Sacred Gyre (private feed for [email protected])

In this episode of Sacred Gyre I have a conversation with Carolyn Martin after I read a selection of poems from her recent book Brainstorming. 

In this episode of Sacred Gyre I will read a selection of poems from the book titled Brainstorming, written by Carolyn Martin.

In this episode of Sacred Gyre I have a conversation with Rashida Saunders, a Portland police Officer who grew up in poverty in the Black community who, in her memoir and podcasts, explores strength, leadership, service, emotional wellness, and what it means to remain human while carrying responsibility for others.  

I don’t usually make a deal in public about all the year-end holidays other than wishing the best for everyone in inter-personal gatherings. But an exchange with an Uber driver reminded me of what I want for Christmas in a way that surprised and delighted me.

In this episode I navigate through a recent knee injury, what it tells me about how we measure things, and about the ways life can be both certain and uncertain.

On September 9, 2001, four airplanes were hijacked by terrorists and deliberately flown into three buildings, while another one crashed in Pennsylvania when passengers and crew bravely fought the hijackers and prevented the airplane from crashing into a fourth building.

Recently many commentators have written memories of that day. Those acts gave rise to country-wide responses on every level, and each person responded in their own way. As I remember those days, I am motivated to think about my own response, and the context within which I was living.

In 2001 I was still working as a machinist for United Airlines. I'd taken a class in business meeting facilitation and gone back to graduate school where I earned a graduate certificate in conflict resolution. I was allowed to facilitate a variety of business meetings at United, while still working mostly as a machinist. After work and on weekends I worked part time on my own using these new skills.

One of those part time jobs was as a mediator for the United States Post Office at times when I wasn't on the job at United. This mediation was offered as a way to resolve many of the complaints employees made to the Equal Employment Office or EEO when they believed they had faced discrimination.

Those complaints often took years, literally, to resolve, and at great expense. The mediation process was offered to employees on a voluntary basis. When successful, employees dropped their EEO complaints.

The new model the Post Office used for these mediations was called Transformative Mediation. It was developed by Robert A. Baruch Bush and Joseph Folger, and popularized in their book The Promise of Mediation. While transformative mediation incorporates many of the skills I'd already learned in other trainings, it centered on a new approach.

Transformative mediation is focused on helping the disputants to use and improve their own skills in handling conflicts. Our role as the mediator was to both create a situation where the disputants define the problem from their point of view, and at the same time help them listen deeply to how the other person sees the problem and why they seek the solution they want.

It's not focused on agreement, but on understanding each other. Solving the immediate problem is a secondary, though welcomed, outcome. Better skills in handling conflict and making the decision to see the other person as a well-meaning human being with their own needs, interests, and perspective is primary.

I was enjoying this part time work even as I still loved doing my job as a machinist. On September 10, 2001, I mediated a conflict between a supervisor and employee on the midnight shift at a mail handling facility near my home. Everyone in the room worked hard. As I used the transformative mediation skills, the participants gradually took responsibility to create a mutually agreeable resolution to the conflict.

Early in the morning on September 11th I left the building and went to my car to drive home. As I started up the engine, my radio came on as a reporter was describing the scene where American Airlines flight 11 crashed into the first of the two towers in New York City. What was initially called a freak accident, by this time was already being reported as a deliberate act.

I sat there, stunned at first. My happiness after assisting the Post Office employees to work through their conflict was overcome by fear, and sadness at this horrific act. I drove home and turned on my television just in time to see videos of the aftermath when United Airlines flight 175 crashed into the other tower. I spent some time in the following days taking in the new situation; trying to hold my beliefs about peaceful resolution at the same time as our country made decisions about how to respond to these acts of violence.

United Airlines, in those days at least, was like a big family. In fact, it wasn't unusual to literally know several members of families working different jobs at the company. And the people I knew viewed all airline employees as part of a larger family. Everyone I knew cared about airline safety. Our jobs depended in part on perceptions in the public's mind that flying was a very safe form of travel. That meant every airline needed to be safe, not just United Airlines. And in the machine shop in South San Francisco where I worked, we repaired parts for other airlines' engines, not just those for United.

After the attacks on 9/11 all flying was officially stopped for two days, and some airports remained closed for a month or more. A lot of people decided not to fly at all. It took nearly three years for airline traffic to return to the same level as it was in August of 2001. Shortly after the attack I was told to "get back on the machines" and could no longer do the facilitation of business unit meetings I'd been doing part time since 1994.

Over those seven years I'd grown to love the conflict resolution work. After 30 years as a machinist, it began to feel like I was approaching a time of transition. When they told me I couldn’t do the meeting facilitation work any longer, I made a decision. At 57 years old and with 13 and a half years at United, I was eligible for early retirement. I retired, took my modest pension and healthcare benefits with me and became a full-time independent mediator, facilitator and workshop developer in conflict resolution skills.

