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Wednesday, January 29, 2020

On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity & Getting Old


By Parker Palmer

Berrett-Koehler     2018
198 pages     Spiritual

Parker Palmer, author, poet, visionary, has been a part of the spiritual growth movement for almost forty years. I first met him when we read The Courage to Teach in an education group. Then I read A Hidden Wholeness in the church library. So, when my spiritual growth book club at church chose On the Brink of Everything as our January book,  I was so pleased. The group met today and the discussion was outstanding.

Parker Palmer is 80 years old—the same age as my husband—and I know how my husband felt on his 80th birthday! Palmer believed he had at least one more book in him, so he created a compendium of essays he has written through the years. In On the Brink of Everything,  he explores how he is responding to this new era in his life, and he is not hesitant to express everything he is feeling--the  good and the bad. The essays and poems that he chose to include fit the several themes outlined at the beginning of each section. 
  
I embrace his feelings about aging. He says, “I like being old because the view from the brink is striking, a full panorama of my life—and a bracing breeze awakens me to new ways of understanding my own past, present, and future.” I honor his struggle with depression and his ability to speak about it with humor and understanding. I appreciate his candor when he announces his disdain for the current president in an essay called “The Soul of a Patriot.” I agree with his desire to reframe aging “as a passage of discovery and engagement, not decline and inactivity.”

I love how he wove his love of nature into every chapter of his book. I could very much relate, because I am finding that as I am aging, I love to just sit and observe the natural world. I love taking walks with my grandchildren and pointing out the little pieces of nature that could so easily pass us by. Besides that, Palmer loves to hike and canoe in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota—part of the world where I grew  up.

I enjoyed so much the self-deprecating humor with which he faces life—except for the righteous anger with which he deals with our broken political system. A lot of our discussion yesterday at book club was about people's fear of “the other.” His essay entitled “In Praise of Diversity” addresses this issue head on when he quotes Jean-Paul Sartre: “Hell is other people” and then goes on to say: “My hell is much more specific. It’s a place populated exclusively by straight white males over fifty who have college degrees and financial security—which is to say, people like me. For me, variety is more, much more, than the spice of life. It’s a basic ingredient of a life lived fully and well."
 
One of the best parts of On the Brink of Everything is the inclusion of a great deal of poetry, both Palmer’s and others. He closes each section with one of his poems—all beautiful, all meaningful. Several years ago Palmer began a collaboration with the singer Carrie Newcomer. I heard Newcomer in concert several years ago, and for some reason, I had not remembered that she frequently composed works using Palmer’s poetry for the lyrics. Her musical partnership with Palmer can be found here.  

This is an easy book to read in small bursts, but I suggest that you sit down with a pencil because you will find yourself underlining passages on nearly every page. The Publisher’s Weekly review closes with this astute observation; “Warm, generous, and funny, this impassioned book invites readers to the deep end of life where authentic soul work and human transformation become pressing concerns.”

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