Introductory Remarks: Mindfulness and Community Building, Sara Flitner (15:09)

Open Monitoring Practice with Sara Flitner (14:59)

Sara Flitner, former mayor of Jackson Hole, Wyoming and founder of Becoming Jackson Whole, whose mission is to help the community respond to contemporary challenges with focus, compassion and resilience, joined us today to talk about mindfulness and community building and lead us in a meditation practice of open monitoring or open awareness. Please listen to her opening remarks, above, for an overview of her organization’s powerful and transformative work.

We enjoyed an in-depth discussion afterwards, all the more meaningful because many people in the Midweek Pause community of practice have years of commitment and experience in various aspects of community building through such varied efforts as the Malpais Borderlands Group, a 25-year effort led by ranchers that has spearheaded collaborations with environmentalists and local, state and Federal land managers to keep some 800,000 acres out of development in Arizona and New Mexico; the Venture Course in the Humanities, which for more than a decade has brought college-level courses in the humanities into homeless and underserved communities in order to build resilience and increase opportunity; and the Western Folklife Center, which has supported and showcased the voices of rural people for more than 30 years and done much to lessen the urban-rural divide.

We discussed the fact that mindfulness, in its capacity to help us listen to each other and make space for conflicting ideas, is a radical practice. Rae reminded us that the word radical derives from the Latin word for root.

Several people mentioned the concept of the “radical center” in collaborations across the West. Rancher Bill McDonald, the first working agriculturalist to win a MacCarthur Fellowship (and I believe still the only one) coined the term in the mid-1990s to describe an emerging consensus-based approach to Western land management challenges. In 2003, the Quivira Coalition brought together a group of 20 ranchers, environmentalists, scientists and writers to pen an “Invitation to Join the Radical Center.” You can read and accept the invitation here, and see the list of original signatories, of which I am proud to be one, here.

All this to remind us that we don’t practice mindfulness only for ourselves, but for our families, our communities, and our world.

Thank you, Sara, for joining us today. Please visit BecomingJacksonWhole to learn more about her work.