Every month, we pull a prompt from our BreakBread World Conversation Card Deck and offer a reflection. This month we pulled the “enough” prompt:

What is enough? Who is enough? When is enough, enough? Who decides?
Share a story about enough.

The “enough” prompt was auditioned at a BreakBread dinner on March 5, 2021. It’s hard to believe five years have passed. Martha and i were holed up in our one-bedroom Washington Heights apartment with Kahlo, our cat, and Franklin, our dog (who at that time were mortal enemies). March 2021 marked one year of living in the shadow of COVID 19. New cases and COVID deaths were being charted daily in the New York Times and Washington Heights, an enclave in northern Manhattan, was among the hardest hit areas at that time. The groups designated as priority for receiving the recently released COVID vaccine were expanding, public schools were beginning to open for limited in-person learning, and overnight subway service had been partially restored. The stuckness of a pandemicized world was cracking open and we had had enough! And i honestly think that’s where this prompt came from.

The BreakBread Process was in its formative stages. As a panacea to the pandemic, BreakBread had only ever been done online at that point. Joining us that evening via Zoom were our friends Theon, who invited his friend, Tekara, and Alex, who invited her friend, Reha. Even though this was Zoom, these were actual dinners and we all took this quite seriously setting tables, lighting candles, and even dressing for dinner. Then there’s the food… Martha and i had whipped up pasta with broccoli rabe, Theon showed up with Japanese curry & rice, Alex and Reha were together and shared a meal of salmon, rice, and grilled broccoli while Tekara took the prize with sweet potato & collard green soup with a side of coconut cornbread.

How do i remember all this? We actually keep a record of every BreakBreak: when it happened, where it was held, who showed up, what we ate, and to some degree, what was shared. Back then we used the Zoom chat function to jot down juicy or inspiring conversational morsels.

As i look back at the chat notes from five years ago i am amazed at the ground we covered in that one-hour conversation.

We learned that Reha is “strangely good” at racket sports.

We talked about boundaries and how “enough” can be a discovery that results from putting up a boundary — on one side of the fence is “not enough” on the other, contentment.

We talked about how in the United States we live in this odd paradox where on the one hand, cultural consumerism has us in a not-enough mindset of forever wanting more (e.g. transient consumer goods and ephemeral experiences) while at the same time we’re discouraged from wanting better healthcare or more maternity leave, and vacation time.

There was a discussion of the lack of grounding that comes from not being connected to the land and how this lack can be expressed through the insatiable quest for more.

And of course no conversation about enough would be complete without the mention of speed and how fast everything seems to be moving and are we ever moving, growing, evolving fast enough or is it enough to just keep up?

Toward the end of the conversation as the timer was running out i invoked Earthrise - the photograph taken in 1968 by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders. This is the first time humans saw an image of our blue cloud-painted planet as viewed across the desolate lunar horizon. I was four-years old when it was taken and for a moment during my childhood it was everywhere. It always felt, and to this day still feels magical. That on this ball spinning silently in space was me, my family, all the people i cared about and things that mattered along with all the other people – if only society as a whole could see the same thing. Maybe this was the naivete of my child-eyes, but wasn’t it Pablo Picasso who said “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child”?

For me, this photograph is a portrait of enough. And while we’re all caught in our never-enough trance fighting over borders, hoarding resources, racing for domination, this tiny marble of a home is both everything we need and all we’re going to get. What will it take for us to be enough, feel like we have enough, say “Enough!!!” to all our not-enoughness.

As i come to the close of this piece, i offer you a sacred practice of enoughness – gratitude. Who and what are you thankful for? Gratitude is the fence where not-enough ends and abundance begins. I thank Theon and Takara, Alex and Reha, and of course Martha, all who showed up with vigor for that mid-pandemic oasis of a BreakBread. Oh, and thank you Izzy, the cat who jumped onto Alex’s dinner table to say “Enough of this Zoomy chit-chat stuff… i want some attention!!! Purrrrrrrrr…”

As always, we encourage you to have your own conversation about enough and let us know how it went.

That’s why we call our work Conversation Activism — an inner activism of fierce awareness, play, and compassion where we resist the cultural forces that disconnect while embracing practices and values that make way for people, communities and organizations to flourish.

The cultural forces we refer to include the social, economic, and technological realities of our lives that fracture and monopolize our attention, distort our relationships with self, other, and our world, and destabilize trust between, each other and in the institutions that we inhabit.

Together, these forces tear at and erode the very fabric of our humanity.

Especially as AI technologies become more pervasive (and invasive) in our lives, we need to develop frameworks of humanity that nurture and maintain the roots of respect and dignity and that value our very humanness. Such frameworks are necessary in order to ground us so that trust and care can thrive in our relationships and communities. We see Conversation Activism as such a framework – one where we remind ourselves what it means to relate on a human scale. Where every conversation is an opportunity to celebrate the gifts each person brings to the table, to appreciate the nourishment as well as the friction of being in community, to practice the values of respect and compassion so as to nurture the roots of trust and care.

It was the mid-eighties and i was cabin-sitting in St. Albans, located in northern Vermont about 10 miles from the Canadian border. Harold, the father of a good friend, had invited me to stay there for a few weeks of winter solitude and in exchange i would handle a few chores in addition to making sure the pipes didn’t freeze. He let me use his truck and late one frigid starry night the truck broke down on an abandoned stretch of Route 7. It was a dead battery and how i got rescued was another story but the next day i called Harold to let him know what happened and to ask where to get it repaired. Harold chuckled and apologized – the truck was old and on its last legs – and he asked me to take it down to Tom, the local mechanic. Harold advised me that when i arrive, don’t immediately launch into the problem with the truck. Have a conversation. Ask Tom how he’s doing and how his day is going. You can let him know you’re staying up at Harold’s cabin. Get curious, chew the fat for a while then maybe after ten minutes when it feels natural, you can get around to the truck. Otherwise Tom might take offense thinking all you want of him is to fix your truck and you run the risk of not getting that truck back anytime soon.

What Harold shared startled me and stuck with me to this day. Indeed, all i thought i wanted was for the truck to be fixed. But the exchange with Harold and then with Tom reminded me that there’s a human being on the other end of this exchange. When I stepped into that acknowledgement, the experience was richer and more nourishing for me, and i suspect for Tom. Thank you, Harold.

Move forward forty years and i find myself sometimes channeling Harold.

My friend Jerry* found himself caught in a texting kerfuffle with Olivia, a mutual friend. In the text exchange our friend had posted some statements that Jerry felt crossed a line in terms of being overly demanding and even accusatory. Jerry came to me partly for advice but also partly for the reassurance that he was righteous in his assessment of the situation. Money was involved which added to the stakes. I read through the exchange and yes, i could see how one could very well have interpreted the situation and therefore feel as Jerry did. I also knew that our mutual friend was going through some challenging times and i could imagine the subject of this particular exchange might have had her feeling vulnerable and scared. I told Jerry to cease the texting and call. I recommended before he jumps into the thick of the problem, ask Olivia how she is. See if you can listen and really receive her. Oh, and Jerry, don’t forget to breathe. Two days later i spoke to Jerry. He and Olivia had an amazing call. They spoke for about ten minutes and almost forgot to talk about the original issue – which they worked out in less than thirty seconds.

Not all situations call for this level of connection and not all people want to connect – some want to cut to the chase and move on.

For me i do my best to make these opening connections a practice which might look like the examples mentioned above. It can also look like me using the other person’s name on a customer support call to let them know i remembered their name and appreciate the fact that i’m speaking to another human. It feels odd to be on a support call with an AI chatbot fielding human niceties when i know they’re not flesh and blood. It’s also a bit confusing as to what exactly is etiquette when dealing with a machine intelligence posing as human and why bother maintaining it? But this is the slippery slope we tread these days. When we habituate ourselves to dealing one way with machines capable of mimicking human intelligence and inflection, how do we not let that diminish our dealings where we stand heart-to-heart with our fellow humans?

This is where Conversation Activism as a practice of awareness comes into play.

We know that with technologies like social media and texting, it can be easy to disconnect and forget that there’s a human on the receiving-end of our snarky texts or outrage-laden posts. In Jerry connecting with Olivia via phone the real-time voice-to-voice connection was key in negotiating the emotion-laden territory in ways not possible in the emotionally void wasteland of texting.

Technology aside, Conversation Activism is also about the practice of creating new pathways for our everyday relationships to strengthen and flourish. It’s about intentionally moving toward deeper, more resilient connection by breaking free of old patterns and limiting beliefs that keep us stuck.

Ed found himself in an old worn-out pattern of encounter with his partner who was making broad generalizations – ”You always do this…” “You never do that…”. His usual go-to strategies would have been to react by acquiescing and saying something to get out of the immediate line of fire, or pushing back by launching a verbal defense to prove his partner wrong. Neither tactic ever led to a satisfying outcome.

He was determined to try to stay connected and to try to move the conversation in a different direction. Ed took a brief pause to slow down and check in with himself – this is a practice we teach our Conversation Activists. What came up for him was confusion and Ed noticed how uncomfortable it felt to be in that state. He realized he had no idea what his partner was actually asking of him nor did he know how to respond. This pattern of encounter was old. The feeling of confusion was old too but usually masked by Ed’s go-to reactions of argumentative anger or collapse (i.e. fight or flight). What was new was Ed’s capacity to recognize and abide in the discomfort of his confusion.

So Ed got curious and energetically moved toward the encounter instead of distancing or fleeing from it. What came out of his mouth surprised him: “How do you expect me to respond to that?”. He said it in a genuinely curious, nonconfrontational tone and it stopped the encounter dead in its tracks. His partner was not expecting that response. It felt like a trance had been broken. Ed’s partner apologized and what ensued was a connected conversation about what was really beneath the surface for both of them. A new pathway out of an old impasse had been discovered.

