Author Reflections
The Story
I don’t remember ever hearing Catherine start a conversation from a theoretical perspective. It was always an anecdote or, more often, a question that served as our prompt. Catherine was incredibly generous with her stories—her special gift was inviting you inside them.
As we approach the release date of Love Across Difference: Learning Through Story and Dialogue, this portal for Commentary and Reflection will feature short excerpts from the book.
We hope they peak your interest. Since stories are at the heart of everything we explore in the book, we’ll begin there.
From: Chapter 2 The Story
“A miracle of stories is their ability to convey knowledge that we don’t know we need in a manner we can easily incorporate, without ever knowing what we are learning or even that we are learning.”
I don’t remember ever hearing Catherine start a conversation from a theoretical perspective. It was always an anecdote or, more often, a question that served as our prompt. Catherine was incredibly generous with her stories—her special gift was inviting you inside them. And when listening to your story, she had a way of giving back more than she received. You always felt like you were collaborating with her, actively enrolled and tapping into a personal and collective experience at the same time. You were a co-creator and actor.
Catherine thought that a good story wasn’t about convincing you of anything. She always tried to unfold the story in a way you could experience personally. Then she felt you might just convince yourself. She was especially good at encouraging her listeners to empathize with or to imitate the subjects in her stories, and thus enact those tales themselves.
Catherine and I typically began our exploration of stories through the lens of language. Beyond etymology and rhetorical mode, we focused our attention on the use of metaphor. These devices are common in all forms of writing and speech, and they often invite and inspire stories by offering a different way of understanding what is happening and what it may mean.
Used judiciously, metaphors are particularly helpful in accessing challenging topics, like navigating emotion, providing emphasis, simplifying the complex, accentuating differences or magnifying beauty. A metaphor can help us navigate a dilemma or conflict and show us a way forward, without wallowing in the mess of the moment.
Metaphor provides the means to connect our senses, memory and vivid walks into imagination. Creatively, it threads the needle of meaning, coaxing out treasures that have lain dormant in the garment folds of our lives. Metaphor can evoke both aesthetic charm and harsh reality, but always in a style that invites us to rethink and revisit our feelings.
(1) Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Coyote Wisdom (Rochester, Vermont: Bear & Company, 2005), 68.
Living Systems
“Cybernetics provides the tools for noticing how a lake is like a city, or asking how a forest is like a university, or how the church is a body?” MCB
Excerpts from Chapter 3 Living Systems
Every period of history has had a prevailing systems theory that shaped how people see and make sense of their world. Since the mid-twentieth century, the term “systems theory” has generally referred to a class of systems that are open, organic and living, existing in relationship with each other in one degree or another. They are multi-causal, non-linear relationships that move well beyond the bounds of systems governed by simple, linear cause-and-effect logic. Today, we often hear the terms complex systems or complexity theory.
Both the lake and city are teeming with an abundance of interdependent life. A lake and a city each exist in permeable, interconnected space. The shoreline of the lake and the demarcation of “city limits” show us their footprints in physical space. They both influence and are influenced by their surrounding environments. Those environments can bring vitality, stagnation or decay. In a lake’s ecosystem, responsible land-management practices can protect the lake from outside pollutants, like ground water run-off or unregulated human development. A city, being both a social and natural ecosystem, is likewise in the hands of human actors, who choose among an array of public policy and urban geographic considerations to provide for the health and welfare of their inhabitants.
A lake and a city are in constant relationships both within their own boundaries and with their neighbors. The lake is dynamic in the reciprocity of its diverse varieties of plants and aquatic subsystems. The loss of species due to external influence can upset this delicate balance. The city has its various sectors of business, residential, arts and services, even the vitality of green space, and too much of one or not enough of another can be devastating.
When the residential, almost exclusively white flight of the middle-class from American cities began, in the decades after World War II, urban areas went through a period of steady decline. Over the following decades, the economic loss of the tax base accelerated as corporate businesses started to follow their employees, relocating closer to suburban areas. This brought cities spiraling deficits and, in some cases, dramatic defaults. The flight also brought a loss of vibrancy to the cultural fabric, exacerbating urban social problems like poverty, crime, and glaring disparity in income. The structural and socio-racial inequalities that existed before these changes became an ever-increasing and vicious cycle, with each factor of decline feeding the devaluation of another. It is a classic example of a self-sealing entropic system, the serpent eating its tail.
Not surprisingly, during this same period, there were similar declines in natural ecosystems—particularly oceans, lakes, rivers and other bodies of water. Pollution increased due to a flurry of under-regulated development, waste-water discharge and ocean dumping of garbage. I still recall the sickening feeling of seeing syringes and other medical waste washing up on the sand while walking the beach at the New Jersey shore.
The lake/city metaphor offers us a glimpse into some of the key aspects of living systems. First, systems can be unpredictable. This is probably why many people refer to systems as messy. Yet systems are patterns, and you must look deeper than the surface to see the relationships that can actually be quite elegant. Think for a moment of birds flocking or fish schooling—both seemingly random, yet ordered. How do they do that? What messages are passing among those little heads saying, turn here, or, stay close, but don’t touch? Living systems are organic: they exchange energy and information with their environment, and they have a structure that is bounded yet permeable.
Babel Revisited
Catherine delves into the archetypal story and the connection of language and relationships.
From: Chapter 4 Babel Revisited
Being in the Philippines changed my sense about languages, why we care, why we learn. I had found myself connecting with people and understanding patterns of Filipino behavior in ways that I would not otherwise have learned in many years in the country, because when people switch from one language to another, if they’re skillful at all, they also modify behavior. If you want to have someone respond to you in a way that fits the local customs, the best way to get them to do that is to address them in the language of the place. Then the game changes, and the status relationship changes. With any luck, people who may look up to you begin helping you with your mistakes instead of laughing behind your back, but it may be hard to persuade people to do that, for in many places, courtesy forbids pointing out mistakes. And yet when it’s something as simple as language, if you can get people to do that, they may also help you out on some of the other mistakes that you make, and help you understand what’s happening around you.
We, as Americans, tend to go around the world assuming that other people will learn English. In fact, we’re likely to think that if they’re worth anything, they should have learned it already—that there is something wrong with them if they haven’t. And of course, the media and the Internet reinforce that, because although the Internet is now being used in many languages, it is still overwhelmingly English. Our linguistic provincialism is an extraordinary form of arrogance that we almost don’t notice. Some people just talk louder, or shout, when the other person doesn’t understand.
The statement that people “without shoes” learn the language of people “with shoes” is about a lot more than poverty. If you are speaking your native language, you have an advantage over the person speaking a second language. It takes years of using a second language for that inequality to disappear. So, Americans go around the planet, often hoping to build more egalitarian societies, but at the same time expecting other peoples to walk that extra mile of communication, making it in many ways a condition of anything to be achieved, any kind of cooperation, any kind of joint project. And just as we expect others to walk the extra mile in language, we often unconsciously expect them to accept our customs as well.