what happens to any one of us has consequences for all of us. At this moment, I’m connected to those who’ve been disappeared without due process; who’ve had their personal identity dissed, dismissed and put at risk by fascist goons; who’ve been written out of history by white people scared of their own shadow; who’ve been consigned to hunger and homelessness while billionaires game the system to multiply their wealth. And who has the right words to lament the world’s innocent children who are dying because we “grownups” have lost our way? The suffering of my brothers and sisters may keep me awake at night, but it also gives me a compelling reason to get up the next morning and rejoin the struggle for love, truth and justice.

So reach out, reach in and c’mon home! Join with others in the noisy public square and in the silence of your own heart. Together we can say NO! to the hollow men and women in high places who try to fill the bottomless pit within themselves by taking others down. Together we can say YES! to lifting each other up, showing the world again and again that this is what the body politic of a living democracy looks like.

[My 10 books are HERE and HERE. My bio is HERE, on the site of the Center for Courage & Renewal, a nonprofit I founded 30 years ago whose programs are all about reaching in and reaching out. The April 5th photo is by Lizzy Larson in The Badger Herald. The selfie of dancing galaxies is from the Hubble Space Telescope.]