The Year’s Highlights
by Manitonquat (Medicine Story)

The year 2007 was packed, busy, and gratifying for Ellika and me.  We had suffered a considerable loss in the prior year, two thefts of a lot of cash during our travels, and we were facing the loss of our Nature School lands, when many of our friends in Europe went to work to collect donations on our behalf that really saved us.  We were so grateful and at the same time so comforted by the realization that we are, all of us, a family, we are part of a real global family and we are all there for each other.  Excuse me, while I discharge some tears of relief and joy as I consider that now….

So we were able to ride boldly forth into 2007 on that inspiration, and everything has gone very well.  The sweat lodge has been extended into more prisons, and Raven upheld all the programs there powerfully while Ellika and I did our annual tour in Europe, which this year was extended to six months to accommodate two new engagements in Spain and Italy.  We did seven international camps in five countries and nine weekend workshops in three countries.  We were able to visit the communities of ZEGG in Germany and Tamera in Portugal to thank them for their help in saving our land.  Most of the people in Tamera, more than a hundred, were away on a peace pilgrimage walking through the desert to Jerusalem.  The building of their peace village in Portugal is going ahead full steam, with many new buildings, a solar energy plant, and a new lake being dug since my last visit two years ago. 

Every workshop and every camp was strong, different, and exciting.  Our new camps in northern Sweden, southern Germany, and the Danish island of Bornholm, were all delightful, and the Austrian camp doubled its attendance from the previous year!   For the first time we did a workshop in Spain, at a hacienda in Andalusia.  It was very new to the Spanish people, but they were enthusiastic about it so probably we will return to extend our circle family further into Spain.

For our last engagement in November, I had been invited by an ecological organization in Italy to be the keynote speaker for their biennial conference.  I spoke for an hour at the end of the event on the subject of education for the environment.  The people were so moved by what I brought that it was almost overwhelming.  I’m sure that had much to do with the heartfelt translation by my friend Luca who has been translating for me in Italy for many years and is impassioned about our message.  Because the people knew nothing about me beforehand, but they took me into their hearts like family and kept me for an hour to express their appreciation afterwards, the mayor giving me the city’s banner, the president of the university giving me a gold medal, people taking my hands with actual tears of gratitude – and for the first time all the books and CDs I brought, including the new translation of my first book into Italian, sold out completely!

After that Ellika and I and our spiritual daughter Lorenza, who has also been with us for many years and now organizes the events for us in Italy, took a brief holiday in Venice.  You can’t imagine how wonderful it is to be in a city that has no cars!  No traffic, no noise, and fumes, not even any mopeds or bicycles – there’s only room to walk those narrow twisted streets and climb the little bridges over all the canals.  There are beauty, art, and culture everywhere, museums, and a choice of many concerts every night.  After two nights Lorenza went home and Ellika and I honeymooned in our sweet room with a balcony overlooking a canal.  What a letdown when we took the boat to the bus station and came back to the world of internal combustion and pollution!

Now I am back in New Hampshire, back in Birch Cottage, hand-made with a little help from my friends in a peaceful birch grove – settling into the routine of prison circles and sweats, my country music group on Tuesdays, my old rock band on Wednesday nights, and my tennis and workouts at my fitness club three or four times a week.  It’s a bit of a struggle to establish a routine of writing every day because Ellika is not due to come from Denmark for another week, and it’s hard for me to stay ahead of all the other work, the email connections, the post and telephone, and dealing with the house, the stoves, and cooking, but when she is here I think we will have order!

My goal at present is to have at least three new books available by this coming spring  - not impossible as all the basic writing has been done, and my task now is to revise, rewrite, and edit.  I’ll let you know how it goes, and excerpts may appear here in TALKING STICK from time to time.

It continues to feel like there is an incipient movement, or the dream of a movement, the possibility of a global movement in which we work together not only to save the planet and save our children, but actually to make our lives better, make them more satisfying, more fun, more joyful, more meaningful, more constructive, helpful and creative.

