Grandma Magic Episode 15: Mary Pipher, Writing Culture and Personality
Mary Pipher, a seasoned clinical psychologist with a background in cultural anthropology, has dedicated her career to unraveling the intricate connections between culture and personality, particularly within the context of women in American society. From her seminal work, “Reviving Ophelia,” scrutinizing the challenges faced by adolescent girls, to the insightful exploration of women navigating the complexities of aging in “Women Rowing North,” Pipher’s writings resonate with a broad audience. Drawing on her extensive interviews with hundreds of women, she imparts a wealth of wisdom that reflects the diverse experiences of the female journey. Pipher’s influence extends beyond her books, as highlighted in her New York Times article, “Grandmothers of the World Unite!” where she passionately advocates for older women to wield their societal roles as catalysts for systemic change, a call to action rooted in her own environmental activism. Join us for the final episode of Season One of Grandma Magic to learn from Mary Pipher’s life and work.
To learn more about Mary’s work visit https://marypipher.com/. Her memoir, A Life in Light, will be out in paperback on December 12th. You can pre-order at https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/life-in-light-9781639731633/
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Welcome to Grandma Magic, a podcast from the Grandmother Collective. We are a nonprofit organization that supports and advocates for a world where a grandmother’s power is seen, cultivated, and activated for positive change. The Grandma Magic Podcast is an opportunity to learn more about the unique positions that grandmothers, aunties, and other older women around the world can play in advancing positive social development by talking to and learning from grandmother changemakers.
We hope this series inspires you, brings you joy, and helps you recognize the enduring magic and wisdom that comes from grandmothers everywhere. My name is Lynsey Farrell and I’m your host. Today, I’m joined by Mary Pipher, author and clinical psychologist who has written 11 books, including the New York Times best selling books Reviving Ophelia and Women Rowing North, Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing as We Age.
Her latest book is a memoir, A Light in Life. In April, she got our attention at the Grandmother Collective for her New York Times op ed, Grandmothers of the World Unite. Which detailed the many ways that older women can drive change at this critical time in history. An activist herself, Mary has organized movements against the XL pipeline being routed through her home state of Nebraska.
I’m excited to hear her perspectives today about women in leadership and activism, her authorship journey, and whatever else we find to talk about. Welcome Mary!
Mary Pipher: Hello, I’m happy to be with you, Lynsey.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): So, you know, one of the questions that we love to start with is, trying to understand how folks that we’re talking to kind of have had grandmother figures play a role in their life. So would you like to share about a grandmother figure that was important in your life?
Mary Pipher: I absolutely would. It makes me so happy to talk about my grandmother. I actually had two very good grandmothers, but my father’s mother died when I was quite young, and I didn’t have as much contact with her. But my mother’s mother was a homesteader in eastern Colorado, and she had actually graduated from college in 1907, Peru State Teachers College, but she married another student and they moved to Eastern Colorado and established a homestead and then a ranch. And, she and I had a very close relationship. For example, when I visited her house she would always have a jar of cookies and my favorite cookies were molasses cookies, and one time I said, “Oh. You’ve baked my favorite cookies.” And my grandmother said, “Well, that’s why I baked those cookies.” And for me, that was a revelation that someone would go to that much trouble just for me, think about what I might want in advance and plan for it.
We had these big family dinners when we visited Flagler, Colorado, and when we finished these dinners my grandmother would say, “Now Mary, you help me with the dishes.” And then we’d get in the kitchen and she’d say, “and let’s do these dishes very slowly.” And we would talk, we had these long conversations. She was very interested in what I was reading. She was very interested in my moral education. She was very interested in what I thought and who my friends were and how I decided who my friends would be. And, I just loved her so much. And I think she had a profound effect on me. For example, her attitude was very much, you are here to make a difference in the world. And your job every day is to be good and useful. And I really absorbed that message from her.
In retrospect, now, as a 75 year old, I wish someone had given me the message that it was also really good to take care of myself. That it wasn’t just taking care of the world, it was taking care of myself that was important. But, this grandmother was really special to me. She was really the first person, I think, that saw me. And that person who sees you is such a valuable person.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yeah. You know, when we talk to anyone really about the idea that grandmothers have this powerful role to play, what just happened to you happens to so many people. This like immediate feeling of, oh, I remember standing at the sink with my grandmother, or I remember sitting on the porch with my grandmother. And I wonder, beyond that foundational feeling of being seen, I wonder if you can connect that with some of the work that you ended up doing in life. Can you tell us a little bit about your background? What led you to first anthropology, my field, and then, to psychology? What were you seeking?