One might say this sounds like therapy or possibly bridge building and yes, there are aspects of similarity and overlap. The work of Conversation Activism uses the lens of everyday conversation as an everpresent practiceground for continual awakening, increased agency, and more fluid movement toward reweaving the connection between us. One could say you’ve done your self-improvement and your therapy, you’ve done your bridge-building and all the rest… Now let’s put it to practice and let’s see how it shifts not only your world, but the world around you.

Conversation is where you begin to create the world you long for by practicing it into existence.

Conversation is where we reexamine our values and cultural norms, practice respect, reclaim our inner lives, and reestablish the boundaries and connections that protect us. Every conversation is an opportunity to be aware, pay attention, and resist the cultural forces that diminish and challenge our humanness. Conversation is where we reweave our common humanity and celebrate all that makes us human and Conversation Activism is the practice we call upon to shift the conversation.

* All the names and situations in this piece have been modified to protect confidentiality

Every month, we pull a prompt from our BreakBread World Conversation Card Deck and offer a reflection. This month we pulled the “truth” prompt:

When has hearing the truth of another changed you or your truth?

Maybe you are scratching your head when you read this prompt. Hm, when has hearing the truth of another changed me? For me, theater and art flash through my mind: the Vagina Monologues, my friend Greg’s one man show, the banana that sold for $6.2 million. During a BreakBread we co-hosted in the Boston area one person quoted Elaine Guerian, a museum consultant, who said “Museums are a safe place for unsafe ideas.” In this sense, art is a powerful expression of the unsaid, the truth below the surface.

But this brings me to the question: What is truth? This question inflames some people because they fear we live in a “post-truth” society where “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. For me personally, I’ve always felt the “rational” truth seems great for fixing power lines and cars but when it comes to the stuff of life, truth is quite maleable. For example, “What is a banana?” According to Wikipedia “A banana is an elongated, edible fruit—botanically a berry—produced by several kinds of large treelike herbaceous flowering plants in the genus Musa.” But maybe a banana is also a sign of status (as in paying lots of money for banana art) or maybe it is love (as in Banana Bread my grandma made). Could it be that there are many truths and to be human is to be a sojourn of truth?

The word “sojourn” means to stay as a temporary resident. From a biblical perspective, it can reference our spiritual journey on earth, with hopes of returning to our ultimate heavenly home with God. And in many religions, the truth is buried in a sacred text that is set as immoveable law.

Religion aside, are we all on a sojourn of truth? If you follow the work of BreakBread, you know I am.

Most of us have heard of Sojourner Truth, but if you live in Kingston, NY, where I live, you most definitely know who she is. Sojourner Truth was born into slavery as Isabelle Bomefree in Hurley, NY, one town over from Kingston. In 1843, after finally gaining her state-sanctioned freedom and being called by God to travel through the country and share a message of hope, she gave herself the name Sojourner Truth.

Part of Sojourner Truth’s journey of truth was waking up to the prismatic allure of her previous violent “owner” John Dumont, whose abuse she had internalized. (As an aside, is it “true” that someone can “own” someone else?) For Sojourner Truth, after living “free” with abolitionists Isaac and Maria Van Wagenen in a nearby town for a year she almost voluntarily returned into the twisted world of John Dumont. Instead, en route to his carriage to go “back home” to Dumont, in a supernatural flash from God, she saw the pimpled “truth” of Dumont, the ever-presence of God and a vision of Jesus. In this moment, she stopped herself from stepping back into Dumont’s bruised and battered world. Instead, she turned around – making the powerful choice to finally free herself. In that moment, she listened and the truth set her free. We know Sojourner Truth’s truth changed her so deeply that she became a beacon of truth, transmitted throughout the country and across time.

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When I think about these pinnacle moments of truth – those struck by truth, I think of the artists, thinkers, and friends who are open enough to receive truth and courageous enough to share truth. I know I have had those moments while making art.

In particular I think of two of my teachers: Regina Thomashauer and Kasia Urbaniak. Their deep work changed my thinking completely. They both carried teaching about the invisible dynamics of being a woman in the modern western world. They were open enough to receive this wisdom and courageous enough to share it. Their work opened my eyes to the role I played in the patriarchal paradigm. I changed from being reactive and self-loathing to holding a deep and sacred embrace of my innate unique gifts as a woman and a growing agency to work with both my feminine and masculine powers to move through the world. I can’t even imagine my life without these new perspectives. They inform much of our Conversation Alchemy teaching and are foundational to my Relational Leadership Coaching practice.

Could it be that truth travels, moves, sways, weaves in and out of the mental, physical and spiritual world and that some people become lighting rods of truth?

Yes, but I also think truth can also be an everyday occurrence if we are open to it. I know that I feel those moments on a regular basis. One example is when I’m in a BreakBread conversation as we sit together and vulnerably share stories, laugh at the complexity of life and expand our sense of reality. Through each conversation we shift toward a deeper appreciation for our ever changing spiritual, emotional and physical truths. We like to say that when you head into any conversation, and especially a BreakBread conversation, you risk being changed forever.

I recall at one of our many BreakBread gatherings, one friend shared how they moved into a new understanding of love after separating and then getting back together with her husband. I was moved by her ability to be courageous and her humility in the face of insight. When I say moved, I mean I felt it in my heart and my sense of her expanded. There was a visceral shift, truly. I appreciated her wisdom and strength and shared these appreciations with her! She in turn, was changed by my ability to be moved. It is through both the sharing and the receiving of truth that the world is changed (same for Sojourner Truth, Regina Thomashauer, Kasia Urbaniak, the Banana artist). In this sense, if we can truly receive someone in conversation and share our authentic truth, then we have a recipe for change. This wasn’t the kind of change where seeing the truth of another reorganizes the direction of my life. That’s a tall order – the stuff of epochs. These are turning points.

But writing this reminds me to thank the pulsing world around me for its vibrant and alive truth. I am not talking about the truth that is “set in stone” but one that is moveable, dynamic and alive – one where truth lies in both flashes of insight and in small ways like when the dog nudges me for more pets.

We invite you to think about the prompt but more importantly, we invite you to host a BreakBread using this prompt and see…will the truth of another change you?

This month we pulled the “dream” prompt from the BreakBread World Conversation Card Deck and I wrote a personal reflection inspired by the discovery of some childhood writing. In the process of writing, I remember the importance of the people in the village who help to nurture our dreams: nuclear and extended family, teachers, friends, friend’s parents, the neighbor, church members, coaches and teammates. And then I remember how the support of the trees was integral to finding myself and my dreams. In my particular village, I didn’t have a grandmother living close by, instead I was adopted by a grove of wise grandmother trees behind the house to help me with my dreams.

We’ve all heard the term “it takes a village” often referring to “raising a child”. But the term can be used in other ways. For example, it takes the care of the village to feel connected, safe, secure, nourished, happy and healthy. But what is the village? Is it the streets, the commons, the grocer, the shops and schools? Or is it your neighbors, friends, and family? Does it include trees, plants, animals? Where is the village? How has the village changed over the course of your lifetime? How has the village helped or hindered your dreams?

My village has shifted as I’ve moved through my wild and wooly life. I’ve literally lived in 11 towns and in 23 different dwellings. Although this number is inflated by moving around for my dad’s work as a kid, it still reflects the American mentality of “going west”, advancing a career, or following your dream. Over the course of a lifetime, the average American moves 11 times compared to Europeans who move about 4 times. What does this do to the village?

One day a couple of months ago, John said to me “I think the work of BreakBread is helping us to re-village.”

My ears perk up. It conjures up the thought of our friend Jenny stopping by this past summer with some fresh arugula she just clipped from the garden or John and I sitting on our second-floor porch while chatting with our friend Michael, street-level, who happened by, enjoying an evening walk. It reminds me that while the concept of village is vast, the feeling of village is palpable.

According to Mark Dunkelman’s book, The Vanishing Neighbor, since after the world wars, our social landscape has been sliding into a sanitized, vacuum sealed, gated suburban or urban chill where classes don’t mix and weak relations that used to be cultivated in village life are considered a nuisance. And all the moving doesn’t help. He says, as a result we’ve lost our ability to compromise, empathize, and debate. And even if you have some sense of village, the village can be stressed. People are overwhelmed, self-absorbed and intolerant – all of which gets reinforced by media and social media.

Dunkelman says, today we feel connected to the inner ring of our circle of friends and family, who may or may not even live close by, and we feel connected to the outer ring: the larger story of our town, country and world through media and social media. Yet, the middle ring of the circle has diminished for many. He calls this middle ring: weak relations. One could argue that the village lives in that middle ring. These are the folks we interact and associate with but don’t know well, the shopkeepers, the guy down the street, the people we do community service with.

I would argue that the re-villaging work of BreakBread is much different than offering a friendly fist bump with the postman (I never fistbump my postman btw).

In the process of a deteriorating middle space, society has become intolerant, conflict dysfunctional, deadened to the complexity of life, obsessed with staying on the surface and communally adverse. From our perspective, a robust village is more than knowing your neighbor’s name, it’s knowing what your neighbor longs for, understanding their moral fabric and celebrating their unique perspective. And when you begin to understand these things more deeply on a regular basis, the village comes alive. Doorbells ring, when someone is struggling, you show up and vice versa. The acceptance of each other creates a sort of ease that’s contagious. And so… the concept of “village” is vast but the feeling of village is palpable.

And from where I sit, the village has been neutered by the convenience of big box stores, online shopping, social media, texting and even remote work. Our eyes and ears have been sullied into a state of numbness by endless broadcasting disguised as conversation. We have been yanked from the fruits of deep in-person connection by being duped by our cultural idolatry of individualism at all costs.