The murmurs of that hope are arising from our camps and workshops.  Again and again we hear, “I’m so sad it’s over, and I can’t wait until next year.”  “This is the way human beings are supposed to live, getting close, supporting each other, caring for each other.”  “Now the only question for me is how to live this way, this circle way, not just in camp, but all the time, as our way of life.”

Again and again I hear from people who come to camp or a workshop out of curiosity, or with a friend, knowing nothing about it, that they are amazed at what they have learned which now seems the most important thing in their lives.  They can’t believe they were able to get so close to so many complete strangers in such a short time.  They really become convinced of the goodness of human beings and of the need that we all have for each other, and they see the possibility of love and mutual support in a peaceful, caring society stemming from the building of model communities living the circle way.

A circle way community in which, like our camps, all are equal and share with and care for each other, for all the children and the old and infirm, all who need care, with the rich joy of giving, needs to be large enough to be economically self-supporting and small enough that everyone knows each other, a big extended family circle made up of many smaller circles that we call clans, that listen deeply to each other and make consensus decisions about their own work and play together and interact with other clans and the larger circle in the work and play of the whole community.

There are so many circles and communities in the world today, and that is a hopeful sign.  I’ll be writing more about my experience of many communities, including the growing ecovillage movement.  How they might be able to change the world by connecting and building a world movement is the subject of my books now. 

My vision of a circle way community has a major difference from all others I have seen, in the tools used for getting and staying close, for enhancing all relationships and working through their hard places, for getting to know each other deeply, and for making creative decisions together and cooperating and supporting each other, as well as for interacting with the larger world beyond.

These tools are a combination of my work with circles based on ancient traditions of all people and the work of co-counseling which I began to in corporate in the circles twenty seven years ago.  The results from our own community, the prison circles, and our workshops have proved themselves over the years.  Co-counseling really works, and we stay connected to the international co-counseling community to keep making it better.

It is hopeful to stay connected to the global co-counseling community, which, with hundreds of thousands of co-counselors around the world, is dedicated to the liberation of all from oppression and the creation of a truly humane and just society.  To read the reports of people’s struggles and successes in their journal PRESENT TIME is truly heartening.  There is a common humanity that transcends politics and nations, religions, races, and cultures, and as we listen to one another around the world, we begin to know clearly we are family, we care about each other, we are responsible for each other, to be sure every person has basic human needs or shelter, food, water, medical care and education.

Yes, education is a basic human need, not to make money, but to know the world, know our history, know who we are, know what options are available to us.  Becoming educated means learning what it means to be human, learning that as a species we became human when we learned to cooperate and support each other, learned to communicate better and created language.  Cooperation, communication and closeness are essential to our being human.

In our modern industrial society people are isolated from each other, taught to compete rather than cooperate, to dominate or submit, to suspect others and be closed, secretive.  We are taught it is not safe to be close to people, and our culture has no idea how to live intimately with others, so we are not taught that either.  So half the marriages break up, there is a vast gap between adults and youth, between the sexes, the rich and the poor, and among races and cultures.  Our educational systems reinforce those gaps, training people to fit into the system, to become producers and consumers, isolated and lonely, powerless and hopeless.

But the youth have not surrendered their humanity yet.  Whenever I speak at a college or high school, the students cheer to hear an old man who has hope for the world and faith in their ability to create a rational, just and humane society.  I gave a talk at a local Waldorf high school, and the students lined up to thank me and tell me with glistening eyes, “I want to change the world!”

And so I offered a course at the school, and once a week we would sit in a circle and discuss the things that need changing and our thoughts on how to do that.  When the school year ended I wrote a book inspired by that class, CHANGING THE WORLD, which I printed and offer now at my lectures and through the order page of this web site, circleway.org.  It is now being translated into German and Italian.  The excited feedback I am getting gives me more hope for building a movement to begin to reconstruct society in the circle way.

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