Hi there and welcome to the new studio setup of the next chapter with Charlie.
Today will be the very first official show with our new platform of audio and video.
The first episode of 2025 will be published on YouTube as well as your favorite podcast location.
Now I thought that a great way to begin our first show of the year is to enjoy a conversation with our dear friend
Terry Hershey.
Terry is the author of 17 books, hugely popular public speaker, landscape architect, and spiritual guide.
And by the way, Terry and I have been friends for almost 40 years.
I'd like to say neither one of us look like it, but that's not the truth now that we're on video.
So let's see what Hershey has to say for our...
as this show comes on the second day of the new year.
Yo, Hirsch!
Charles, so we're on video now, yes?
Wow.
Do I need makeup?
How does this work?
If anybody needs makeup, look at the top of my head.
You can see the top of my head needs makeup.
years so we became friends in Southern California in 19...
No, no,
No, no, no, I was still in seminary.
Pam and I didn't get married until 1985.
Yeah.
I was already done with what I was.
Yeah, this is gonna be, this would be, let's just do a show of everything in Charlie and Terry's relationship starting 40 years ago.
That would be good.
You know what's good though?
His is important for people to know with a friendship.
Cause I don't remember what year it was, or we did it for like three years in a row where we decided not to do, we did phone stuff, but we decided to write letters.
Remember?
Yeah, it was after you moved to Seattle.
Yeah.
Real letters and put them in the mail snail mail.
Yeah.
That was great.
Three years.
Yeah.
I did.
I kept them all.
Yeah.
not allowed to publish.
I said, until I die, or we'll say this, until I die or reach 80.
Well, you know what, it's an amazing thing now when I reread letters that I write, how different we communicate than when we're just doing this, typing on a machine to do an
email.
Really?
Yeah, yes.
Hands down.
So, but if I were to type into a Word document and then send that, it's in the Word document as an email, it would be like the letter, correct?
Similar, it depends on whether you're doing it as a writer or...
Because when you're doing it as email, we cut a lot of corners because we're trying to pare it all down and get it out.
I see.
Yeah, we don't make space in an email for...
Yeah.
But you know what's so cool about the letter writing?
It's, it, remember the frog and turtle?
Tell the frog and turtle story about the, about the letter.
Do you remember that story?
Yeah, frog and toad, frog and turtle, frog and toad.
Yeah, toad was sitting on the front porch and frog came along and said, what's the matter toad, you're looking sad.
And he said, yes, my sad time of day.
He said, why is that?
He said, because I was waiting for the mail to come and I never get any mail.
And frog said, never?
No, never, never.
No one has ever sent me a letter.
So Frog and Toad sat on the front porch and they felt sad together.
I love that part about the story.
They felt sad together.
Then Frog said, I got to go home now, Toad.
There's something I must do.
So he hurried home and he found a pencil and a piece of paper and he wrote on the paper.
put the paper in envelope and he put a letter for Toad.
And so then he ran out of his house.
He saw a snail that he knew.
And he said, he said to the snail,
Take this litter to Toad's house and put it in his mailbox.
Sure, said the snail, right away.
So then Frog ran back to Toad's house and now Toad was in bed taking a nap.
And Frog said, hey Toad, you gotta get up and wait for the mail.
No, said Toad.
I'm tired of waiting for the mail.
Frog looked out the window at Toad's mailbox and the snail wasn't there yet.
So he said, no Toad, this might be the day.
And Toad said, no, I don't think it'll ever be the day.
Toad.
Frog looked out the window, the snail was not there yet.
Frog said, Toad, please try, maybe this is the day.
Toad said, no one has ever sent me a letter before.
No one will send me letter today.
And Frog looked out the window and the snail was not there yet.
And Toad said, why do you keep looking out the window, Frog?
Frog said, because now I am waiting for the mail.
Frog said, why are you looking out the window?
Frog said, because now I'm waiting for the mail.
And Toad said, why?
said, Toad, because Frog said, because I have sent you a letter.
You have said, Toad?
What did you write in that letter?
Frog said, I wrote, dear Toad, I'm glad you're my best friend, your best friend Frog.
said Toad, that makes a very good letter.
