Episode 73
“Like Jonas himself I find myself traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox.”
—Thomas Merton
Sometimes we feel torn between seemingly opposite truths. Between needing solitude and craving community. Between wanting to fix everything and learning when to say “enough”. Between the darkness of our times and an inexplicable hope that persists.
One person who has helped so many of us live with these feelings and experiences is the educator and writer Parker J. Palmer, who is the founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal.
At 86, Palmer has spent decades exploring how we can hold life’s contradictions without being torn apart by them. In a recent conversation for Love and Philosophy with Andrea Hiott, he shared insights that we hope will come like a balm for you, too.
Dr. Parker Palmer is an American writer, educator, and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, social change and spirituality. He is the Founder of The Centre for Courage and Renewal and the author of 10 popular books, including: A Hidden Wholeness, The Courage to Teach, an Undivided Life, and On the Brink of Everything.
Survival Skills
Palmer calls paradox a “survival concept”, an idea that feels especially helpful right now. We live in a culture obsessed with resolving tensions, picking sides, finding the one right answer. But what if the secret to thriving isn’t choosing between opposites, but learning to hold them together? What if that opens another sort of sensuality?
Consider this paradox Palmer quotes in this episode, a favorite idea of his from the physicist Niels Bohr:
“The opposite of an ordinary fact is a lie. The opposite of one profound truth may be another profound truth.”
Parker says we could even take breathing as a simple example of this. You need both inhaling and exhaling. If you decided to be “just a breathing out kind of person,” you’d die. Yet we apply this either/or thinking to so much of life: Are you an introvert or extrovert? Do you need community or solitude? Should you be vulnerable or strong?
Parker explains that both are part of us, and embracing these parts of us is challenging but transformative. Both individually and in community.
Becoming the Darkness
Palmer speaks from hard-won experience. He’s survived three major episodes of clinical depression, experiences he describes with startling clarity: “In the depths of depression, you’ve become the dark. So there’s no difference between you and the darkness.”
But even in that place where, as he puts it, “you either endure or you don’t,” something paradoxical happened. Deep in the thickets of his inner darkness, he glimpsed what he calls “the soul”—like a wild animal that “is able to survive on hardly any resources at all.”
During one of these dark periods, or just as he was beginning to come out of it enough to function again, while walking through harrowed farmland in Kentucky, a poem came to him that captures the mystery of knowing when enough is enough. He recites this poem from memory in the episode. Here are a few glimpses from it:
The plow has savaged this sweet field...
I have plowed my life this way, Turned over a whole history looking for the roots of what went wrong...
Enough. The job is done. Whatever’s been uprooted, let it be seed bed for the growing that’s to come.
That single word—”enough”—was a gentle nudge towards recovery and it can be cathartic to hear it now. Not because it instantly cured his depression, not because it instantly changes anything for us, but because it offers an image of possibility, that we can stop this harrowing and trust that something might grow from this tilled ground.
the Paradox of True Community
Here’s another paradox that comes out in this conversation: Palmer quotes theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s wisdom about community:
“Let the person who cannot be alone beware of being in community, and let the person who cannot be in community beware of being alone.”
When this paradox falls apart, Palmer observes, “solitude devolves into loneliness, isolation and community devolves into the crowd.” Looking around America today, he sees “a lot of lonely people who have joined together in crowds that become mobs.”
Real community requires people who know how to be alone with themselves. Real solitude requires people who understand their need for connection. It can take a minute for this to really sink in. Actually, we’re still trying to really grasp it.
Love That Doesn’t Try to Solve Anything
Perhaps the most moving part of the conversation was Palmer’s description of the friend who helped him during depression—not through advice or analysis, but through presence. This friend came every afternoon, sat with Palmer in silence, and massaged his feet. Rarely speaking, except occasionally to say “I can feel your struggle today” or “I feel you getting a little stronger.”
“He was there every day,” Palmer recalls, “having found the one place in my body where I could feel a connection with another human being.”
This friend understood what poet Rilke called love: “that two solitudes border, protect and salute one another.” He didn’t try to fix Palmer or offer solutions. He simply showed up, day after day, creating space for Palmer to exist exactly as he was.
the Edge Where Everything Becomes Visible
Palmer titled one of his books (from 2019) “On the Brink of Everything,” inspired by his friend Courtney Martin and her three-year-old daughter Maya who was discovering the world with fresh eyes. At 80, he realized he too was “on the brink of everything” and going forward to that brink, he wanted to be committed to what Buddhists call “beginner’s mind.” This is such a powerful way to imagine our lives as we all move forward.
Kurt Vonnegut once wrote: “I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”
Maybe that’s where wisdom lives—not only in the safety of certainty, but also on the edge where contradictions meet, where we can see what’s invisible from the comfortable center but where we care for each other and realize we are more than just our individual lives after all.
Letting Be
What if instead of demanding that people choose sides, we learned to hold paradox? What if instead of trying to fix each other’s struggles, we practiced presence? What if instead of fearing our brokenness, we understood that “wholeness has nothing to do with perfection” but with “embracing our brokenness as part of who we are”?
Palmer spent decades learning and sharing and teaching about the idea that you can’t separate soul from role—that trying to leave your true self at home while you go perform in the world ultimately breaks you. The alternative isn’t easy: it requires what he calls “rejoining soul and role,” bringing your full identity and integrity into every part of your life. That sounds hard, but the quality of life lived is worth it. And letting others do this for themselves in their own ways means is the real spirit of listening.
This isn’t a quick fix or a simple formula. It’s more like learning to breathe—finding the rhythm between solitude and community, vulnerability and strength, accepting what is and working for what could be.
As Palmer puts it: “The desire to feel at home in who we are and whose we are—the two great questions—runs very deep. Just keep your eye on it.”
The full conversation with Parker Palmer is available on the Love and Philosophy podcast on all your favorite platforms. Palmer is the founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal and author of ten books, including “A Hidden Wholeness,” “The Courage to Teach,” and “On the Brink of Everything.”
Parker Palmer is a beloved educator, writer, and activist who helps people find courage and meaning in their work and lives. He writes about universal human struggles, finding your calling, dealing with depression, staying true to yourself in a world that pulls you in different directions, and creating communities where people can be authentic and trust one another.
This article and podcast is informational only and not meant as professional guidance or advice
Some of the key themes in his work are as follows:
Vocation and purpose: helping people discover work that aligns with their deepest values
Inner life: making it okay to talk about the soul, meaning & identity in secular spaces
Courage over fear: practical wisdom about living with integrity despite obstacles
Education as transformation: not just information transfer, but helping people become more fully human
Parker draws from Quaker traditions but speaks to people of all faiths and none. He’s academic (former professor) but writes in plain, beautiful language, combining personal vulnerability with social activism in ways that help others find meaning and connection again.
Follow Parker on Substack at parkerjpalmer.substack.com.
• Amazon page with all 10 of his books is HERE.
• IndieBound page with all 10 of his books is HERE.
• Founder page at the Center for Courage & Renewal is HERE.
• Project with Carrie Newcomer, The Growing Edge is HERE.
• Facebook Author Page is HERE.
• His wonderful On Being columns are collected HERE.
