Parker Palmer quotes
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/55813.Parker_J_Palmer
“Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.”
Like a wild animal, the
soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy,
& selfsufficient.
it knows how to
survive in
hard places. I learned about these qualities
during my bouts with
depression.
In that
deadly darkness
the faculties
I had always
depended on collapsed. My
intellect was useless; my emotions were dead; my will was impotent
my ego was shattered.
From time to time,deep in the thickets
of my inner
wilderness,
I could sense the presence of
I could sense the presence of
something that knew how to stay
alive even when the rest of me
wanted wanted to die.
That something
was my tough
tenacious soul.
Anytime we
can listen
to true self and give the care it requires, we do it not
only for ourselves, but for the
many others
whose lives
we touch.”
~Parker Palmer,
Let Your Life Speak:
Listening for the Voice of Vocation
Listening for the Voice of Vocation
By choosing integrity, I become more whole, but wholeness does
not mean perfection. 
It means becoming
more real by
acknowledging
wholley of who I am.
The highest form of love: the love that allows intimacy
without the
annihilation
of differences
Humility is the
only lens though which
great things can be seen & once we have, humility is the only
posture possible.
Each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens up
Violence is what happens when we don't know what else to do with our suffering.
The winters
will drive you
crazy until you learn to get out into them
As I teach, I project the
condition of my soul
onto my students,
my subject,
& our way of
being together
heart such as
empathy,
patience,
compassion,
the capacity
to forgive.”
Eventually, I developed my
own image of teh"befriending"impulse behind my
Imagine that
from early in
my life a friendly
figure standing a block away was trying to get my attention
by shouting my name, wanting to teach me some hard but healing
truths about myself. But I--
fearful of what I might hear or
arrogantly trying to live wihtout help or simply too busy with my
ideas and ego and ethics to bother-- ignored teh shouts and walked away
this figure, still with friendly intent, came closer & shouted more
loudly, but I kept
walking. Ever closer it came, close enough to tap me on the shoulder. but I walked on.
Frustrated by my
unresponsiveness,
the figure threw
stones at my back,
then struck me with a stick, still wanting simply to get my
attention. But despite teh pain, I kept walking away
ten years, teh befriending intent of this figure never disapppeared but b/c obscured by the defeat
of by my refusal to turn
around. Since shouts, taps, stones, sticks had failed to do the trick, there was only one thing left: drop the nuclear bomb called depression on me, not with the intent to kill but as a last-ditch effort to get me to turn and ask the simple question:
"What do you want?" When I was finally able to make the turn-& start to absorb & act on the selfknowledge available to me I began getto get well
The figure calling to me all those years was, I believe, what Thomas Merton calls "true self."
This is not the ego self that wants to inflate us or deflate us, a form of self-distortion, not the intellectual self that wants to hover above the mess of life in clear but ungrounded ideas, not the
ethical self that wants to live by some abstract moral code. It is the Self planted in us by the God who made
us in His own image. The self that wants nothing more, or less, than for us to be who we were created to be.
True self is true friend.
One ignores or rejects such friendship only at one's peril.
The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will
bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope,& love
When we learn how to listen
deeply to others,
we can listen
more deeply to.
ourselves.
— Parker J. Palmer
Why does a literary scholar study the world of "fiction"? To show us that the facts can never be understood except in communion with the imagination.
The soul speaks its truth only under quiet inviting trustworthy
conditions.
We are exploring together. We are
cultivating a garden together, backs to the sun. The question is a hoe in our
hands. we are digging beneath the hard crusty surface to the rich humus of our lives.
In my own life, as winters turn into spring, I find it not only hard to cope with mud but also
hard to credit the small harbingers of larger life to come, hard to hope until the outcome is secure.
Spring teaches me to look more carefully for the green stems of possibility; for the intuitive hunch that may turn into a larger insight, for the glance or touch
that may thaw a frozen relationship, for the stranger's act of kindness that makes the world seem hospitable
again.
We must come together in ways that respect the solitude of the soul that avoid the unconscious
violence we do when we try to save each other that evoke our capacity to hold another life without dishonoring its mystery never trying to coerce the other into meeting our own needs.