Mary Pipher: Well, first of all, I would say that probably my strongest characteristic is curiosity. I was born curious and I was just a real big reader as a girl, read all the time. And also I listened to adults when, uh, we had big family gatherings or my parents were around a group of people. I didn’t play with the children, I wanted to hear what the adults said. So I always was very curious. And we lived in, uh, little Nebraska and Kansas towns, all white people, very homogenous communities. So when I went to college at KU, this was 1965, and I immediately became interested in the civil rights movement, which was starting to happen at that time in Kansas City.
My first activism and my first act of trying to understand people who had been raised very differently than myself was in 1965 at KU. Now anthropology, what I loved about anthropology, was the whole idea of how people organize their lives differently, how culture affects personality. I loved Margaret Mead. How point of view shapes the way we understand the world. And so when I went into anthropology, I took as many people do in that field, linguistics and archeology and all the other areas in anthropology, but I really was interested in culture and personality. And then when I went to school in psychology, I was interested in how the culture affects mental health.
So really for me, anthropology and psychology were in many ways, very similar.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yeah, I too came from what is a relatively homogenous background and I didn’t even know anthropology existed. Maybe that was the same for you?
Mary Pipher: Yeah, absolutely. When I went to college, I didn’t know it was a field.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yeah, no, I had no idea. And I think I took a class, my first class was just cause it sounded interesting, was peoples and cultures of Native America.
Mary Pipher: Yes.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Or North America or something, right? So it was about indigenous people. And I read an ethnography. I don’t remember which one, something about some Pacific Northwest group. And I thought, “Oh my gosh, these are questions I didn’t know could be asked.”
Mary Pipher: Yes. Probably the Kwakiutl. That was the one I remember.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yeah, maybe some Boaz or something, but it might’ve been even like a little bit more modern because I’m a relatively modernist, urbanist, cultural anthropologist. But it was just we can ask these questions about how society is structured, about how the symbols connect with meaning, it was so revelatory to me.
Mary Pipher: Absolutely. And my first class, I believe, was The Peoples of Central America. And I did that because I was very interested in what the United Fruit Company was doing to Central America. I was very interested in the Cuban Revolution. So I wanted to understand: what is the situation down there? And then from that class, I just really moved into anthropology.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Okay, so you have a grandmother that has been encouraging you to do good in the world from a very young age. Then this sort of expansive learning that comes with being a social scientist. How have these informed some of the ways that you’re active every day- even today that, you know, we got to read about in the New York Times article?
Mary Pipher: Well, I had a period of time that I think most adults have where I was primarily working and raising children. And during that period of time, I wasn’t particularly active. I would show up for certain marches or write a letter to the editor about a certain cause. But when my children grew up originally my life did not slow down when my children grew up because.
Reviving Ophelia was published my daughter’s senior year. And that led into about a decade of constant writing and speaking. So it was really probably about 2000 that my life slowed down to the point I could re engage. And I did it with refugees. Our community, Lincoln, is a resettlement center. And in 2000, we had 54 languages in the schools, now we have 118. But the anthropology in me returned and I thought I really want to get to know some of these language groups. And so I began sponsoring families and I decided there’s a book here. There’s a book, all these people from all over the world coming to Lincoln, Nebraska. So I started doing a lot of interviews and it was an incredibly fun book to write. In fact, I could have just done interviews for about five years. It was so interesting to me. At that time that people were coming in from the former Yugoslavia and Serbia and Bosnia. They were coming in from all over Africa, Nigeria, and especially Kakuma, Sierra Leone. They were coming from Laos and the Hmong were coming into the community. So, just such an interesting mix of people. Iraqis, Kurds coming in.
So anyway, I wrote that book and I stayed very engaged with the refugee community. I’m still very engaged with it. Right now my husband and I are helping the Afghan community here in Lincoln and sponsoring Afghan families. And I’ve just loved it Lynsey, because what it means is I can come to understand. One of our Afghan families is a tribal family from the Hindu Kush, and the other Afghan family is a very sophisticated family from Kabul. The husband was a journalist, so I can come to understand a little bit more about Afghanistan as I deal with these refugees I’m working with now.
The other thing I care very much about is the environment. And I started understanding where we were with an environmental crisis back in the nineties. I was asked to be on a board called the Center for a New American Dream National Board and this board had very sophisticated environmentalists on it and so I was able to really educate myself about what was coming and what needed to be done to stop it. So, like many people that at some point have what environmentalists call the “oh shit” moment. When we just realize we’re in trouble, we’re really in trouble. At first, my first reaction to that was just despair. Just crying and crying, not being able to concentrate. I remember when I had that moment. My grandchildren were here and were picking raspberries. And I was thinking. “What is going to happen to these beautiful children, given what I know?”