Meanwhile, the aftermath of the terrorist attacks went on. In New York City, the destruction of the twin towers was total, and various government and private businesses became involved in creating plans for what to do with the site. Should they rebuild the two towers? Should there be a memorial for the lives lost in this horrific terrorist attack? What would a memorial look like?

Six proposals were developed, but there was a lot of controversy about them. So the authorities turned to something they called the Listening to the City forum. It was held online over several weeks and at the Jacob Javits Convention Center on July 20th and 22nd 2002.

For the in-person meetings, experienced facilitators were recruited from across the country. I volunteered and was accepted as one of them. Before the in-person meetings I went with a couple of other facilitators to the devasted area, at the time a large, ugly hole. I just wanted to ground myself with a gut feeling of what the participants were being asked to respond to.

The in-person forum involved an open dialogue using the America Speaks 21st Century Town Meeting model. More than 4,500 people participated over the two meetings where they were divided into tables of 10-12 people with a facilitator at each table. The organizers presented different ideas. We would facilitate a discussion at each table. Then the table participants would use electronic devices to record their responses to the ideas.

These conversations, along with the longer online forums with over 800 participants, contributed in important ways to the final design.

Everyone who remembers the 9/11 terrorist attacks has their own rection. For me, it was a recommitment to the work of peaceful conflict resolution I'd already begun in 1994 when I took a 4-hour class in business meeting facilitation at United Airlines. Why did I make that specific decision?

Things like those terrorist attacks and all the many business, government and international decisions that followed are not anything I had meaningful influence over. But I did have control over the one thing nobody could take away from me. What Viktor Frankl, in his book Man's Search for Meaning, called "the last of the human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances."

I can make those choices when I interact with family and friends, when I go to meetings of our Homeowners association where I live, or when I write or speak in public forums. I can choose whether to demonize others or to assume that they are trying to do their best, given their circumstances. I can speak and act as though, as some have said, every verbal battle is metaphorically a gun fight to which I must bring a gun rather than a knife, or I can choose to be an invitation to a thoughtful conversation, even if some others may have lost their way and are speaking in what I see as angry or demeaning language.

I can't personally change the larger world by making these decisions, but I can act in a way that I believe has a higher likelihood of us reaching toward the best of our country's ideals. A country in which everyone truly has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That is just my personal reaction. We are a country of a little over 340 million people. In that larger world, my reaction, my story about 9/11 is one small data point. On the local level each person’s story matters to themselves and to those around them.

My story by itself isn't some overarching truth, even though it is deeply true for me. Our individual reactions play into the way our larger communities and our country react to events like this. Even though they become less and less influential as the size and complexity of those worlds increase, Our stories and ways of reacting still matter. We can't really know to what extent our personal reactions may affect other people, but they do.

As I will talk about in the next episode of my Butterfly Arose podcast, one person's story is just one data point. In that episode, I am currently working through my thoughts and learnings on our system of medical care and the role that human stories play in improving that system. In what ways do personal stories become valuable information to the system? I try to use my memories of how I reacted to the horrors of 9/11 to help me stay true to my values.

I hope this episode of Sacred Gyre invites you to remember how your own reaction evolved. Or if you weren't alive or old enough yet to have memories of 9/11 that it will prompt you to be thoughtful as you remember difficult events or circumstances that were important in your own life. I believe this is one aspect of how we learn and grow over time.

In the meantime, thank you for listening. You can follow links I refer to in my podcasts by going to the written format on Substack and clicking on the bolded text.

If you would like to hear or read more of my podcast episodes, please sign up by going to the About page at WW II Baby Substack. Every subscriber receives all my posts, but if you are so moved I would appreciate your becoming a paid subscriber. It helps me with the costs of creating these podcasts.

In this episode of Sacred Gyre I talk about an incident in which one of my personal "perfect stories" becomes obvious and how I am reacting.

I then offer some thoughts on how this appears in the larger society and what I think is our responsibility as we notice such "perfect stories."

In this episode of Sacred Gyre, I grapple with a decision by my health care provider to stop certain forms of care for transgender youth. What should I do as I feel anger, fear or sadness in response? And what, if anything should you do in similar circumstances?

Episode 24 Navigating My Discomfort With Unconscious Bias

In this episode of Sacred Gyre, I use an example from my own life to illustrate the ways in which well-intended language about social change can potentially create harm. In addition to my thoughts on this subject, I also use this podcast episode as a way to hold myself accountable

If you would like to hear or read more of my podcast episodes, please sign up by going to my About page at WW II Baby Substack. Every subscriber receives all my posts, but if you are so moved I would appreciate your becoming a paid subscriber. It helps me with the costs of creating these podcasts.

Welcome listeners. In the last episode of Sacred Gyre, I read a collection of 13 poems from the newly released book Splitting Open the World by Carolyn Martin. In this episode 23 Carolyn and I have a conversation about the vulnerability of writing poems about your own life, and of her reaction to my reading of her poetry.