So then Frog and Toad went out to the front porch to wait for the mail together.
And they waited a long time because four days later the snail got to Tosa.
That is a great story.
that is the beauty, is that not the beauty of letter writing?
Is the anticipation of the letter.
I love stories, because you know I love, I read memoirs of historical people, and I love the memoirs of people who have been letter exchangers.
They lived in different parts, typically of Europe, of the ones I read, but they lived in different places, and they wrote letters for years, sometimes decades.
And so these are the books of the letters they have written to each other.
That's incredible.
the memoirs that you're looking at?
Yeah.
So I just had a really interesting thing happen and that my notes expanded to take up my entire screen so I no longer can see you or anything.
Right.
Okay, I'm here.
can.
Now I just manipulated it with that.
So, you wrote a Sabbath moment today, which you do every Monday is your grand Sabbath moment.
And then you write weekly follow-ups or daily follow-ups Tuesday through Friday.
And I encourage everybody, be a link on the site and include on the show notes and check out Terry's Sabbath moment.
Now today you wrote about Jimmy Carter.
Tell me about that.
Well, was, I don't, I write Sabbath Moment, the blog I write, I literally write it the day I post it at night for the next morning, but I literally write it that day.
In other words, I don't write it ahead of time.
I write it that day.
Remember Charles Schultz, the guy that did Peanuts?
And, cause he did a comic every day.
He did the big Sunday one, Then he did it every day.
Someone said to him, why do you...
do that every day.
don't you just take one day and do like 30 of them and then you could take a month off.
You
He said, why don't you just tell Rembrandt to knock out all of his paintings and then he doesn't have to work again.
Yeah.
In other words, the art, doing the art part is really, I'm at home there in the writing.
So long story short, so I was writing my Sabbath moment about end of the year.
And as I was writing the end of the year thing, there was a news thing that popped up on my phone, and it was that Jimmy Carter had died.
And I...
had written about, the last time I had written was about Roslyn Carter.
Because Jimmy and Roslyn, when Roslyn died two years ago or whatever it was, Jimmy and Roslyn were married for 77 years.
77 years.
Think about that.
Exactly, think about it.
Think about it.
If you've been married to somebody for 50 years and you say to them, we still have 27 more years to go.
To catch Jimmy and Roslyn.
Yeah, exactly.
We have 20, happy 50th, honey.
We have 27 more, my Lord.
But.
you learn?
What did you learn in Jimmy Carter's story?
Well, did my favorite, now I have to look it up to see what it is, but my favorite Carter quote was, he said, have one life and one chance to make it count for something.
I'm free to choose what that something is and the something I've chosen is my faith.
Now my faith goes beyond theology and religion, you and I would agree with that, and requires considerable work and effort.
We would agree with that.
My faith demands, this is not optional, my faith demands that whatever I do, whatever I can do and wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can, with whatever I have, to
try to make a difference.
And I loved that grounding.
I loved the way he grounded himself there.
And so I wrote about the fact that the little gestures of goodness and kindness make a difference in our world.
So you know, as I was thinking about your quote, I was thinking on make a difference, somehow make a difference.
There's something about that phrase.
I've used that phrase a lot.
I so agree with Jimmy Carter.
I mean, I so agree with the concept of it.
But making a difference feels to me almost comparative.
You know, and I don't want it to be, I don't want that I made a difference, their life has changed because of me or they, you know, I don't know that that's exactly what Jimmy
Carter, their life may be better because of something I did, but I like the idea of with make a difference, let's just say, I think it's good to include making an impact.
That's a language, I know it may sound like totally synonymous, but there's something about making an impact that rings really true with me.
And that is.
Making a difference feels big, making an impact feels incremental, feels small.
You were talking about, you wrote about gentleness, gentleness, I mean it's kindness and gentle acts of goodness as you were listening.
And I think for me, kindness is the noun that changes everything.
That is, that for me, if I had a noun that I wanted to be known by, which, you know, I don't know that I live up to that, but kindness is a big word for
Yeah, I forget who made the quote about it.
He used to believe in people who were amazing in terms of how they did performance.
He said, now that I've grown older, I'm in awe of kind people, or kind act, kindness.
in other words, basically it's, I mean, whether you want to use impact or difference, it's just about our measuring, how we measure.
and what's the measuring tool we use.