And so I was talking to a young guy who was over here, pruning trees and he felt the same way about the environment, and he said, “well, let’s form a group. I’ll bring my friends, you bring your friends, and we’ll do something, we’ll do something locally here in Nebraska.” So, that’s how our environmental group started, and this was in 2010. We’re still going very strong, and our first project was to stop the KXL pipeline and we did it. Now, I don’t mean to say only my little group did it, there were other groups, Bold Nebraska, we ended up forming coalitions. It was a wonderful project because we ended up forming coalitions with the very red, Republican western part of Nebraska. With the ranchers and farmers who also knew that you can’t feed a herd of cattle bottled water, that you’ve got to have clean water.
So, that was a wonderful experience and it sort of led to a premise that I talked about in the book, The Green Boat, which is my book about the battle to stop the KXL, which is the main reason to be an activist from my point of view is the mental health reason. That if you’re in despair about the world, The best thing you can do is go to work and you may not be able to change the world. For example, people have been working for world peace for hundreds of years and we’re still fighting wars. But, what you will do is give yourself a sense of efficacy, and efficacy gives you hope.
So I’ve really been grateful that I had this group of environmentalists I can work with. And the sort of almost daily helping of this Afghan community. My grandmother would like all that very much. She’d be proud of me that I’m doing that.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yeah, did you see the pipeline exploded in Virginia yesterday? There was an explosion of a pipeline running through, the western side, the Appalachian side.
Mary Pipher: Was it a pipeline from the tar sands? Do you know what kind of pipeline? The tar sands pipeline is a very different substance. For one thing, it’s extremely hot and it’s viscous and we have no way to clean it up. So it is by far the worst kind of oil to explode.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): I don’t know how many times a pipeline needs to explode or a train needs to derail or, you know, these environmental catastrophes need to happen before we stop. But, it’s interesting what you’re saying about that feeling of efficacy, of feeling like I’m doing something and if I’m doing something other people are doing something and little by little we will make some progress.
Mary Pipher: Well, your podcast is a good example of something that helps in the world, because one of the reasons I think people feel as much despair as they do is there’s an enormous amount of good work going on all over the world, but that isn’t usually in our newspaper or in our media feeds. And so anyone like yourself who’s actually trying to talk to people who are doing good projects, is beneficial to the culture.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yeah, my background is in Africa, doing research in Africa, and 20 years ago you did not hear any good news out of Africa. And I think me and people that I went to grad school with, folks that I was active with, in Nairobi, Kenya were part of development organizations and nonprofits.
The changing of that narrative has been incredibly positive and I’m sure that there has also been change on the ground, but it is more once you start hearing good news, then you realize, oh, it’s not as bad as we thought it was. It’s not all poverty. It’s not all hunger. It’s not all war.
Mary Pipher: Absolutely. There’s certain tropes that are very present in the culture and they’re caricatures of what’s actually happening. And for example, one thing that I found extremely heartening when I went around the country talking about The Green Boat, I never went anywhere that people didn’t come up and say, “Well, here’s what we’re working on in our community.” So that was a wonderful experience.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): We just have to flood people with the good news.
Mary Pipher: That’s right. That’s right.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Okay so, I can’t not have you talk about the uniqueness of older women as agents of change or as change makers. And so you yourself, this story that you’re telling of like I didn’t do much while I was raising children and having a career, and certainly we have lots of folks that totally understand that. And that there’s people of your generation that were active in the 60s and 70s, and they’re active again today, and there was that space in between. Beyond it being like freeing up of time, what is it about older women that makes them uniquely situated? Why did you call out for them to unite?
Mary Pipher: Well, first of all, Margaret Mead talked about PMZ, postmenopausal zest. And many women, once they’re through, being mothers or having some kind of career that keeps them busy 24/7, have a great deal of energy and intelligence and eagerness to have an impact on the world. So it’s a population that’s ready, ready to go to work.
