My wife asked one of my sons last week if he remembered his “angry year” ten years ago or so in his mid-teens and how, after we spent two weeks camping and using a talking stick around the campfire several times, he came home markedly changed for the better.
I learned about a talking stick back then when I was working at Utne Reader and they published the a cover story on “Salons: How to Revive the Endangered Art of Conversation and Start a Revolution in Your Living Room.” (One of my job titles there: Salonkeeper. Utne now publishes a book titled, Salons: The Joy of Conversation. And The Salon-Keeper’s Companion: An Utne Reader Guide to Conducting Salons, Council and Study Circles is still posted online.)
We used our talking stick a few more times as a family after that summer’s camping trip but I’ve not thought much about it since. Last week I happened to be reading Ekhart Tolle’s new book, Stillness Speaks. His central thesis about stillness seems to gel with physicist David Bohm and his theory of dialogue, which I also first heard about in that issue of Utne. Likewise, dialogue is one Peter’s Senge’s five disciplines for a Learning Organization.
Monday night, I built my first fire in the woodburning fire cage that I got from my wife and kids for my birthday.
It was a perfect night for a fire… crisp, clear, no wind, leaves falling. It occurred to me to invite my daughter out to sit with me in front of the fire and pass the talking stick back and forth. She’d been in minor hot water with us several times during the day and so it seemed liked a good time to tap into whatever help we could get from dialogue and stillness.
I explained to her my crude understanding of what can happen with a talking stick and dialogue. I told her that since the person holding the stick knows that they won’t be interrupted either with criticism or praise, they’re less defensive and are more likely to speak more honestly and more openly… from the heart. Other people there are more likely to really listen and try to understand the person with the stick, since they’re not preparing to reply. And since nobody needs to worry about being interrupted or even having anything to say if they don’t want, there tends to be many periods of silence, way more than usual. This decrease in verbal and mental chatter makes it more likely that everyone’s subconscious can more readily tap into something larger or deeper.
Christians might call this God’s Grace; physicists might call it the field of potentiality in the quantum void of the atom; George Lucas might call it the Force; new agers might call it the wisdom of the universe. Lately, I’m more drawn to the phrase “field of intelligence” in part because of all the attention to the human genome project and the decoding of large sequences of human DNA . It’s hard to deny that’s there’s no small amount of intelligence packed into the cells of every living thing.
So I let down my own hair a bit and talked about my struggles that were and are very similar to the ones she’s having. She talked a bit and then we took turns ticking off a few things we were feeling grateful for, and that was it. Nothing earthshattering, and she even had one more run-in with her mother after that. So who knows what benefit might come from it, if any. But I’m confident that it was good for both of us. And it’s got me thinking.