Or actually it's not just the measuring tool.
I took my glasses off, but now I realize it's my glasses.
It's the paradigm.
What paradigm do we use to go through our day?
And it's, I mean, the little differences are a powerful thing.
mean...
Just when you open a door for someone who needed the door open for them going into the post office, because they were carrying stuff, and they actually stop and say, thank you.
In other words, they didn't expect.
Yeah, I had experience with that this week, this past week, because Pam and I were on retreat.
We were at Christmas in Phoenix.
We were out of town.
We were with our son.
And we had an opportunity.
Then we stayed at a resort called The Omni.
And it's really nice.
It's older.
It's not brand new.
It's older, and it has class, and just sort of fine Mexican architecture.
And it was just wonderful.
And the times I had an opportunity to say thank you, I am learning to pause when I say thank you and to look someone in the eye, just briefly, not stare them down, but look them
in the eye and say thank you.
And you just see this smile, ear to ear smile, like they've never been told thank you in the past.
Well, it's the thing about, mean, because my Sabbath moment is about the permission to be here now.
I mean, that's really what it's about to be here now.
And just those moments are really that.
I mean, you pause and you, in other words, I see, because anytime, anytime someone, when someone sees you, it makes a difference in your life.
He sees me.
Yeah.
Right.
He notices.
He pays attention.
In other words,
he honors that i am present she he she and the point is it's it's a different world we're not walking by the moment that is the most
Oh, that's a great saying, Terry.
Write that down.
That's a blog.
What did you say?
You don't.
We're not walking by the moment.
we're walking in the moment.
Yeah, I love that.
That is so true because I was gonna say part of this whole package has to do with what we're talking about.
has to do with being, when you're walking in the now, you have to be present in the now.
That means, you know, in the distractions that hit us, we are just bombarded with distractions.
Well, yeah, and we allow ourselves to be bombarded by it because the culture we live in is that the gift of enough, is the other phrase I use about being in the not.
The gift of enough, yeah.
Oh, I'm glad you mentioned that, Charlie.
And that book is available.
But the gift of enough is...
In the culture we live in, the paradigm we use is that more is never enough.
That's the culture, our paradigm.
More is never enough.
I need one more, one more, one more.
And so that means I'm always moving past the moment to whatever's next.
So it has to be, so everything is faster.
I mean, even, even we have, even we have the capacity.
And so even the permission to pause, for example, this device right here,
Because even if we have to wait for two seconds for something, it drives us nuts.
We don't have the capacity to pause even for two seconds.
We're like.
And we do that with so many areas.
You know, I think distraction.
I have even, I'm going to go theological on this right now, but I have even defined the word sin.
And sin for me is anything that, sin is anything that distracts us from the love of God.
Sin is a distraction.
our acts, they distract us from the love of God and the love of God is what motivates us, what moves us, what inspires us and what we feel when we feel that whether we believe in
God or not, it's not even that, that's not even, but you feel this love from somewhere, you feel this goodness, this happiness, this joy.
And I think the distractions are just so freaking distracting.
So if you want to get theological, so here's my theological thing, is that when you go, if you read through the New Testament, there's only one sermon that Jesus preached really.
All those are stories.
But every encounter that Jesus has, the first thing Jesus does is he pays attention, in other words, look at a certain tree or a certain fruit or a certain bird.
In other words, everything is like time out, pause, be here.
In other words, whatever the distractions are have gone away.
Look at this.
In other words, he brings their attention to right here.
and that's the power of the parable, is that be here now.
Yeah, and the message is about the hereness of a tree.
yes, but one of the distractions for the disciples is when Jesus is just having them notice the tree, is they want to get the moral of the story.
In other words, wait a minute, what's this about?
In other words, we have to move on from this.
We have to go somewhere with this.
And he's like, just hang with me for a minute, will you?
I think that's a literal biblical phrase.
Just hang with me for a minute, will you?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's a wonderful idea.
You know what I want to do is let's, I want to take a look at 2025 options.
What might be good for you in 2025?
What might be good for you to do in 2025?
And we both have the same feeling about New Year's resolutions.