This brings me back to Jenny and Michael. Initially they were “neighbors” or as Dunkeleman would say, “weak relations”. Yet now they are amongst the villagers we adore and trust – people who we’ve sat with on a regular basis to deliberately share vulnerabilities, insights, and stories around big questions through our BreakBread gatherings. We’ve welcomed them into our home and they have welcomed us to their homes (well, Michael is working on that). We’ve shared slow meals and deliberate listening. Are we re-villaging? It feels like it.

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Part of what brought John to this word re-villaging is a program we developed some years ago but has not yet been funded called the “BreakBread American Village Series”. In this series we envisioned re-villaging an entire town like Kingston, by establishing small groups all over town to gather for a series of BreakBreads to explore a sequence of questions spiraling around the bigger question of “what is the American village?”. The benefit being that while sitting together to talk about our roots, our values and our dreams, we literally grow the foundational roots we all need to create a thriving village. This series is about nurturing the shared humanity that is our birthright. It was about not letting our village be sidelined by the gristle, grind, and distraction of modern life but instead prioritizing our personal and communal connection so we can realize the thriving village so many of us long for.

We invite you to reflect. What might re-villaging mean for you and your village?

And, if you’d like to explore bringing a large format BreakBread to your community, please visit our website for more information.

Every month, we pull a question from our BreakBread World Conversation Card Deck and offer a reflection. This month we pulled the “dreams” prompt:

How have your dreams guided you through your life?

As I contemplate this prompt, I laugh because I recently found two bits of writing that I rescued while rummaging through old boxes in the basement of my dad’s house. They were two ragtag loose-leafs claimed by my young handwriting, big round letters, cursive on the angle. One was the notation of a dance routine complete with jazz hands and step-ball-chains. The other was a free-write essay on “freedom”, free-writing an apt strategy for the topic. I write “The whole world is involved in every person’s freedom and desire for freedom”.

Neither piece was dated, but my guess is I was about 13 when I wrote the dance steps and 14 when I wrote about freedom. I was a hungry child reaching for the rhythm of my body, slipping into the waves of music, sensing the complexity of freedom, a cornerstone of American life, and trying to find my personal connection to it. My soul’s impulse was to see, experience, and question the tufted folds of meaning that coursed around my wiggly body. It became a practice to touch the multiplicity with my pen and to move to the music, or for that matter the drum beat of printers, the clip of passing trains, the rolling warm tones of church bells. I was moved to move and write and contemplate. I dreamed dances, I dreamed questions, I dreamed love. And this is now the life I live.

When I think of the innocent dreams of childhood, the wide-eyed desire, responding to life, I ask, can we separate life’s circumstances from the dream? Are they connected? Probably. For me, I have felt my dreams ripen and shift as life piles up with challenges: new phases of hormones, accolades and rejections, births and deaths, love and loss. Rubble becomes the fertile soil from which to garden a new dream into existence.

Paul Klee’s essay “On Modern Art” sees the artist as a sort of tree.

“From the root, the sap flows to the artist, flows through him, flows to his eyes.

Thus he stands as the trunk of the tree.

Battered and stirred by the strength of the flow, he guides the vision on into his work.”

Maybe dreaming emerges from the nervy root tips of our being, so we can catalyze new buds to burst forth. Is life but creation, with all of us creating in our own way?

Yet the tree is also part of a grove. Are we not nurtured and nudged (or not) by the grove or the village: the people who come along, whistling down the long alley of life, toning the next note in the song: mothers, fathers, friends, friend’s parents, neighbors, teachers, grandparents, and maybe even strangers, animals, plants and trees.

I remember the woods behind our house in Sewanee, Tennessee. At 9 or 10. I would meander through the leaf-covered cold toward the lake but never to the edge. I liked to be alone back there. I’d find a falling tree to rest on and sit quietly. I loved feeling the alive “grandmother tree air” looming between the grey spikes of wooden splendor all around. The trees spoke to me, told me there was so much more than meets the eye, reminded me that time is thick and most of life is invisible. They encouraged me to keep noticing what’s beneath the surface. The trees held an important seat in my 10 year old village: they were the wise grandmother amongst a village of nuclear family, neighbors, school and church. These arbor-villagers were part of my grove, drawing me towards my dreams in a way that others in the village couldn’t.

As a reader, we invite you to see what the prompt sparks in you.

You may be even noticing that when you read the prompt, you immediately think of your night-time dreaming life. Or maybe you jump to being called a “dreamer” by your very practical parents. Or maybe you fulfilled all your dreams and feel your dreams as a powerful force in your life or maybe it’s the opposite. This is the beauty of the BreakBread prompt, there are many possible responses for yourself and for others. Make sure to be open to what’s there and if you like something, we also invite you to make “jazz hands.”

Conversation Activism 101: For your next conversation, bring a monkey wrench.

Our Conversation Activism workshop tagline is: When you change the conversation, you change the world. Doesn’t that sound nice? After all, who doesn’t want the world to change?

Yet, one of the basic human dilemmas is that we love change as much as we hate it. Change creates novelty and novelty can be refreshing, exciting, energizing – erotic. Change can also feel uncomfortable, scary, and downright threatening. It’s complicated. Either way, change is disruptive.

“When you disrupt the conversation you disrupt the world” – doesn’t have the same gentle ring to it. “Change” is a good word for marketing but when it comes to doing the work of Conversation Activism, “change” is disruption wearing a bowtie. So rip that bowtie off and roll up those sleeves! Hand me that monkey wrench — hands are going to get greasy!

Arguably some conversations are fine the way they are. These might be conversations that are more cut-and-dried or transactional. They tend to be more functional, serving a specific purpose and getting the job done.

However, we humans are seldom that simple. We show up to our conversations with lots of baggage. With emotions, feelings, wants and desires, all of which can change moment by moment, so right off the bat, we are way beyond the carry-on limit – caught standing in an ecosystem of conversation that also includes nuanced context, meaning, history and relationship. To navigate this complexity we rely on numerous strategies including falling back on patterns and habits. We call upon opinions, judgements, and assumptions. This is the nature of conversation and while these strategies can be helpful, they can also lead us into conversational atrophy – conversations that dead-end in smalltalk or avoidance or conversations lined with expectations or dripping with cultural learnings and bias. The conversation gets stuck and sometimes we don’t even know we’re stuck.

“Stuck” might look like having the same old conversation (or argument) over and over again. Or avoiding things we need to or want to talk about. Or desiring a shift in a relationship including more depth, more meaning or simply getting past small talk.

In our Conversation Activist workshops our disruption work starts with the monkey wrench of longing and desire. What are the longings and desires that permeate our lives? What do we really long for in our conversations? What really matters when it comes to creating meaningful and lasting connection?

Our longing runs deep and our desire runs wild. Both desire and longing are important in keeping the conversation moving but they’re very different. In the context of conversation as ecosystem, desire is more proximal and immediate. Our curiosity pulls us moment to moment in the immediacy of the flow of conversation. Longing is more pervasive. It permeates the ecosystem including the soil and the horizon. We sometimes judge desires and especially longings to be somehow unacceptable. They might feel silly, impractical, shameful, or embarrassing. In our vulnerability we might deem them too big on the one hand or menial and unimportant on the other. We might consider ourselves undeserving or on the other end of the spectrum we might express them as demands.

These are the longings and desires not to be placated by commodified consumerism. Big Gulps, Coach bags, and excursions to the Caribbean have no place here. Dig deeper beneath the material bling into the radical realm of heart and soul. Francis Weller, psychotherapist, writer, and soul activist, speaks of these as “primary satisfactions”.

Primary satisfactions are the activities that have been hardwired into humans over millenia. He states these are those things from which we receive true nourishment. Things like “being members of a community, gathering around the fire, hearing the stories of the elders, feeling supported during times of loss and grief, offering gratitude, singing together, and sharing meals at night and our dreams in the morning”. We all recognize and deeply long for this soul nourishment and rarely receive it. In the absence of primary satisfactions Weller states that we opt for secondary satisfactions - things like rank, privilege, wealth, status, and on the shadow side, addictions. These things we can never get enough of because they fail to truly nourish. Weller states if we were to begin to actually address our primary satisfactions, the entire consumer economy would collapse overnight. Now that’s disruption!

Putting our Primary Satisfactions first in conversation, puts a monkey-wrench in our passive state of acceptance and calls us into the realm of doing something different. Our humanity becomes something nurtured by doing and practicing rather than buying and possessing. For us, Conversation is the very territory to bring us face-to-face with our primary satisfactions and into the practice of our common humanity.

We have an exercise we introduce in our workshops aptly called Uncovering Longing. It’s a simple exercise that encourages participants to dig down and explore their longing. Every time we do this exercise the quiet in the room thickens and grows deep. Time slows. Tears flow. For those willing and daring enough to share their longing, the realization that we are not alone in our longing becomes viscous and alive. This is what i call a threshold exercise. It initiates a movement shifting from ordinary to sacred time and space. It leads our workshop participants to the next question which is: Given your longing, how might you be able to bring more of what you long for into your gatherings and conversations? And this is where we realize that meeting our longing face-to-face requires disruption. Because to make those shifts means facing the personal and cultural patterns that keep us on the surface of life.

A Systems View of Conversation

Disruption is a bursting forth, a shattering of patterns, a shift in flow in the way things were and the way things are. A disruption is a call to pay attention or to awaken. But shifts in the conversation don’t just happen, they require an act that is simultaneously disruptive, courageous and compassionate. This is why we call it Conversation Activism. In Conversation Activism we take a systems view of conversation. A conversation is a small social system that threads relationship and reflects culture. Just like the living systems of organisms or an ecological system or a larger social system (such as a community), a conversation is a system in the sense that it’s an integrated whole whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts. And just like any system, a conversation responds to disruptions in its own, self-organizing way.

For example when one person leaves or joins a conversation the conversation becomes a different conversation. The leaving or joining may be gentle or abrupt. The original participants each register their own internal response which might be expressed in innumerable ways. This disruption of plus-one or minus-one influences rather than controls the conversation. There’s no hard and fast rule as to how the conversation is to change — the conversation may break down or it may break through shifting to a new state of order.