The other thing is that by the time we’ve lived, I’ll just pick a decade, 60. By the time we’ve lived six decades we actually know a lot of things and what we know, we have practical experiences. Many of us are very good connectors. I’ve lived in this community for 50 years and taught at both universities and raised children here and been a therapist here. And one of the things that helps me be effective in Lincoln, where I live, is I know who to call. I know how to connect people to each other. But I actually think the most important thing about older women is the quality of their attention, the quality of their intention, that we’ve learned to be good listeners, we’ve learned to be non judgmental, we’ve learned to be present with other people, we’ve learned not to give advice. Those things are extraordinarily valuable.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Mary, the last thing you said was you’ve learned not to give advice?
Mary Pipher: Yeah.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): What do you mean by that?
Mary Pipher: Well, for example most smart parents quickly learn not to give advice to their adult children unless asked. Adult children don’t want advice.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Like, parenting advice, like advice on romantic relationships, those kinds of things.
Mary Pipher: Right. Right. But it goes beyond that. I think being a therapist maybe helped me catch on to this, but most people when they’re sharing, I do a lot of and I think this is true of grandmothers not necessarily therapist grandmothers, but many grandmothers I do a lot of listening to people talk about their life circumstances. And especially when those life circumstances are difficult. For example, there was a young woman in our community, her brother was lost at sea and she was very close to this brother and not only did he never come home, but they have no idea where he was lost at sea. We weren’t really close, she knew me from the farmer’s market, but she came up and visited with me about that. And then she just asked, “Could I just come to your house and sit on your bench when I’m feeling sad?” And even if I wasn’t here, I think what she perceived about being here was it was a calm place. It was a place to feel relaxed, serene, unpressured. And I remember myself when I had bad insomnia, one of the ways I could always go to sleep was to remember my grandmother’s kitchen. And I could remember just shelf by shelf what was in that kitchen. And as I went through her kitchen, I would calm down and fall asleep. So I think that calming presence and generally both as a therapist and as a person, as an adult, when people talk to me about their troubles I don’t give advice, I ask questions or I’ll congratulate them on their strengths or I’ll express gratitude that they’re sharing with me, but I very rarely offer specific advice to people. One thing I think too about older women is often we’ve worked through our own stuff. We’ve gotten to a place of self acceptance, and that allows us to be accepting of other people. We’ve also reached a place of authenticity. And of course, this doesn’t apply to all women. And, you know, you can’t really say, for example, “I really like refugees.” What you really are saying is “I like most of the refugees I’ve met,” because all groups of people have some, we call them difficult cookies, DCs. But many women my age I think are self accepting, authentic, and just that feeling of I’m okay with myself, I can tell the truth about who I am, I don’t need to impress anyone, gives other people permission to be that way.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): The Margaret Mead. Postmenopausal, what was it PMZ?
Mary Pipher: Postmenopausal zest, PMZ.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Oh, PMZ. Okay. Postmenopausal zest. Is there a piece of this also? I mean, I guess we’re really talking about American women, where we eventually reach a state where our status or our identity or something is not wrapped up in the male gaze or in, especially I guess for heterosexual women, that you’ve moved beyond that.
Mary Pipher: You know, in Women Rowing North, I tell a story about the two different gyms I went to. And the first gym was down at the university where I was teaching. And I’d go swimming down there. And it was mostly younger women, grad students and students. And they were so stressed, so stressed about everything, but including their bodies. They’d get dressed in the locker room in a way that just really tried to hide their bodies. And if they spoke about their bodies, it was “my thighs are too fat” or, “I’m getting pudgy” or, it was always a negative comment about their bodies. So then I changed gyms and went to a gym that had a lot of older women and it was just such a contrast because the older women are walking around in their underwear or taking all their clothes off and talking on their cell phone and aren’t self conscious about that and making jokes about their bodies and making jokes about other things, laughing a lot. And it was really striking to me, how much happier women are in their sixties and seventies than they are in their twenties, for example.
And, I think part of it is once you’re sort of no longer deemed as attractive or the male gaze goes elsewhere, some women don’t like that they see it as a kind of invisibility that it’s demeaning. But I think many women are relieved, and there’s just so much freedom in not really needing to please with appearance.
Now, of course, there’s still women that dress up and wear makeup and worry about appearance, but I’m not one of them. And I’ve actually never been one of them. You know, I remember, I think I wrote about this in A Life of Light, but there was a period of time when these girdles were in, when I was in high school. And these girdles were like from just under your breasts down to your thighs, and they were this real thick plastic that just kind of encased your body. And so all my friends were getting girdles. So I decide, well, I’ll go buy a girdle. So I go to the department store in our little town and buy this girdle. Well, I didn’t buy it, I tried it on and it just made me miserable. It was tight, I couldn’t breathe very well, I didn’t like a lot of pressure on my abdomen. So I decided right then, I am never going to suffer to be beautiful. You know, I’m just never, ever going to do that.
