A Great Longing is Upon Us

by Wendy Willis
Executive Director, Deliberative Democracy Consortium
Writer in Residence, Healthy Democracy

It won’t surprise you when I say: The state of our union is a little rickety. Hate crimes have increased for the fourth straight year. Political disagreements have strained family relationships to the breaking point. A majority of urban Americans and a majority of rural ones each say the other views them negatively. As The New York Times put it, “For all the ways Americans are divided today along urban and rural lines, the two groups are at least united in this: Majorities of both, according to a new Pew Research Center survey, believe that everyone else is looking down on them.”

But one of the reasons I love Oregon is that we don’t just throw up our hands and say “Oh well, I guess that’s how it is and how it has to be.” This past year, no fewer than four of Oregon’s state-wide civic organizations launched programs to promote dialogue across difference.  Healthy Democracy began Community Oregon, a statewide program to bring rural and urban Oregonians together over several months;  American Leadership Forum launched the Urban Rural Connection project to intensify relationships between urban and rural senior follows; Oregon Humanities undertook Bridging Oregon to create opportunities for dialogue about the complexities of division and connection; and the Oregon Community Foundation expanded the Latino Partnership Program to support ongoing dialogue in the Latino community.

Sensing an opportunity, Healthy Democracy Executive Director Robin Teater—in her wisdom and good sense—hatched a plan to  bring representatives of all four organizations together during the National Week of Conversation to hear more about what we are all learning. So, on April 26, we gathered with a group of 12 Oregonians for a Democracy Salon hosted by Healthy Democracy.

We stuffed ourselves with delicious Thai food, we read each other poems off our phones, we laughed and compared stories about children and parents and the trials of trying to make our state a little kinder and a lot more just. But here’s where the truth telling comes in: All of us run dialogues for a living, and in the two hours we had together, we barely got through introductions. Robin and I had big ambitions—we were going to do a learning exchange. We were going to discuss ongoing partnerships and evaluations. None of that happened.

And yet . . . believe me when I say, it wasn’t because we were wasting time. Using Robin Wall Kimmerer’s tour-de-force, Braiding Sweetgrass, we asked people to introduce themselves, their places, their families. Here is part of the prompt from Kimmerer:

In a way, I was raised by strawberries, fields of them. Not to exclude the maples, hemlocks, white pines, goldenrod, asters, violets, and mosses of upstate New York, but it was the wild strawberries, beneath dewy leaves on an almost-summer morning, who gave me my sense of the world, my place in it.

We asked people to introduce themselves by completing these sentences:

~In a way, I was raised by:
~My mental map had all the landmarks I needed:
~You could smell:
Ÿ~In our family, the presents we gave one another:
~Even now:

The introductions were generous and vivid and textured. We learned about one another’s families and our favorite trees and the joys and wonders and heartbreaks of young childhood. We heard about a family farm in the Willamette Valley and the magic of the Peruvian Amazon and Saturday-night baths and smelly pigs. We heard about loneliness and homesickness and the confusion of moving to a place so different from the places of our births. We heard about racism and cruelties and suffering. And yet, to a person, each of us said some version of: “I love Oregon. This is my home.”

We had high hopes, Robin and me, about how we might compare the progress of the various programs, about how we might create collaborations. But instead, we did something else. We sat together, we ate food from a place most of us have never been, we listened to one another, we laughed, and then we hugged goodbye. We promised we would do it again.

And I could not be more honored or more pleased. As Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us, there are things to learn from the strawberries:

 When I was young, I thought the change might happen that fast. Now I am old and I know that transformation is slow. The commodity economy has been here on Turtle Island for four hundred years, eating up the white strawberries and everything else. But people have grown weary of the sour taste in their mouths. A great longing is upon us, to live again in a world made of gifts. I can scent it coming, like the fragrance of ripening strawberries rising on the breeze.