We are whiplashed between an arrogant overestimation of ourselves & a servile underestimation of ourselves.
🍃🌱🌿💚🍃🌾💚🍃🌿🌱🍃💚🍃🌿💚☘️🍃I want my inner truth to be the
plumb line for the choices I make about my life - about the work that I do and how I do it,
about the relationships I enter into and how I conduct them.
As a young man,
I yearned for the day when, rooted in the
experience that only comes w/ old age
I could do my work fearlessly.
Now in my mid-sixties I realize I will feel fear sometimes for the rest of my life. I may never get rid of fear. But - I can learn to walk into it & through it whenever it rises up - naming the inner force that triggers- fear - Naming our fears aloud- is the first step toward transcending them.
Now in my mid-sixties I realize I will feel fear sometimes for the rest of my life. I may never get rid of fear. But - I can learn to walk into it & through it whenever it rises up - naming the inner force that triggers- fear - Naming our fears aloud- is the first step toward transcending them.
Wholeness does not mean
perfection. It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life” ― Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life
As young people, we are surrounded by people w/ expectations that
may have little to do with who we really are. expectations may be held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to
fit us into slots.
Mentors & apprentices are partners in an ancient human
dance, and one of teaching's great rewards is the daily chance it gives us to get back on the dance floor. It is the dance of
the spiraling
generations, in which the old empower the young with their experience and the young empower the old with new life reweaving the fabric of the human community as they touch & turn.
One of the most painful discoveries I made in the dark woods of depression was that a part of me wanted to stay depressed. As long as I clung to this living death, life became easier; little was expected of me, certainly not serving others.”
The spiritual traditions are primarily about reality
...an effort to
penetrate the illusions of the external world & name its underlying truth
🍃☘️💚🌿🍃☘️💚🌾🍃🍀💚🍀🍃🌿Vocation at its deepest level is, "This is something I can't not do, for reasons I'm unable to explain to anyone else and don't fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling
The more you know about another person's story, the less possible it is to see that person
as your enemy.”
― Parker J. Palmer, Healing
the Heart of Democracy: The
Courage to Create a Politics
Worthy of the Human Spirit
You seem to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to
There are some relationships which
I am capable of love and others in which I am not.
To pretend otherwise, to put out
Our strongest gifts are usually those we are barely aware of possessing. They are a part of our Godgiven nature, w/ us from
our first breath, & we are not aware of having them them than we are of breathing.
Formation may be the best name for what happens in a circle of
trust, because the word refers,
historically, to soul work done in community.
formation
can mean a process which pressure of orthodox
doctrine, sacred text,
doctrine, sacred text,
& institutional authority is put to the misshapen soul to suit it to the shape dictated by some theology. This is rooted
in the idea that we are born with souls deformed by sin. Our situation is hopeless until the authorities "form" us properly
 |
| A circle of trust: |
formation flows from the belief that we are born with souls in perfect form. As time goes on, we subject to powers of deformation, from within as well as without, that twist us into shapes alien to the shape of the soul. But the soul never loses its original
form. Never stops calling us back to our birhtright integrity.”
― Parker J. Palmer,
A Hidden Wholeness:
The Journey Toward
an Undivided Life
My life is not only about my strengths and virtues; it's also abt my liabilities,trespasses
limits, & my shadow. A
dimension of 'wholeness'is we embrace what we dislike or find
shameful abt ourselves as well as what we are confident and proud of.”
Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to learn to weave a complex web of connections among themselves
their subjects, their students
& can weave a whole world for themselves.
ironically,
from our indifference to
those among us who suffer.
Everything depends on the lenses through which we view the world. By putting on new lenses, we can see things that would otherwise remain invisible.”
The soul is like a wild animal— resilient, savvy,
self-sufficient
tough yet shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the thing we should not do is to go crashing through the woods
shouting for it to come out. If we
walk quietly into
the woods & sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature may emerge. out of the corner of an eye we may catch a glimpse of the
― Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life
We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.”
Long into my career I harbored a secret sense that thinking and reading and writing, as much as I loved them, did not qualify as "real work.
By standing respectfully and faithfully at the borders of another’s solitude, we may mediate the love of God to a person who needs something deeper than any human being can give.