And so I’ve been very lucky. I haven’t had a lot of the concerns many women have even when I was young, but I think by the time women are my age, many of them no longer have those concerns and it’s such a relief.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Mary, is there a way to accelerate to that freedom, or do you just have to go through every life stage and life phase and experience things?
Mary Pipher: Well, of course, people acquire skills and acquire more resilient attitudes and learn to modulate their emotions at different times in their lives. And there’s women that are 40 years old that have those skills. And again, there’s women that are 85 that don’t. So it’s not specifically age, it’s intention, it’s attitude. Attitude is almost everything. It’s not everything, but it’s almost everything. And just the ability to set, I know one of your questions sometimes is about rituals. And one of my rituals every morning is to set my intention to have a good day. And sometimes I’ll be more specific. I’ll set my intention to look for opportunities to laugh. Or I’ll set my intention to look for beauty. Or to look for loving kindness. And I believe that we find what we’re looking for. So that if one sets her intention to look for a certain thing, she’s likely to find it.
You know, the other two skills, I think, that most older women have are gratitude skills. There’s amazing calculus with old age where the more that is taken away from us. The more grateful we feel. And so, at some point, my women friends will just like almost cry at the beauty of a ladybug. I mean, it just doesn’t take much for us to feel grateful. And then the other thing is really cultivating reasonable expectations. The secret of happiness, reasonable expectations. And so, for example, I’ve got a lot of family coming in. This week, and we’re having, I think, three big dinners here at the house with large groups of people, and my expectation is at least one of those dinners probably won’t go all that well, and that there’ll be some confusion and some failed dishes on my part and so on, and it’ll still be fun. And so just being able to have reasonable expectations takes a lot of pressure out of a lifetime.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): What do you think as a grandmother, ’cause you are a grandmother.
Mary Pipher: Yeah.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): How many?
Mary Pipher: Five.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): So as a grandmother to five, what are some of the ways that you are really being intentional about passing down ideas? Or are you thinking about their moral education the way that your grandmother did? Are you focused on particular traditions or rituals?
Mary Pipher: Well, Plato said, “Education is teaching children to find pleasure in new things.” And I think that has been one of my north stars for grandchildren. The other one is protecting children from what’s harmful in the culture and connecting them to what’s good and beautiful. So, when I had grandchildren, I thought a lot about this. I think I was the first person with every single grandchild to carry them out to watch a sunrise. And I was very big on carrying grandchildren out to look at the stars. And I remember the first time I took my little grandson Otis outside, he was born in February and I took him out the first spring day when he was about two months old and put him on a blanket on the grass. And I just watched his face and how astonished he was at the trees and the sky and the wind.
It was just amazing. You could see his whole mind was just expanding. So I did a lot. I had nature walks every day with the grandchildren when they could learn to walk. And we’d take a little paper bag and pick up an interesting rock or we’d pick up a flower to go home and identify. And we’d always come back with a little bag of leaves and sticks and rocks and look those up and we had butterfly nets. And so I did a lot with the natural world. I did a lot with books. I love books. I wanted these children to love books. And then you might not be surprised here, but I’m a major storyteller. And that is probably where the moral edification came in.
And here’s one example of that. So I made up two families, the McGarrigles and the Lovelies. And the McGarrigles were just a totally disorganized, chaotic family where nobody acted right ever. And the Lovelies were like doing everything right. So before we would go places I would talk about how the McGarrigles behave and just make it hilarious. You know, like say they were going to the zoo the first thing they would do would be try to run into the lion’s cage and their mother and father would be drinking slurpees and not even notice it and they’d have to be rescued by a stranger. And then, on the other hand, when the lovelies went to the zoo, they held their parents hands and they asked politely for permission to buy an ice cream cone and they didn’t try to enter the cages of the animals. And they didn’t rush ahead of other children to get on the train and so on and so on.
But the other thing is in our family, I would say our biggest emphasis to children is on kindness and I think it is in many families, you know, I don’t think we’re unique in that but I think the way to teach kindness is by kindness and I think the children in our family all ended up being very kind.
I mean, they’re different people. One family is more well behaved than the other, for example, better manners and so on, but they’re all kind. They’re all kind people. So I’m very proud of that. That’s probably something my grandmother wanted to see.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): I ask this question a lot because I get different answers, but do you think when you had the first grandchild, that there was a shift in you? Did it indicate a rite of passage for you? A change in your status in some way?