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In addition, there’s far more happening in the non-verbal realm than we are able to notice. These are the subtle disruptions happening on levels detectable by body and heart to which we often respond and react intuitively and unknowingly. This is like when you glance at someone and they catch your glance and glance away and then you glance away. This little ping-pongy dance happens in a millisecond and we often move on without giving it another thought but these things are happening all the time. Not every little wayward disruption is significant or meaningful but when we practice attuning ourselves to these very subtle ripples we can begin to get a feeling for when and how to play in the dance following a wayward current or pulling on a thread hanging in midair.

In this way each conversation has its own degree of intelligence in how it responds. It can’t be controlled — it can only be influenced. Its response depends on who’s present, as well as time and place. Robin Wall Kimmerer talks of systems and systemic transformation as requiring a mix of incremental change and disruption of the status quo. Incremental change is the work of the Conversation Activist. As Conversation Activists we bring more awareness to our participation in conversation and can choose to disrupt the conversation with the intent of influencing it to shift. When we disrupt the patterns of any conversation whether they be ingrained, habitual, or unconscious, we open the horizon to alter the path of the current conversation and as a consequence, every subsequent conversation.

Many years ago i was participating in a regularly occurring men’s group. There was one man in the circle who drove me nuts. He rambled on and on and never seemed to get to the point. The group decorum was about letting each man speak in his time with no commenting or crosstalk. My frustration meter was pinned off the charts. One day i tried something different. I somehow got it into my head that maybe this guy was never going to “get to the point” the way i would have done it, and if that’s the case, what might he really be trying to say? I dropped my expectations and released my demands and to my astonishment, i felt i was actually hearing him for the first time. I was inwardly more calm. I was able to listen more attentively. And what i heard was still rambly but it kind of made more sense. Over time, his shares seemed to become shorter and more coherent (or was it just me?). I do know that in our after-group hang at the local diner i went from tolerating his presence to enjoying our evolving connection. Our new connection began with me disrupting how i listen rather than me insisting upon or imposing my own way of communicating.

These small shifts change the balance of the conversation’s ecosystem. Whether you toss a pebble or hurl a boulder into a lake, you create ripples. Conversations are no different – anything you say or do, no matter how seemingly innocuous, creates ripples. You say something, you say nothing. You look askance, you look someone in the eye. You join, leave, pay attention, space out. laugh, cry all create ripples some of which the consequences are significant and some indiscernible. They’re ripples nonetheless and ripples are disruptions.

Why does this matter?

First, anything you say or do in conversation has an impact (that is, creates ripples or a disruption. Acknowledging this and bringing more awareness to it opens the possibility for us taking more agency and responsibility in our conversations.

Secondly, implicated within this view is that conversation is not an isolated instance. Conversations affect our relationships going forward and backward. One way of understanding this is that the arc of a relationship could be defined by a long series of conversations that ebb and flow across time bringing us closer or driving us apart. The questions we do or don’t ask, what we do or don’t hear that reinforce our understanding and beliefs about the world. And in this way when you change the conversation you change the world.

Having this kind of deep and detailed awareness is both empowering and daunting. You could call it the Miranda Rule of conversation – anything you say or do can and will have an impact.

In order to navigate this awareness, you need to embrace ambiguity and know you aren’t fully in control – a feat in our certainty-obsessed culture. Just know embracing ambiguity requires courage, curiosity, and compassion. Know that the conversation is bigger than you and you don’t have complete control as to how your contribution (or monkey wrench) impacts the conversation. This is where play comes in! Muster the courage to try something new, call upon curiosity to see what happens, have compassion for yourself when it doesn’t land and let yourself foster compassion for others. And be honest and when appropriate, willing to apologize– because sometimes you try something, the monkey wrench slips, and someone gets hurt. Have fun, letting disruption guide and inform you in the wilds of conversation and with time learn to use it wisely as a means of channeling, responding and contributing to deeper more meaningful conversations in your life.

Because when you change the conversation, you change the world.

“Understanding of life begins with the understanding of patterns.” ~ Fritjof Capra

What personal or collective patterns have been emerging in your life? What is the story and meaning behind these patterns?

We have a joke in our house, that when something is lost i’m the “good” looker and Martha is the “terrible” looker. She sees things with different eyes than i do. Broadly speaking, when i walk into a room i notice more granularly how the space is filled whereas she seems to notice how the space is arranged. She will want a table moved slightly because the angle is off or insist that a picture on the wall should be moved up three quarters of an inch whereas it looks fine to me. I’m unable to recognize the disharmony she’s responding to but admittedly, when she’s done with all her chiropractic spatial tweaking, something does indeed feel qualitatively different and more harmonious.

I, on the other hand, tend to react to clutter, in particular clutter sprawl. There’s probably some arcane branch of physics like Clutter Attractor Theory or the Thermodynamic Law of Stuff that explains how within an hour random glove left on the kitchen table attracts a friendly soup spoon and by the end of the day there’s loitering gang that includes a toothpaste cap, some junk mail, a grocery receipt and a nail clipper. Clutter sprawl is when these tiny galaxies of sundry items begin to appear throughout the house. I tend to notice them before Martha does and my tolerance for them tends to be lower than hers. I’ve learned that rather than expending domestic capital insisting they be cleaned up right away, i consolidate them into piles outposted around the house. This placates my anxiety and eventually they reach critical mass where they’re noticed and disassembled.

We live in a cultural context that purports one “objective reality” but it’s not that simple.

Martha and i walk into the same room but see two different rooms. We could argue about whose version of the room is the real one but understand they are both real. So Martha rolls her eyes when i’m too obtuse to see that the chair askew in the corner is being obnoxiously obstinate while i add a wayward sock to the growing pile on the kitchen table and move on. Our individual understanding of reality and engagement with it is dependent upon our perception of it. And while we think we’re perceiving what’s objectively there, what we’re actually perceiving is reality that’s shaped and filtered by the patterns we recognize.

The Fritjof Capra quote speaks of the understanding of life through the understanding of patterns. He’s an author, physicist, systems theorist and deep ecologist known for books that include The Tao of Physics and The Systems View of Life. In his work, he talks about how complex nonlinear networks are the underlying pattern of all living things.

We take a systems-approach to conversation in our workshops.

We posit that every conversation is an ecosystem or web of relationships interwoven in time and space. The language of conversation is a language of patterns – spoken, gestural, spatial, contextual, and cultural. Recognizing patterns help us navigate reality and make sense of it.

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Conversations present a rich microcosm of the world we inhabit as individuals and can be a mini-laboratory for growth, both personally and communally. Next time you are in a group, pay attention. What patterns are present or are emerging? Often our body and hearts are more exquisitely attuned to patterns below the surface – far more finely tuned than the mind. The mind tends to be more rational and linear and recognizes patterns that are more formulaic - they can be seen and measured. Whereas the patterns recognized by the heart and body are more nonlinear – more like shapes, or webs of viscera that we feel into. This is like when you have a gut feeling about something or someone that you can’t explain rationally yet the recognition is palpable. It’s a vocabulary for which we don’t always have words. Often we discount, ignore, or dismiss these wordless states but our ability to abide and pay attention opens us to a richness of experience and relationality. If we only look for and legitimize patterns that are recognized on the rational level we end up stuck with a very limited view of reality.

I’m reminded of a conversation i had many years ago with my healer, teacher and friend, Jason Shulman. It was a healing session in which i talked about struggling with conversations where i would often feel stuck. I didn’t know what to say and felt i had nothing to contribute. Jason asked “well, are you listening?” to which i answered “yes.” He pointed out that he recognized in me a very deep listener and that no true conversation can be had without the listener. Jason didn’t leave it at that. He dug deeper, inquiring as to what i meant when i said “i have nothing to say” and what that felt like. I talked about the discomfort, the feeling of inadequacy, of being stuck. He moved to suggesting how about asking a question? I responded by saying i don’t know what to ask. He responded, “for someone who listens very deeply, what happens when you feel curious or wonder about something?” We dug deeper. I realized that in my family there was something i picked up – a pattern of not asking too many questions. Nobody ever actually told me that asking questions was wrong but there was something about not being too nosy and minding my own business that was foundational in my New England upbringing. Then there were the times when, as a child, i would ask questions that may have caused discomfort or a bit too prying, as children sometimes do. I was very attuned to people’s reactions, including that which remained unsaid, and was sensitive to feeling their discomfort and to me feeling like i did something wrong. For example, there was a time when i was very engaged and inquisitive in catechism (i was raised Catholic), when i asked: Why don’t we include Mary when we make the sign of the cross, afterall, isn’t she the mother of god? <ouch!> I was met with a scowl and accused of “trying to make trouble”.

At this point in my session, the brain kicks in and says “Of course! I was taught that asking questions was somehow verboten and now it all makes sense. Just ask more questions.” But it’s not that simple. The path to that revelation in that healing session was not rational (except in hindsight) and neither was moving forward, for the pattern and the feelings were deeply ingrained. Jason helped me see and begin to accept that sometimes (maybe most times) asking questions will feel deeply uncomfortable for me and that i would have to learn to play with it.

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This is an example of me recognizing and interpreting collective patterns that were present for me while growing up. We have to first recognize them and then make meaning of them. I interpreted the patterns to mean: don’t ask questions! Another child may not have picked up on them or may have found delight in asking questions capable of making nuns squirm.

Wherever these patterns emerge from, slowing down and tuning in at the level of the body and heart are especially key to transforming challenging situations and conversations.

