A Small Climate Success
Here is a small but hopeful story:
Each winter my family goes to a four-day camp where we sing, dance, play folk music, write songs, and celebrate the end of a calendar year. Anyone who goes to this camp may offer a seventy-five-minute gathering on a particular topic, like “French Country Dances” or “How to Play Banjo.”
I led a gathering called “Our Climate Change Stories.”
Over the first twenty minutes of the gathering, twelve people arrived—or about sixteen percent of the camp. I had expected fewer people to want to stop doing music and talk about this scary topic. Many of the people had already met me. My years of discharge have helped me to share more of what I think about and to be more loving to new friends.
I asked people to say their names, where they lived, and one way they could tell [perceive] that the climate was changing even if they did not read the news. I repeated the instructions and widened the circle of chairs each time one more person arrived.
This worked well. It had nothing to do with quoting scientists or political leaders. It led to people thinking about their home environments and what they could see with their own eyes. Everyone shared for two minutes each.
Then I said that when we are listened to, we get smarter, and that the problem of climate change will need us all, not just people in certain roles, to be the smartest we can be, so we should listen to each other.
I asked them to pair up and listen without interruption for six minutes each. “When you are talking, you can start out with a plan for what story to tell but then follow your mind anywhere it wants to take you. It does not have to make sense; you will be smarter afterward. When you are the listener, offer eye contact. Use a facial expression that shows that you are glad—glad that the other person has this chance to be heard, even if the story is not happy. When the timer goes off, stand up and stretch and then switch roles.”
This also worked well. Everyone did a mini-session as if there were nothing surprising in my instructions. It had been my briefest “introduction to Co-Counseling” ever, and it was enough. They looked like they could have gone right on to twelve-minute-each-way sessions if we’d had the time. Everyone seemed hungry to talk, now that there was a place in which talking about climate change was the expected thing to do.
I suggested that they look for opportunities to open up similar safe places for respectful listening everywhere they go. I said that the eye contact helps us get close to people, including those who may not agree with us, and helps us renew our hopefulness.
We each got a very short time to say highlights in our closing circle.
“Inspiring,” said one person.
“I feel better,” said a ninety-one-year-old.
“People like you give me hope,” said a man who I know votes differently from me.
As I walked out to go to my next class, two people who had just met and been each other’s partners for the mini-session told me that they were now friends and were going to stay in the room and keep talking to each other.
Fort Bragg, California, USA
Reprinted from the e-mail discussion list for RC teachers
(Present Time 198, January 2020)