We can put the chairs in a circle, but as long as they are occupied by people who have an
inner hierarchy, the circle itself will have a divided life, one more form of "living within the lie": a false community.”
― Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Lif
Solitude does not necessarily mean living apart from others; rather, it means never living apart from one’s self.
Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the "integrity that comes from being what you are.”
Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about-quite apart from what I would like it to be about-or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.”
The civility we need will not come from watching our tongues. It will come from valuing our differences.”
― Parker J. Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit
Instead of telling our valuable stories, we seek safety in abstractions, speaking to each other about our opinions, ideas, and beliefs rather than about our lives. Academic culture blesses this practice by insisting that the more abstract our speech, the more likely we are to touch the universal truths that unite us. But what happens is exactly the reverse: as our discourse becomes more abstract, the less connected we feel. There is less sense of community among intellectuals than in the most 'primitive' society of storytellers." Parker Palmer, AHW, 123”
― Parker Palmer
There is as much guidance in what does not and cannot happen in my life as there is in what can and does -- maybe more.”
Solitude... is not about the absence of other people-it is about being fully present to ourselves, whether or not we are with others.
Community does not necessarily mean living face-to-face with others; rather, it means never losing the awareness that we are connected to each other. It is not about the presence of other people-it is about being fully open to the reality of relationship, whether or not we are alone.”
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When we catch sight of the soul, we can become healers in a wounded world-in the family, in the neighborhood, in the workplace, and in political life-as we are called back to our "hidden wholeness" amid the violence of the storm.”
― Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life
The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our
love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings.”
― Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life
Our problem as Americans -- at least, among my race and gender -- is that we resist the very idea of limits, regarding limits of all sorts as temporary and regrettable impositions on our lives.”
The punishment imposed on us for claiming true self can never be worse than the punishment we impose on ourselves by failing to make that claim.”
Every profession that attracts people for “reasons of the heart” is a profession in which people and the work they do suffer from losing hear
The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all-and to find in all of it opportunities for growth....
From an early age, we absorb our culture's arrogant conviction that we manufacture everything, reducing the world to mere "raw material" that lacks all value until we impose our designs and labor on it.”
When I give something I do not possess, I give a false and dangerous gift, a gift that looks like love but is, in reality, loveless—a gift given more from my need to prove myself than from the other’s need to be cared for...
we are created in and for community, to be there, in love, for one another. But community cuts both ways: when we reach the limits of our own capacity to love, community means trusting that someone else will be available to the person in need.”
A scholar is committed to building on knowledge that others have gathered, correcting it, confirming it, enlarging it. ”
Under stress, an unexercised heart will explode in frustration or fury. If the situation is especially tense, that exploding heart may be hurled like a fragment grenade toward the source of its pain.
But a heart that has been consistently exercised through conscious engagement with suffering is more likely to break open instead of apart. Such a heart has learned how to flex to hold tension in a way that expands its capacity for both suffering and joy.”
― Parker J. Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit
I cannot imagine a spiritual pain deeper than dying with the thought that during my sojourn on earth, I had rarely, if ever, shown up as my true self. And I cannot imagine a spiritual comfort deeper than dying with the knowledge that I had spent my brief time on this planet doing the best I could to be present as myself to my family, my friends, my community, and my world.”
The underground... 🍁
is a dangerous but potentially life-giving place to which depression takes us; a place where we come to understand that the self is not set apart or special or superior but is a common mix of good and evil, darkness and
light;
a place where we can finally embrace the humanity we share with others. That is the best image I can offer not only of the underground but also of the field of forces surrounding the experience of God.”
If I can remember the inner pluralism of my own soul and the slow pace of my own self-emergence, I will be better able to serve the pluralism among my students at the pace of their young lives.”
... in nomadic cultures, the food and shelter one gave to a stranger yesterday is the food and shelter one hopes to receive from a stranger tomorrow. By offering hospitality, one participates in the endless reweaving of a social fabric on which all can depend—thus the gift of sustenance for the guest becomes a gift of hope for the host. It is that way in teaching as well: the teacher’s hospitality to the student results in a world more hospitable to the teacher.”
― Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of
... a culture like ours – which devalues or dismisses the reality and power of the inner life – ethics too often becomes an external code of conduct, an objective set of rules we are told to follow, a moral exoskeleton we put on hoping to prop ourselves up. The problem with exoskeletons is simple: we can slip them off as easily as we can don them.”
the reality we belong to, the reality we long to know, extends far beyond human beings interacting with one another
If you seek vocation without understanding the material you are working with, what you build with your life will be ungainly and may well put lives in peril, your own and some of those around you.
Faking it' in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override one's nature, and it will always fail.”
we all have an inner teacher whose guidance is more reliable than anything we can get from
a doctrine, ideology, collective belief system, institution, or leader...
we all need other people to invite, amplify, and help us discern the inner teacher's voice” doctrine, ideology, collective belief system, institution, or leader.
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In true community we will not choose our companions, for our choices are so often limited by self-serving motives. Instead, our companions will be given to us by grace
... Often they will be persons who will upset our settled view of self and world...
define true community as that place
where the person you least want to
live with lives….
the disappointments of community life
can be transformed by our discovery that
the only dependable power for life lies
beyond all human structures and
relationships...
Do not commit yourself to community, but commit yourself to God…In that commitment you will find yourself drawn into community.
Parker Palmer, A Place Called Community, 1977”
The door that closed kept
us from entering a
room, but what now lies before us is the rest of reality.”
There are times when the heart, like the canary in the coal mine, breathes in the world's toxicity and begins to die.”
unconditional love does not lead us to rest on our laurels. Instead, it surrounds us with a charged force field that makes us want to grow from the inside out — a force field that is safe enough to take the risks and endure the failures that growth requires.”
the democracy I cherish is constantly threatened by a brand of politics that clothes avarice and the arrogance of power in patriotic and religious garb.”
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"I pledge thee my troth." With this word one person enters a covenant with another, a pledge to engage in mutually accountable and transforming relationship...to know in truth is to become betrothed, to engage the known with one's whole self...to know in truth is to be known as well.”
― Parker J. Palmer, To Know as We Are Known: A Spirituality of Education
I had failed to understand the
perverse comfort we sometimes get from choosing death in life, exempting ourselves from the challenge of using our gifts, of living our lives in authentic relationship with others.”
... wholeness-mine, yours, ours-need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life.”
burnout...
burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess-the ultimate in giving too little! Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have: it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place.”
Honest, open questions are countercultural,”
We find common bonds in the shared details of the human journey, not in the divergent conclusions we draw from those details.”
Who am l?" leads inevitably to the equally important question "Whose am l?"-for there is no selfhood outside of relationship.”
teacher within is not the voice of conscience but of identity and integrity. It speaks not of what ought to be but of what is real for us, of what is true. It says things like, “This is what fits you and this is what doesn’t”; “This is who you are and this is who you are not”; “This is what gives you life and this is what kills your spirit—or makes you wish you were dead.
What seed was planted when you or I arrived on earth with our identities intact? How can we recall and reclaim those birthright gifts and potentials?
Depression is the ultimate state of disconnection, not just between people but between one's mind and one's feelings.”
we must withdraw the negative projections we make on people and situations-projections that serve mainly to mask our fears about ourselves-and acknowledge and embrace our own liabilities and limits.”
One crosses God by trying to be something one is not. Reality-including one's own-is divine, to be not defied but honored.”
we will extract a price from others. We will make promises we cannot keep, build houses from flimsy stuff, conjure dreams that devolve into nightmares, and other people will suffer - if we are unfaithful to true self.”
Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: `Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: Why were you not Zusya?"'
But before we come to that center, full of light, we must travel in the dark. Darkness is not the whole of the story-every pilgrimage has passages of loveliness and joy-but it is the part of the story most often left untold.”
As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining the human race.”
consciousness, yours and mine, can form, deform, or reform our world. Our complicity in world making is a source of awesome and sometimes painful responsibility-and a source of profound hope for change. It is the ground of our common call to leadership, the truth that makes leaders of its all.”
From first days in school, we are taught to listen to everything and everyone but ourselves, to take in all our clues about living from the people and powers around us
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