I was in a healing session with a client and we were discussing some particularly challenging issues having to do with work. He made an offhanded comment that sparked my curiosity. Following this feeling, i asked some questions that seemingly had nothing to do with the issue at hand but they felt resonant and like they wanted to be asked. At first what seemed like a totally irrelevant line of questioning led to a discussion about an issue present in his relationship with his wife and children which uncovered an emergent pattern that was almost an exact mirror illuminating more clearly the work issue. The issue was actually much bigger than the original isolated work incident and we had opened the way for seeing the issue with new depth, understanding and possibility. At the level of conversation, with practice, you can spot (or feel) these patterns and challenge yourself to take a small step toward something different.

The next time you’re in a conversation, take a breath and pause for a second to check in with yourself. It might feel warm, welcoming and comfortable, or maybe the conversation feels strained. You look and someone averts their eyes. You feel a churning in the pit of your stomach. Pay attention. Get curious. What’s the default story we go to? Aha! Perhaps that’s a pattern! What could this mean? Break the pattern. Ask a question. Listen. Shift your body. Change perspective. How does it change the conversation? Play.

How could it be that the table is so powerful? Is it just the sweet and sacred geometry – similar to the circle but different?

After all, what other animal sits at the table?

For me, when I arrive at the meeting table, the cafe table, the lunch table, and especially the BreakBread table; I sit, I sink, I settle, I see, I slow down. If I come to the table with intention, these feelings are strong. If I come to the table mindlessly rushed and distracted, these feelings are just below the surface, subtle, hardly noticed.

Malidoma Some, a medicine man and diviner of the Dagara culture with both feet in the West and Africa, writes in his book Ritual, about how the dominance of machine-time in the West distances us from our spirit because we are always rushing and running toward something that’s not actually running away. Why are we running? In my own experience, I often toss and turn and tumble through life searching for more time, thinking about how much time something will take, as if “time” is a thing. I find myself aghast with overwhelm and to-do lists.

Inside this frantic modern rhythm, I long for what I call the “alchemical” table, for those moments where I can slow down, and slip into a wave of connection, filled with deliberate listening and nourishment. A little like the BreakBread table….

This table is inhabited by ritual – to which clear intention and carefully held structure is brought to invite us to cross a threshold into something more deeply meaningful and aligned with the soul.

This is the table that, like an alchemic tree, roots us to the very invisible palpable mycelial nature of life and thus to our vulnerable, interdependent humanity. It can be a wedge in the engine of life, holding the door open for time to expand and for our humanity to splay itself openly in the center.

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In our modern lives, the meal-time table is the daily opportunity to sit heart to heart to sink into our messy, rich entanglement and to be nourished both physically and spiritually. Yet, with the release of smartphones comes silent mindless scrolling while scarfing down pasta. With the prevalence of busy workdays comes eating alone at our desk (at least in America). With the lack of communication skills come silent tables, violent tables, tables riddled with landmines and conflict. With a culture rooted in domination come tables ruled by narrowness and fear. And maybe there’s no table at all – because the table just doesn’t feel good anymore.

Certainly, not every meal needs to be laced with the sacred connection but the table itself is a powerful leverage point for togetherness – even if it’s just game night, arts and crafts day, or a meeting. The table has even more power when it’s invoked with intention and structure.

Consider the Boardroom Table weighted by goals, actions, outcomes and responsibility. This table literally focuses members while the power dynamics direct the cadence of who speaks and who is listened to. Of course, now we have the added distraction of phones and what happens when the table is taken away and replaced by the virtual meeting? Usually efficiency is gained at the cost of connection, which ironically frays the very connection needed to get things done. Could it be that the virtual table hasn’t been properly invoked?

On the other hand, there is the slow and delicious alchemical table, invoked by intention and structure (like the boardroom) but is also sparked by the presence of the heart, the deep respect for our shared and sacred humanity and listening that moves beyond the narrow (story swapping, status jockeying, righteousness) and into a gentle expansion into the outer realms of connection. Try it, it’s contagious.

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As you sit for Thanksgiving this year, perhaps take time to sense that alchemic tree holding up your plates, knives, forks and food; sense the nourishment of body, mind and heart.

Honor the spatial, organizing, focusing quality of the table. Notice where you feel enlivened or stuck. Maybe even invoke a powerful direction for the table by making it a place of ritual, where together you declare your communion and identity. Or maybe make a centerpiece, or go around and share gratitudes, or invite everyone to cook and tell the story about their dish. Or maybe you could share the “introduction of gifts” or intentionally slow down with a prayer or meditation as we do in BreakBread – setting the conditions for meaningful conversation to deepen and nourish your bonds.

Whatever you decide, we invite you to consider the power of the table to shape your life and community.

Every month, we pull a question from our BreakBread World Conversation Card Deck and offer a reflection. This month we pulled the “family” card.

Why does family (biological or chosen) matter to you? What family story nourishes you to this day?

What pulls me in about this particular prompt is the word “nourish”, for within my family and heritage is a deep connection to food – growing it, making it, and of course, eating it! Mealtime, especially dinnertime, was always important and when visitors came over or we visited someone else, food was always part of the enjoyment. Most of what we ate was homemade and with that came a feeling of home and family that can’t be found in stores or restaurants. Everything had love caringly baked into it as part of my family linguistics – going way back through my grandmothers and beyond.

I have great-grandparents heralding from Poland and Italy. Going further back than this familial octet? Not much. Just a few scant photos, several surnames, and the names of several cities i’ve yet to visit that pepper my familial lore. And yet i know there have been thousands before me throughout untold and forgotten generations.

The ancestors watch, waiting in the wings. Their nourishment coming to me through food.

I’m five or six years old and there’s a large yellow bowl with a towel draped over it resting on the warm radiator. The kitchen is alive with a glowing yeasty aroma. Brimming with curiosity and anticipation i peek beneath the towel and poke my finger into the irresistible doughy mound magically coming to life. It’s sticky and dry and cold and warm and moist all at the same time! “Let it alone so it can rise,” cautions my grandmother. I can barely contain myself in anticipation and in ten minutes i’m back to my peeking and poking.

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Time seemed to stop when my grandmother made cinnamon raisin bread.

It was like her kitchen became the entire world and the whole world was dusted with flour and smelled like cinnamon and yeast. The whole morning became an eternal wait for the dough to rise enough for her to knead it down and then put it back on the radiator to rise again. Sometimes she’d let me knead and then use the dull edge of a butter knife to scrape the dough off my hands. After two or three more eternities when the dough was finally ready she’d plop it out onto a giant wooden cutting board that seemed to take up the entire kitchen table. She sprinkled flour as if it were pixie dust and began working the dough with a massive rolling pin with one handle broken off and missing in action. She gradually worked the belly-like mound flat, turning, dusting, and deftly rolling it into a sprawling dusty field awakening to its spring planting.

With flicks of her wrist her glinting knife cast buttery splinters across the doughy span.

Then came a generous sprinkling of sugary cinnamon followed by the sowing of the raisins. She’d let me help with the raisins, cautioning me to not clump them too thickly but from my five year old vantage, there was no such thing as too many raisins! The whole affair was rolled up, then cut to fit for placement into ancient bread pans where they had to be placed aside to rise yet again! At some point in this interminably long ordeal the expectant loaves were finally ready to be placed in the oven where they disappeared for what felt like days as the kitchen’s misty dawn aroma of yeast and flour slowly transformed into a midday air warmed with the toasted scent of melting rivulets of buttery cinnamon bubbling beneath slowly browning bread crust.

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Finally, with the dinging of her wind-up timer the loaves were birthed heroically browned and steaming to be put on racks to cool. I don’t recall what transpired while the bread was cooling. Probably lunch. Maybe a nap (afterall, all this bread-baking is exhausting). But i do remember the pale green plates each with a slice of freshly buttered warm raisin bread as we sat together quietly enjoying the fruits of our morning.

To look in the mirror is to see your family. They peer back at us through our eyes and speak to us with our tongue. Whose eyes are these? Whose body is this? The resonances and ripples of parent, grandparent and great grandparent emanate beyond shape, size, and color. They register through forgotten gestures and quirky dimensions of bodily memory. Their stories still read in the pages of our flesh and bone whispering tales of previous generations always present and ever emergent.

There are many tales we tell. Some bound in flesh, some in the bones and some in memory. Not all are happy. Some we wish to forget. This is one i carry that for me is bound in scent — the smell of bread being incarnated from the most basic of ingredients – flour, milk, water, yeast, lots of cinnamon and raisins, a considerable heap of time, and of course, love.

Photo by Vilius Kukanauskas from Pixabay

As a long-time creator and entrepreneur, I’m big on the future. Goals draw me forth into a hopeful vision of what I want. You may also have a vision or goal drawing you forth, dosed with an equal amount of “know-how” to help you achieve your desires..

And then enters the unknown, that unexpected obstacle. How do you relate to the unknown? Some people love the unknown and see it as an opportunity. Some over-prepare as a way to hedge the unknown and others are paralyzed by a fear that leaves them limp, distracted or angry.

You can find the same three-step dance in conversation: 1. desire 2. know-how and 3. the unknown.

The difference being that, in conversation all three are entangled in a rapturous complex opera of self, histories or lack of history, sense of safety, likes, dislikes, judgments, assumptions, conscious and unconscious conversation patterns and habits, the list goes on.

Desire is the raw material of conversation and one’s raison d’etre. The known is comfortable, safe, seen, understood, on the surface or conscious. The unknown is uncomfortable, unsafe, unseen, unacknowledged or unconscious.

The Known

Just like when we are moving toward our goals in life, in conversation, most of us stay on marked roads of our know-how, hoping there are no eroded cliffs around the corner. Since there are no actual roads in conversation, we can think of “the known” or visible parts of conversation as the metaphorical marked roads of the conversation.

The known is what we know about ourselves and others. For example, you know you feel free to talk with some people and not others, or when you trust someone, or when someone is generous. You can also know Bob talks a lot and sucks all the air out of the room, or that Carley will not think highly of your ideas, or Avery won’t hear you. In transformational teaching of Landmark Education, they call this Already Always Listening. We call it the Road to Know-Where.

