Convocation Stories, Part One: Walking for Peace, Listening for Song cover art

Convocation Stories, Part One: Walking for Peace, Listening for Song

Convocation Stories, Part One: Walking for Peace, Listening for Song

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 In this special bonus mini-series, Climate Changed returns to the 2025 BTS Center Convocation, where participants “flipped the script” and stepped forward to share climate-centered personal stories—not lectures, not data, not policy, but lived experience. Co-hosts Peterson Toscano and Ben Yosua-Davis introduce two powerful stories of walking, vision, and spiritual practice from BTS Center community members June Zellers and the Rev. Sara Hayman. About This Mini-Series: Convocation Stories At the 2025 BTS Center Convocation, participants were invited to share climate-centered stories grounded in their own lives—stories shaped by imagination, vulnerability, and courage. In this mini-series, Peterson Toscano and Ben Yosua-Davis share two of those stories in each episode, offering listeners a glimpse of how ordinary people are integrating climate concern with spiritual practice, community, and daily life. This end-of-year series is designed for a season when many of us are carrying questions about justice, the environment, and the future of our climate-changed world. Reflection, exhaustion, hope, and uncertainty often intermingle. These stories offer a companion for that moment, reminding us that one of the most powerful tools we have is our own voice and our own lived experience. How These Stories Were Made: The Story-Making Process To bring these stories to life with care and craft, The BTS Center partnered with Stellar Story Company. Months before Convocation, the BTS Center staff invited participants to propose story “seedlings” connected to the Convocation theme. More than twenty community members responded. From those proposals, seven storytellers were selected. Each worked with an experienced storytelling coach from Stellar Story Company over several months, meeting in multiple sessions to develop, revise, and rehearse their stories. Together they shaped deeply personal narratives—rooted in faith, place, and embodied experience—designed to be shared in a plenary setting rather than as expert lectures. As Associate Director Nicole Diroff explains in the episode, the intention was to “flip the script”: to center not headline keynotes, but the voices of people sitting at the tables, taking the leap to tell stories they had “lovingly, prayerfully crafted” for this community. The hope is that these stories will not only move listeners but also spark new stories in all of us. Stories in This Episode “When the Earth Sings” – A Vision Quest with June Zellers Attorney and long-time BTS Center participant June Zellers takes us back 32 years to Eagle Song Camp in western Montana, where she joined 27 women and Indigenous teacher Brooke Medicine Eagle for a three-week physical and spiritual training culminating in a two-day vision quest. Sitting within a carefully prepared medicine circle on a grassy mountainside, June seeks “soul-level answers” to why her outwardly successful law career feels so soul-crushing. What follows is a night of galloping horses, a mountain lion stalking a fellow participant, and the unsettling choice to break the rules in order to move toward another’s distress. The second morning, as she wakes, June hears what she can only describe as the earth itself singing—a three-syllable chant carried first by stillness, then by warm rain, and finally by a brook she has crossed many times before. Tone-deaf and unable to reproduce the melody, she nonetheless carries this silent chant as a mantra through decades of difficulty, sorrow, and grief, a reminder that “regardless of my circumstances, the spirit of life is so incredibly joyful. And my soul, our souls, are designed to be radiant.” “Walking for Peace and Friendship” – A Long Walk with Rev. Sara Hayman The Rev. Sara Hayman, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Ellsworth, Maine, describes how intentional walking has become a primary way she gets grounded amidst overlapping crises, ministry demands, and the weight of liberal religious leadership. From the Camino de Santiago in Spain (500 miles, no blisters—though bedbugs made an appearance) to the wild coasts of Newfoundland and a sheep-covered Dingle Peninsula in Ireland, walking renews her spirit. It reconnects her to land, ancestors, and gratitude. When Penobscot spiritual leader and activist Sherri Mitchell invites her to help organize a “Journey for Peace and Friendship”—an 82-mile, eight-day prayer walk from Indian Island (Penobscot Reservation) to the State House in Augusta—Sara says yes without asking her congregation’s permission. Alongside Wabanaki leaders and a diverse group of walkers, she experiences ceremony, risk, hostility from passing traffic, unexpected welcome (church bells, homemade chocolate-zucchini muffins, cold sparkling water), and the daily discipline of simply putting one foot in front of the other. On the State House steps, exhausted and unprepared with formal remarks, she finds herself moved into...
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