Mary Pipher: Oh yeah. Well, I mean, the main thing was, I remember when my son and his wife told me they were going to have a baby and the way they told us was they gave us a little frame picture of my ultrasound. And I’d never seen an ultrasound. So I thought they gave us a picture of a little buffalo. And I said something like, “Well, this is a really cute little buffalo. Is this a symbol of something to you?” And my son goes, “Mom, it’s an ultrasound. We’re having a baby.” He was kind of amazed at my stupidity, I think. And I just burst into tears. You know, I just cried and cried and cried with joy. And the same when I saw my first granddaughter, Kate, I almost went into shock, I was so happy and it was such a remarkable moment in time that I couldn’t talk. I just could not move or talk for a little while.
I think this is very typical of grandparents. It totally rearranges the way you think about the world. And unfortunately my son’s children didn’t live in our state. So we’d go over there once a month, and driving home I would cry all the time. I just could not bear to leave those children. But now those children have left me. They’ve all graduated from high school and one of them’s graduated from college.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): And they’re all gathering this week? Or parts of them?
Mary Pipher: My daughter’s family’s coming to town.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Oh, good.
Mary Pipher: She lives in Canada.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Good. We do Camp Nana. My parents live far, far, far, but I try to get out there for a few weeks every summer so that, there’s some of that long term engaged, time period,
Mary Pipher: The thing that grandmothers tend to do, and grandfathers too, if they’re good grandparents, is give children time. There’s a saying, my parents always told me to hurry up, my grandparents always told me to slow down.
And that’s one thing, if we have grandchildren around, we can spend all the time they want playing Scrabble or telling stories or going to the swimming pool. We give them all of our time. We want to give them all of our time. And then the other thing is unconditional positive regard. Parents cannot do that because it’s their job to raise these children and to teach them manners and make sure they eat the right diet and go to bed at a certain time. But grandparents really have the great luxury of they’re in charge, they’re not responsible. They’re responsible for, in my opinion, creating a safe and loving space for children and a sense in a child that I am deeply loved. But that’s what they’re responsible for. And so it’s a wonderful job to have, the job of, teaching someone they deeply love.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Well, I’m going to ask one last question. Speaking of love, in your New York Times article you talk about leading with love, that being maybe one of the major reasons that we should be really encouraging the grandmothers. What do you mean by it? What does leading with love look like?
Mary Pipher: The great leaders in my opinion of the world are leaders who lead with love and we can go back to Gandhi. We can go to Joanna Macy, who is one of my favorite world leaders, environmentalist. She does the work of despair and empowerment. That’s just beautiful work and I’ve trained in doing that work. Or for example, Thich Nhat Hanh has been extraordinarily influential. And he’s led with love and I think almost all the successful social change movements in the world have come from leaders who led with love. And you could argue in a way that Zelensky is leading with love. He’s in the middle of a war right now, but his love for his people is fierce and it’s obvious he doesn’t want to be in it. He wants to be a peaceful leader. He just can’t help it. He was invaded. But, the leading with love in the rest of life is partly because you’re very useful and help other people by leading with love. But it’s mostly for me because, what I think is we receive from the world what we give to the world. So for people that are giving the world love and kindness. What we’re receiving from the world is love and kindness.
And I forget if it was in A Light in Life or Women Roaring North, but I wrote that at this point my life is very much a matter of giving and receiving thank you notes, figuratively and literally. And that’s such a wonderful way to be in the world. I’ve also been in this community a long time and in a community like this, as a leader, it’s easy to have people that disagree with a particular stance I might take or whatever. But I’ve always been very concerned that everybody I have contact with feels respected. And it’s made a tremendous difference. It’s allowed me to keep working. If you’re someone who leads with anger, or leads with satire or aggression you’re not a very effective person and you’re probably not a very happy person.
That’s another thing. One last thing about older women is generally we know how to modulate our emotions, and so life is less stressful because we’ve figured out what we need to know to not get worked up and to not be reactive. And just reaching the point in adult life where you’re no longer the skier behind the boat of your emotions, but you’re the person driving the boat and able to decide when to react with emotion, when not to react with emotion, it’s a great freedom.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yeah. Well, Mary, do you have any final things that you want to share before we close out today?
Mary Pipher: Well, just that I think you’re doing wonderful work. We’ve talked on the phone some about the work you do, and I wish you and the grandmothers collective and this podcast all the best of luck, Lynsey.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Oh, thank you so much. I’ve really had a great time chatting with you today.
Mary Pipher: Thank you.
