## Metadata - Author: [[dumbofeather.com]] - Full Title: Parker Palmer Is Living the Questions | Dumbo Feather Magazine - Category: #articles - URL: https://www.dumbofeather.com/conversations/parker-palmer-is-living-the-questions/ ## Highlights - The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr once offered a wonderful definition of paradox. He said, “The opposite of an ordinary fact is a lie, but the opposite of one great truth may be another great truth.” I love that. A quick example: are we made for solitude? Absolutely. We’re all going to die alone so we better get accustomed to our solitary condition. Are we made for community? Absolutely. We can’t do without it! - I have a definition of truth that has served me well over the years: “Truth is an eternal conversation about things that matter conducted with passion and discipline." - So my beef with traditional academia is that it teaches a lot of conclusions and sends people out as conclusion-repeaters, rather than as people who know how to live in the eternal conversation, who have the skill of being in community with their own voices and yet attentive to the voices of others - My dad had an enormous influence on me. He grew up in a blue-collar family in Waterloo, Iowa. During the Great Depression, he went to Chicago—“the big city”—in search of work, carrying only a high school diploma, and rose over the next 50 years to become owner and CEO of the company that had hired him as a temporary bookkeeper in the early 1930s. He was a very successful businessman, but he had an amazing ability to avoid telling me what to do about the issues in my young life. Instead, he asked me honest, open questions that evoked that inner teacher. He never laid particular expectations on me, as in,  “I want you to do X, Y or Z with your life”—but he surrounded me with a kind of energy field of expectancy that made me feel confident that I grow from the inside out, in my own direction, toward my own tropisms. At the same time, Dad surrounded me with an unconditional love that made it safe for me to risk failing, the downside that always comes with the territory called “growing”! I did not have to succeed to earn his love. I have no doubt this is why I’ve had a basic trust in life from early on that has made it possible for me to risk, grow, fail and repeat that cycle again and again. I think the Circle of Trust model is basically an extension of the “safe space” Dad created for me as I was growing up—a space full of expectancy and unconditional regard where people can and do take the risk of growing while being rooted in what is deepest in them.