Staying on the Road to Know-Where can cut you off from the potential vast nooks and crannies of conversation. It is the nature of knowing to know we are right. It is laden with righteousness. Is it a coincidence that the word “know” is a homophone of the word “no”; as in “No! I’m right!”

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Our sense of knowing isn’t necessarily bad. It helps us feel secure in where we stand, and when we feel secure, we can relax and this is quite functional. We typically use much less energy in communications with our in-group, where our “knowing” is the same.

But…..

The Unknown

What about the unknown? How can the unknown be harnessed and played with in conversation so a more vast landscape can be discovered and we can deal with those washed out cliffs when we get to them.

First let’s look more closely at the unknown.

There is what you don’t know about yourself. During the course of conversation, we often aren’t conscious of how we are feeling or what we are thinking. We aren’t aware of our conversation habits and patterns in the moment and may not even know what they are. For example: maybe you aren’t aware that you are checking out or that you think the other person isn’t credible (perhaps it’s even an unconscious racial or gender bias).

There is also what you don’t know about the other. For example, you don’t know how Bob came to his opinion or what’s at stake for him (or you may think you know). Or you don’t know what people feel is appropriate or normal (even though you think you know).

This is where the fun begins

Let’s use Bob as an example. We know Bob is “someone who always goes on and on” with no room for you. You are on the Road to Know-where. You could stay on the Road to Know-where, happily “right” that he’s “the worst”, stuck in your typical reaction of numbing out. Or you could play, and perhaps find a shift into unexpected expansion and connection.

Here are a couple of Conversation Alchemy practices that you could try:

1. Get Present With Yourself

Remember conversation is a rapturous opera, so much of which is unknown. Start to make the unknown known by compassionately looking at yourself and getting present to what is there. Sense what you are feeling and what those feelings tell you about what you long for. Then notice your mind and what judgments and assumptions leave you with an air of righteousness

I use the word compassionate because when we get present with ourselves, we begin to see our humanity peaking through – the longing, the fear, the anger, the sadness, the stubborn refusal to be anything but right. This isn’t about changing those things as much as welcoming them.

When we bring these things into the light of curiosity, we can begin to make choices in the conversation that get us more of what we want – things like fun, freedom, connection, love, depth, meaning and play.

2. Get Curious About Him

Now that you’ve gently gotten curious about yourself: your thoughts, feelings, judgments and assumptions, it’s easier to get curious about Bob.

What do you think he is feeling and what does he want? If it doesn’t seem apparent, perhaps ask him. Or even if it does seem apparent, ask him. Remember, you often think you know but you may be wrong. If that doesn’t get you anywhere, ask a bold question that brings in the imagination or humor.

The idea is to play and see what emerges while using compassion for self and other to hold righteousness at bay.

3. Don’t be Trapped Defenses

It takes finesse and practice to ask questions that open the conversation, and sometimes these attempts can instead evoke defenses, especially if you haven’t taken the time to compassionately check in with yourself.

Don’t be trapped by Bob’s defenses by defending yourself because righteousness usually leads to more righteousness. Instead, get genuinely curious. What’s upsetting about what I just asked? And then bring in gratitude for his honesty and for the courage it took for you to move beyond your normal response to Bob.

Working with the unknown is not for the faint of heart.

It may initially feel like work to step off the Road to Know-where and into the unknown. But over time, it becomes playful and gratifying to get present and curious with what is in the conversation for yourself and others. Perhaps if you use these tools over time, some of these challenging conversations will brighten and blossom into deep and vibrant relationships. That is our hope.

For this month, we will explore the improbable. This is the prompt:

In his book, The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb says the world is shaped not by predictable patterns but by “highly improbable consequential events.”

Share a time when the improbable showed up. How did it shape your world?

I met my future wife, life partner, and business co-conspirator by tagging along with a friend to a Christmas party. And it wasn’t love at first sight – it would take another three years of scattered platonic connections before we actually opened our eyes to the possibility there might be more here.

An acquaintance once lost his car keys and locked himself out of his car in the middle of a desert off a desolate seldom-trafficked road. After a day of fruitless searching and no hope of rescue he gave up. Sitting in despair in the shade of his car a small beetle appeared and tracked through the sand. On a whim he followed this six-legged sherpa who made a straight line to where the keys were resting.

Life would be boring if everything were predictable. And yet we spend massive amounts of time and energy seeking sanctuary from the unpredictable.

The improbable, as Taleb refers to, is that outsized unpredictable event that defies all rational planning, sober prediction and carefully calculated actuarial tables.

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Ours is not the first culture to attempt to mitigate the unpredictable. There have always been oracles, seers, shaman, and priestesses. The tools of astrology, tarot, runes, and I Ching are but a few of the ancient disciplines called into service to predict and guide. There have also been calendars, tidal charts, sundials, compasses, sextants, all calling upon the past to make the future more… predictable.

We have a powerful tradition of rational scientific evidence-based thought to wrestle any and all recalcitrant improbabilities into submission. The pundits, prognosticators, and the expert-industrial complex all gang up 24/7 on all goings on that smack of dysregulated normalcy. If their explanations are not to your liking, you can dial up any number of conspiracy theorists to allay any fear that something beyond the horizon of rational explanation is at play. Just chalk up the latest anomaly to deep state, extraterrestrials, billionaires, marxists, drug companies, the left wing, or the right wing. In other times it might have been satan, witches, faeries, and trolls.

And yet we revel in our stories of synchronicity and happenstance, the aberrations from our patterned, otherwise predictable lives.

While the promise of certainty might seem to be survival, it’s at the edges of chance, uncertainty, and novelty that hold the promise and freedom of aliveness. These are the improbable events that give shape to an otherwise flat, predictable life. It’s your parents getting a job and moving to a school district where you meet a lifelong friend. A flat tire derails a planned getaway pointing you toward an unexpected reunion with a long lost cousin. An impromptu conversation intersected by a chance eavesdropper leads to a new job. These are the coincidences and synchronicities that beg for our attention. Walt Whitman purportedly said “the sidewalks are littered with postcards from god” (of which i have never been able to find the source) but it’s a perfect allegory for our wrinkled universe enticing us forward with unexpected treats.

What about you? When has the improbable showed up? How has it shaped your world?

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Slow down you move too fast
You got to make the morning last…
~ Paul Simon & Art Garfunkel

There are times of the year that invite, ask, prod, even beg us to slow down. Are we listening? During the summer it’s the heat and extended daylight.

During the winter it’s the cold and extended darkness. Things speed up in the spring and fall with renewed vitality hopefully nourished by the previous cycles of slowing down.

But for many, the speeding up is familiar and inevitable while the slowing down is rendered optional if not impossible. There’s often a patina of moral dyspepsia that arises at the thought of slowing down, taking time off, resting, not burning our candle at both ends. We recognize the idea of time informed by the rhythms and cycles of the natural world but we abide by the ceaseless movement and restlessness of time as informed by machine.

We forgo being in conversation with the natural world as we pathologize its “inconveniences” as problems to be solved. The heat of summer, and of changing climate is mitigated by all-pervasive air conditioning. The problem of darkness is banished by ubiquitous electric lighting. Could the glow of the omnipresent screen be a panacea burning away some other form of visceral inner darkness lurking on the edges of our awareness?

That’s a topic for another day but screens are an example of us adjusting and adapting to the realm of digital time. A platform of synchronous immediacy everything is “now” except there are a hundred – even a thousand – simultaneous nows all vying for our attention.

This digital now is very different from the long now of waiting for the summer sun to make its way past the sweltering of noon toward an afternoon relief where we can resume activity.

With machine time, time is compressed, standardized, commodified, and monetized. One hour is theoretically the same as the next. This scrubs time clean of all its messy threading between realms of body, earth, and otherworld. The quality of our attention is very different in machine time. Consider a one-hour drive down the interstate at 80 mph versus a one-hour walk through the woods at 3 mph – no screens, earbuds, or electronic paraphernalia! The quality of attention and the presence of mind, body, and soul are different. And while one could argue they don’t necessarily have to be different, it’s simply too seductively convenient and easy for us to unknowingly resign ourselves.

In our conversation work we talk a lot about time. In particular, slowing down.

The time dimension in conversation is seldom talked about and not well understood. It’s often ignored and simply disregarded. Why? It’s inconvenient.

David Foster Wallace tells this story:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

The water of conversation is time.

Our animal bodies and minds are astutely tuned to small morsels of time. I recall in the early nineties i was a partner in a record company and one of my business partners was mentoring me in editing video. He shared a rule of thumb he called his “two-frame” rule. When you have a cut between scenes that’s kind of almost there but doesn’t feel quite right, try bumping the cut two frames forward or back. I was amazed at how often it worked and at the marked difference a mere two frames made. Video operates at 30 frames per second so two frames amounts to 1/15 (0.0667) of a second.

Zoom ahead thirty years and think about how we interact with screens aware of how painfully “slow” a website loads even though we’re waiting mere fractions of a second. There’s even a phenomenon called email or screen apnea. First noticed and studied by Linda Stone, she coined this phrase to describe the tendency toward shallow breathing or even holding one’s breath while engaging in email or screen activities. In between the gaps of sending and receiving or doing and waiting the anticipation often induces people to stop breathing for short periods of time - inhaling but not exhaling – or simply not inhaling. This has the effect of amping up stress, anxiety, and fatigue. And they rarely notice they’re doing it.

Why does this matter? It’s not that this is a diatribe against technology but rather an affirmation that we’re wired to respond and react to our environment and environmental cues about time and time is the water in which conversation swims. We talk about slowing down in conversation as a core concept. Of the various practices we teach, the most rudimentary is breathing. This is not some new esoteric practice. Before you speak you normally do take a breath but what we’re inviting is for you to be aware of that breath. In order for bodies to speak, breathing is required. So breathe! And notice that you’re breathing. This is especially powerful in the heat of a conversation where tempers are flaring or you’re feeling cornered and flailing. One deep breath can remind the nervous system that while this may be uncomfortable, this is not truly a life or death situation. That consciously invoked breath may bring enough of a burst of oxygen to keep the brain stem from kicking us into fight or flight mode and give the frontal lobe enough of a pause to regain its footing.

