A guest post by Inside Passages facilitator Maggie Chumbley.
“I’ve chosen, like many people I know, to ensure as much as possible that my work is part of the work of building a just and sustainable world, and I know that this kind of life will be difficult.”
It was a sunny late August morning on Whidbey Island. Kurt and I sat down to tea looking out at the illuminated Maxwelton Valley. Just a few weeks previous we had returned from a retreat that wrapped up Kurt’s latest of many seasons on the Inside Passage in Southeast Alaska. It had been my first time to Alaska and my first time working with Kurt. I was the cook for retreat, and I was still glowing from the experience several weeks later. I started this cooking gig with a pretty empty tank as I arrived to Alaska exhausted after running a summer camp for international youth, but despite the hard work and long hours, to my great surprise I came back from Alaska renewed, and oddly rested.
Kurt met me at the tiny airport in Petersburg, Alaska with a big hug wearing his huge smile and iconic Alaska x-tra tuff boots. I had just completed seven weeks of working with international teenagers in New Mexico, one of my most direct ways to be in “the work” of building a just and sustainable world. I’ll often remark that I have known no deeper exhaustion than what I feel at the end of this work each summer. Our youth often confess and face some of their deepest fears and secrets during their time with us. They leave our program bonded tightly to each other across continents. I feel enormous gratitude for the privilege to do this work.
But, this kind of work is almost always heartbreaking and exhausting. It asks you to give everything physically and emotionally and can bear a 24/7 schedule. What surprised me this year was how Alaska shifted everything and how I bounced back so quickly. After just seven days in Alaska, I experienced what Kurt mentions in his book, The Circumference of Home, as the “scouring sand” of quiet time in wild country where my “hunger for silence” was finally satisfied and I felt the effects of deeper inner renewal. It brought me to a place of deeper renewal and perspective on my work than I thought was possible.
So, back to that sunny morning on Whidbey. Kurt invited me to convene a group that was different from the folks that frequently gather with him in Southeast Alaska to meditate and kayak. He wanted to bring more people like me, the folks he sees as young change-makers who are in the game, and doing “the work”. I couldn’t imagine a more relevant offering to the folks I feel share some of my story as a passionate and sometimes burnt out young change-maker. Kurt often uses an expression that I love, calling the mindfulness practice that supports our work in the world, “inner habitat restoration”, and that’s exactly what it felt like.
As we’ve begun to plan and promote this retreat, I’ve been asking what it means to be a young change-maker. What are the unique rewards and challenges we face? Why would going to Alaska to learn mindfulness and kayak in the wilderness serve us? What would we want to converse about? I began to think broadly through my own work as a school teacher, youth facilitator, and entrepreneur. At 31 years old, living in Seattle, belonging to a community of change-makers and working in the field of education and youth empowerment I am no stranger to the weight of disillusionment, the anxiety of climate change, and the frustration of what seems to be the central trade off for folks like me which says there’s no money in doing good. Or we’ll have to supplement our do gooding with corporate jobs. Now, even the availability of stable income is questionable no matter where you are willing to work. The landscape and modern inheritance for the millennial generation shows a very tough economic reality, and I have certainly felt this too.
The other side, however to choosing this life is that I am also no stranger to the joy and rootedness of being part of a loving and beloved community. I’ve enjoyed the spark of thinking of an innovative idea and knowing that I’ve created my life in a way that I can act on that idea. I know the rush of supporting and co-creating disruptive technologies, and the expansive feeling that what I am doing in this moment certainly is some of the most important work of humanity.
At this age, we the young change-makers can often be the ones calling the shots, running the organizations and voting with our dollars. So, most of the time, I feel like I am very much in the game, and in some ways even making the rules. It’s a dynamic landscape. We are living that tension between knowing that we are facing the most imminent and terrifying global risks like climate change, and yet we are also uniquely poised to utilize our highest creativity and innovation. Yet it is often difficult to make sense of our own efficacy in this paradoxical time we live in. Parker Palmer writes in Let Your Life Speak, “We are whiplashed between an arrogant overestimation of ourselves and a servile underestimation of ourselves.” I’m certain many like me know the bewilderment of that whiplash.
For many of us folks working to make a world that works for all, some kind of contemplative practice has also emerged from the same heart that brought us to our work in the first place. It had to emerge so we could, as Kurt writes, “know where we stand, and hold our ground” (p.117). Last August in Alaska, it was the immediate and deep plunge into the contemplative silence we practiced that revived me so quickly. It rebuilt my inner capacity. Kurt writes, “I teach meditation to activists, among others, because I am so convinced that our efforts to save the external environment will lead to burnout and despair if we do not include adequate attention to our inner habitat restoration. The two are not separate and never have been. Our failure to understand this connection, emotionally, as well as intellectually, can overwhelm even our noblest efforts as change makers”(p. 114). I know that disempowered state of overwhelm and I found that the community, rhythm, paddling, silence and wilderness of a retreat with Inside Passages gave me that essential restoration of my inner life so that my work in the outer world could continue with strength, passion and resilience.
-Maggie Chumbley
Please see more about our retreat offering by visiting the retreat page.