Another core concept under the auspice of slowing down is bringing awareness and balance to the roles of heart, body and mind in conversation. For some, the mind is a given with its rational strategizing as they wallpaper every conversation with all the knowing that they think they know. For them, everything from the neck down is simply a system of transport for the head. For others, their hearts take the lead and are an enigmatic aberration to those who are heads. Slowing down and checking in – body, mind, and heart – is an exercise in bringing more awareness to those parts of us that are indeed in the conversation and where we may not have equal fluency in one or more.

On this moment to moment level we work to become more aware of the language of time and how we move through it. How sometimes we talk fast to the point of tripping over our words, or we space out, opening cognitive gaps where we have no recollection of what was just said. We become more sensitive to how we register pauses and perhaps begin to use pauses and silence as part of our conversational vocabulary, sometimes even asking for a pause mid-conversation to let something linger and bloom. Slowing down during conversation is a powerful method of movement often counterintuitive, misunderstood, or even ignored – especially in a speed-obsessed machine-world. Purposely slowing down is an expansion of time opening it up beyond the exactingly measured linear time moving into the fertile, alive spiraling of organic time. The point of slowing down is freedom – choice. When we expand time we have more opportunity to recognize there might be more options than we initially perceive and to perhaps make different, wiser choices.

In contrasting companionship with the slowing down in conversation is the slowing down of long time. That is, the time in between and around conversations.

It is an arc of conversations over time that nurture relationships and create the narrative of our lives. Think of any long term relationship in your life. While there is always being and doing woven through this relationship the arc of all the conversations you’ve had over time is like a map of how the relationship started, evolved, faltered, and thrived. Understanding this and navigating this long arc conversation by conversation is an art and a gift. We move through and navigate the individual conversation as we would the currents of a sea while the long arc is like the ever cycling tides of a relationship.

The work of BreakBread World takes into account these tides, for it makes a difference in how we abide in a conversation, how we end it, how we leave off when we hold in our view the arc of the relationship and the intentions we hold and the gifts we cherish. We work in the in-between realms of conversations where we have time to relax or harden, ponder or stew, forgive, forget, ruminate, and marinate. Part of our work with conversation is to look at the in-between time along the conversation arc. Like negative space in a piece of art, the in-between seemingly empty space between conversations is where we derive so much of its meaning and how we go about this with our ingrained and learned patterns and habits profoundly impact our relationships.

The act of slowing down is a shift in awareness. A movement of mindfulness and attention. It’s purposely pulling the car over, getting out, and walking through the forest rather than passing by it. It’s a testament to the fact that while we live in a machine-world we are not machines nor will we ever be. Conversation is a human activity that happens at the scale of human pace. One conversation at a time across the arc of a lifetime interwoven with thousands of other lives. Conversation activism starts with a single breath to say i am here, you are here, even though in conversation we may feel our urgency, let us first slow down.

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For the next year, every month we will be pulling prompts from our BreakBread World Conversation Card Deck and sharing our own responses with our community. You can try out the prompt with friends or over your own BreakBread gathering, an intentional process that weaves respect, care, and trust into our connection with each other. We believe shifts in how we gather can shift the conversation.

Ok, now…my own response to the prompt, “What Makes for a Memorable Summer?”

I write this as 3 ducklings and 1 chick are pecking at grass for bugs, slapping webbed feet against the wet Massachusetts ground, taking high summer dunks in the water basin under the sprawling maple tree. We had our own dunk in Hadley pond yesterday. We traipsed through a moody pine forest, padded with dry needles, the darkness a nod to fall, just around the corner.

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The days slowly shorten as we grasp for watermelon, cherries, ice tea and laughter knowing that Autumn light is just a month or so away.

We head back from the pond just before a crack of thunder breaks into sheets of rain.

When I try to “remember” summer, I often flash to the summer we spent in Clarkton, Virginia when I was about 10. My dad worked as an interim minister before his last year of seminary. Picture this: the end of a long country road, a small but cared-for modest white church attended by neighbors – all mostly related with the last name Woosley (pronounced ooo-sley). Friendly strangers and church picnics that included baseball, honest-to-goodness real clogging where skirts and fiddles flew with wild heart precision and me: enamored, watching, running, dancing, playing soaking in the gifts of summer and the heat of the south.

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For me, a memorable summer is the feeling of the hot sun melting away worry, work, and aspiration off my resting body. The picture of park picnics, bright yellow dresses and bare shoulders. The sound of cicadas calling for “togetherness” in a sharp, hot, soupy buzz.

But why does a memorable summer matter?

Summer connects us to our humanity, our animal instinct of relishing in the abundance of eating roadside berries, or sleeping under the maple tree when the sun is too much. I know when I don’t get to experience summer at its peak – I feel robbed of something essential. I feel dark, subpar, not quite ok. I have had summers like that.

That’s me, what about you? Is summer a bliss or a bomb? Maybe it’s racked with challenges or stories of loss? Maybe for you your “memorable” isn’t as sun soaked and frolicky. Remember, BreakBread prompts are designed to be shared in conversation, with another or a group of others. It’s an opportunity to know each other and ourselves more deeply and to celebrate the multiplicity of our experiences and to weave our connections deliberately and graciously. So, yes, feel free to contemplate this on your own, but the real opportunity is bringing this question to your friends, family and community.

For you, what makes for a memorable summer?

Every month, BreakBread shares a prompt to explore using the BreakBread process. This month is the “Impossible Prompt”

:

The impossible: a wall or a doorway?

Share a story where what you believed to be impossible turned out to be quite possible. What impossibility are you now facing?

We live in a world of impossible possibilities. The mobile phone we hold in our hand, hinted at in the Dick Tracy comics with his 2-way wrist radio, is now a reality extended way beyond those naive imaginings. One of thousands possible examples once never thought possible or even dreamed of are now encountered in our everyday lives.

It is our human tendency to link the possible, and therefore the impossible, with this tenaciously persistent thing we refer to as “reality”.

What is real and what is not, often has to do with what is objectively perceived, can be measured, and is reproducible; for example: money.

I am reading “Of Water And Spirit: Ritual, Magic and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman” by Malidoma Patrice Somé in which he states that in his culture, anything that can be imagined is real and therefore despite our thinking in the West, quite possible. He claims what is not real are the walls and limits we place in the way of imagination.

So, imagination is real whereas the limits upon imagination are actually what is not real. So what’s illusion and what’s real? When we write off our imagination by telling ourselves it’s not real, or it can’t be done, are we terminating the journey before it begins? And is not what’s real and worth our while, the journey itself?

History is filled with the stories of those who have inspired us by achieving something extraordinary – often up until their achievement, is thought of as quite impossible.

What’s not told are the stories of those who never tried the impossible.

What is the impossible for you? A wall or a doorway? Is it a dead end not worthy of consideration or a horizon inviting us to imagine, dream, and who knows… maybe we’ll end up somewhere we could never have imagined.

In my family, food was love and the kitchen table was central to its expression. We convened around our kitchen’s oval table that served dutifully as a launchpad for art projects and homework, an arena for puzzles and games, and a desk for balancing the checkbook and paying bills. Most importantly it was called into service daily as gathering place for communal nourishment of body, mind, heart, soul, and of course, family.

The rhythm of eating was a rite and our kitchen table the altar.

Family dinnertime was a given. Absenteeism was not even a consideration short of being bedridden with some deathly contagion. And growing up, we weren’t the only ones. Mrs. Foley, who lived next door, had a large cowbell, its clarion ring announced dinnertime at the Foley household and pretty much served as the dinner bell for the entire neighborhood.

My mother did most of the food preparation and food was prepared everyday for every meal. My sister, brother, and i all had chores that circled around dinnertime – shelling peas or shucking corn, setting or clearing the table, washing or drying the dishes. My father was somewhat exempt from the doings of dinner as he arrived home from work at dinnertime. Those times were modest and a single breadwinner could support a family.

The kitchen table served as a daily gathering touchpoint to talk about our days, share thoughts and feelings, and make plans.

There were manners, rules, and customs. There was plenty of laughter and at times, tears.

Conflict and tension arose from time to time and we learned to navigate between the fields of what was said and the fences of what was left unsaid.

Physical spaces can either encourage or discourage relationships and the table (kitchen, dining room, or other) is one of these spaces. But there needs to be a call – an invitation. And people also have to be willing to slow down, allow time and make space for connection to take root.

Some kitchen tables are gathering places; others serve as mere distribution points.

Some center around conversation and companionship while others, the focus is invaded by screens. I recall visiting my cousins where a small squawky television had taken up residence at their kitchen table. Its blaring presence was hard to ignore as it greedily tugged the tide of attention contorting the table’s orbit towards it and away from each other. Incongruous and emotionally dissonant situations make for sticky memories and for me, this was one of those situations. The memories of family, food, and connection of my childhood experience led me to revere and regard the table as essential in raising my two daughters and in hindsight i am grateful that their mother and i held fast to our conviction.

What happened at your kitchen table? What was welcomed? Frowned upon? Who held the power and how was it held? Did the call to the dinner table take precedence over all else? Was there even a call? What does it mean and why does it matter? Share a story about your kitchen table.

Our BreakBread Prompt for this month is about the kitchen table:

“We’re all human at the kitchen table.” ~ Ava DuVernay

What happened at the kitchen table? What do you remember fondly? What would you rather forget? Share a story about the kitchen table.

To learn more about BreakBread visit www.breakbread.world.

Every month at BreakBread World, we publish a prompt. This month’s prompt is about right and wrong.

Between the fences of right and wrong, there’s a vast meadow flowered with questions, possibility and mystery.

What is right? What’s wrong? Tell a story of righteousness – either about your own or another’s.

Our prompts are the kind of questions that lead to more questions.

What do we do when what is right for me conflicts with what is right for you? How does what’s right or wrong for an individual conflict or align with what might be right or wrong for the wider community, society, or planet? Are there universal “rights” and “wrongs” that are inherent and unassailable?

Martin Luther King Jr. said:

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Believing in a moral universe implies a belief that there are higher principles guiding us and our decisions. If you disagree, then what are the determinants of right and wrong for you?

The question of right and wrong points to another question: how does one lead a good life? Or what does it mean to live life as a good person? This is not to be confused with “the good life” as defined by a sense of having achieved a level of material comfort and success. Essential to being a “good” person or leading a “good” life is to have a sense of what’s right and wrong.

Living together in family, community, or society necessitates boundaries and guidelines. This is part of culture — the rules: spoken and unspoken. In a fractured globalized society rich with diversity, who holds the moral compass? Where do we turn to for moral leadership? You could say religion offers this moral compass. Yet, we’ve seen throughout history how the religious fences of right and wrong can become walls of righteousness planting the seeds for fundamentalist fortresses that spring us into witch hunts, inquisitions, crusades, and genocides. We in the United States have separation of church and state and in theory, practice the rule of law. But just because something is technically legal does not necessarily mean it’s morally right.

Is the market capitalism that guides so many of our societal decisions, moral? Has self-interest and money in the form of profit become the arbiter of right and wrong?

It’s not only free markets but also new technologies that are sometimes accompanied by moral arguments claiming to foster more equality, empowerment, and justice.

These were some of the hopes expressed in the nascency of the Internet, social media, cryptocurrency, blockchain and now even AI. Now we have algorithms trawling through our personal data dressed in a moral veneer of efficiently delivering products and services catered to our specific individualistic needs and desires. Is efficiency, convenience and profit moral?

In search of justice, social initiatives and organizational frameworks to address systemic inequalities and advocate for the rights of marginalized communities attempt to balance the scales of justice. Affirmative action and DEI are both examples of attempts to instill moral order in our institutions. They are both now demonized as immoral by the current administration which seems to place unquestioned loyalty in strongmen as their moral north star. What’s right? What’s wrong? Who’s good and who’s bad?

What about an internal compass? Can we rely on ourselves to follow some internal sense of right and wrong?

This puts us in the land of preference, opinion, and identity, none of which can serve as absolutes – even for ourselves.

Journalist Walter Lippmann said:

“if what is right and wrong depends on what each individual feels, then we are outside the bounds of civilization”.

That internal compass works fine until it meets up with another’s compass pointing in a different direction. What do we do when what is right for me conflicts with what is right for you? Individual, collective, people, planet — who decides and how?

Welcome to the vast meadow flowered with questions, possibility and mystery.

Photo by Yunus Tuğ

This is not the place to expound upon the meaning of ancient koans but in the same spirit, if one person talks and no one listens, has a conversation taken place? Conversations are not spoken into existence but rather, they are “listened” into existence. The Conversation Activist knows that the listener holds the power.

The more you listen, the more there is to hear. Try it. Sit in stillness for five minutes and listen. Maybe you’re in a quiet room or a noisy bar. Listen, listen, listen. To the sound of your breathing. The chatter of your mind, the sensations in your body. Listen near. Listen far. Listen to the sound of the space around you. The traffic, or wind, or birds. A distant plane, the rustling of leaves, clinking glasses, the murmur of someone else’s voice. Listen, listen, listen.

When we reduce our concept of what conversation is to an “oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas”¹ where one speaks while another listens and then they switch roles, we reduce conversation to a transaction. The rich, fertile, depth that is the potential world of each conversation becomes more impoverished and bleak.

Active Listening and Deep Listening are two important concepts of listening. These generally involve suspending judgment and being more fully present with the other person in order to better understand their experience or point of view. One attempts to hear beyond words into the nonverbal level of communication to uncover deeper meaning, unspoken needs, and feelings.

The Conversation Activist goes one step further moving into a more embodied state of listening. This is the understanding of conversation as more than the words being said and the person who’s saying them. There are worlds speaking to us.

When the Conversation Activist listens they know that bodies, hearts and minds are speaking.

So is space — the room or location we are inhabiting. Time is also in the conversation — each participant’s past, present, and future. Even the conversation itself which is a co-arising creation has something to say.

When a tree falls in the forest, science and rationality argue that indeed a sound is made. So what? Why does it matter? What the listener’s participation brings to the falling tree is relationship, aliveness and meaning. And whether it’s a falling tree or a person speaking, the listener brings the critical piece to the dance of conversation. Why does this matter? Because with power like this, what kind of listener do you want to be?

Join us for our next 4-session Conversation Lab for Changemakers & Impact Leaders, starting February 25, 2025

1. Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Home is a mountain. Home is a tree. Home is the smell of freshly baked bread, cinnamon and rose perfume. Home is crisp sheets and rain-soaked curtains. Fireflies and cool summer breezes. The creaking stair and the reassuring ticking of the hallway clock.

Home is a feeling. Homesick, homeless, broken, home at last. It is the laughing, the heartbreaks, the worrisome omens and the chicken soup fevers. Home is long dark hours waiting for sunrise as well as languid sun-soaked afternoons. We savor the memories, hopes, angry arguments and tearful reconciliations. It lives in the imperfections of ambiguous origin – the crack in the wall, the missing bannister newel, the wall switch that does nothing. It is joy and delight, dread and remorse we recognize by a resonance in our heart.

Home is a place of forever leaving and forever returning. We leave, escape, elope, even run away and then find ourselves longing to return. It’s both destination and devastation of an eternal seeking. Home is the unceded womb of our original un-homing. A mythology from which every hero journeys to find that upon their return home is never the home they left — not because it changed but because they did. It is both that which we long for and the very longing itself.

Home is the people who matter the most. A spirit of being, created solely by virtue of the lives lived within its domain - not defined by structure or geography but by inhabitation – family, friends, transient guests and ghosts. Let us not forget the ghosts that breathe in the shadows of every well-lived home, roaming the bardo that is both delta and headwaters and everything in between.

Home cannot be architected, bought or built. A house is not a home for a home can only be made — not through the product of work but as the result of labor. The slow animal dance of heart labor across time and space. It is an outcropping of pulse and breath. The accommodation of accumulation of trinkets and memories, stories and dust, and the holy ordinariness alive in the gaps.

Home is an unfinishable sentence that we make and which makes us. The search for home is home in search of itself. All longing is but a cry for home — the sacred covenant between us and the earth that we belong and that there is a place that can hold us in the grace of the world.

When I was a young father my daughter periodically struggled with infestations of monsters taking up residency beneath her bed. Rainbow unicorn nightlights and magic pixie faery princess dust seemed to have no effect upon them. My level-headed rational assurance that there were no monsters pitted against her incarnate knowing that there were, led to a protracted entrenchment of opposing certitudes. The problem wasn’t so much their inexplicable existence but rather their uncertain consequence – all the scary worst-case mayhem monsters have been known to whip up.

Exacerbated, I lay down beside her in the glow of her rainbow unicorn nightlight. As she became calm and drifted toward sleep, my mind got busy ruminating. I began taking inventory of all the itinerant monsters of uncertainty in my life – the ones waiting for me at the office, lurking in my inbox, screaming from tomorrow’s news headlines. How could I not see that my daughter's monsters were no less real than my own? I noticed my arm was carelessly hanging down over the side of the bed. I reflexively lifted it out of harm’s way.

We lay together, her tiny warm body nestled next to mine, as the rise and fall of our breathing threaded the quiet night tapestry. A wind-chime mingled with the soft rustling of leaves while a mournful train whistle journeyed in the distance. I came to realize my job as father is less about filling her world with more certainty but rather companioning her in her uncertainty.

As friends, family members, and of course, parents, let us make friends with uncertainty and be companions to others in theirs.

With that, we invite you to explore this month’s BreakBread prompt on uncertainty:

How has permanent, intolerable uncertainty shaped your life and world?

For more information about BreakBread and our prompts visit BreakBread.World.

Photo by Michal Ico

Did you notice that the birds went silent? They, along with the entire woods, dipped into waiting. All of creation settled into deep stillness, as all bodies silently spiraled through space toward the momentary alignment known as “eclipse”.

Did you see “the eclipse”? Look – there it is!

It became a thing – the thingification of a moment, when it is really a movement. It’s a dance of heavenly spheres – sun, moon, earth, and let’s not forget, human eyes are spheres too. It’s a co-arising turn of everything breathing into an ephemeral spiraling alignment.

You could have watched “the” eclipse on television, the Internet, or TikTok. You would have said, there “it” is or there “it” was. But if you weren’t there, wherever “there” was, were you actually eclipsing?

Did you notice the silence and stillness of the birded wood? The undusk-like dimming of the daylight. The slow ghosting of shadow. The sky’s shift from shades of cornflower to baltic blue to an iridescent washed-out black. Venus quietly made its appearance along with a few sparkling companion stars. And the sun’s flaring corona scorched the rim of a burnished new moon. In their dance, the heavenly spheres invite us into a dimensional turn where that which is hidden in the ordinary becomes illuminated in the darkness.

As quickly as it came, the moment dissipates. The blue sky awakens and the birds begin to sing. The ghosted shadows reinvigorate and the busyness of daylight surges. Everything is as it was except, different.

Did you notice the tree branches are now eclipsing the sun? Did the trees move? Was it the sun arcing to the west or the new moon pulling east? Was it me? – have i not been standing in the same spot for the past hour? All of creation is eclipsing moment to moment to moment and me with it. Shifting, dancing, breathing. There is no “there” there.