I don't want to call them New Year's resolutions, maybe New Year's influences.
Things that I'm influencing, this is a good time of year.
This is a very convenient time of year, end of one year, beginning of another to say, oh, here are some things I might like to do differently or might like to continue doing.
But you gave me a phrase that I really think is good to think about, and that's...
Let's talk about in 2025, Terry, what are things you said, let's talk about things you honor.
I like that.
What are the what are the things you honor?
And one of the first things that comes to that is honoring the present moment, honoring yourself enough to be to be to saturate yourself in this present moment.
And what's going on like right now would be very easy for me to be distracted, you know, with a
First time doing the show, cameras rolling, I'm looking at notes and I've got to lose all of that and just fall into this moment with my friend and...
So two things, one is, because the word honor literally means, the literal translation of honor is, it means to make space.
You make space for something.
When you honor something, you make space for it.
I like that.
In other words, it's not just a cognitive thing.
That's why I like it.
In other words, it's not like, okay, I honor you.
No, I literally have made space for you.
So that's honoring, and so whatever the moment is.
And here's a...
a paradigm for you and then I'll answer your question if I can.
Michael Jordan, who wasn't bad in his craft, right?
You ready for this?
When he was asked about game winning shots he had, and by the way, he missed more game winning shots that he made.
know, but when he was asked about them, he said, and I loved this,
He said, even though it's just everything is so, speaking of distracting, you could be easily distracted, right?
And then you'd get the ball stolen away, et cetera.
He said, whenever I would go up for that shot, he said, time always froze.
Time stopped.
In other words, everything was slow motion.
What I loved about that is he honored that moment in himself.
In other words, wasn't about, am I gonna make it or miss it?
Are we gonna win or lose?
I loved that about that.
In other words, for them it was just, he was in the shot and he said everything froze and I was, in other words, he didn't use the word content, but it was like, I was in it.
In other words, he was fully alive in that.
I loved that.
For that moment.
that moment.
then the clutter and the chaos and the distractions and all of that happened.
then it's almost like he sets up, he sets himself up for that moment.
He knows that moment is gonna come.
And then when that moment actually appears.
so this is to your point is we say we want to honor certain things, say in the coming year, say whatever it is, say today, say later.
And so my question is do we set ourselves up for that or not?
It's my gardening thing too.
I say I want to grow so many things, but do I put the right kind of dirt there or not?
And the dirt is everything.
and so do I set myself up for those things.
I mean, it was that, as you know, I did something recently in 2024 that I had never done before that I'd always said I was gonna do.
I wanted to walk the Camino de Santiago, which is, I wanted to walk the French Way, which is across all, from France all the way across Northern Spain, made famous by the movie The
Way, even though the first people who walked it were.
couple thousand years ago, not quite, but pretty near, pretty near.
Anyway, I walked the Portuguese Camino from Porto up to the Camino.
I took one of the quicker, there's actually a quicker one.
There's a quicker one from France straight down.
That's real short, that's only four or five days.
There's about nine versions of it.
But I had said I was, it's one of those things, but we do that a lot.
I think I would like to or I'm going to, it's then someday, someday.
And so I finally walked, and the Camino.
And the most grateful part about that is,
It was nothing really like I expected because I didn't really have any expectations.
I didn't have any.
And it gave me the permission to start asking what kind of things do I want to honor in my life and world now, both in terms of the context of me and my growth and life and
relationships and work and all of that stuff.
And the gift of just making that try, that attempt, was the gift.
I tried it.
See, the thing is, is you did it, Hirsch.
You know, and...
But there are people even who started, tried, and to that point, there are people who, a lot of people who read because I was writing while I was walking it, would never be able
to technically walk it, just physically, then it's not possible, but they can still walk it virtually.
In other words, there's still things we can do with that.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a, you know, I was in sort of line with deciding to do something.
Timons, you know, the guy that I worked with when I was in ministry, the senior minister, used to tell a story.
Seven birds sitting on a high wire.
Five of them decided to fly away.
How many are left?
So, you you think two.
He says, no, there's seven left.
They decided they didn't do it.
They didn't.
And I was talking, I was at a...
a playoff game that my son was in.
think it might have been against the Yankees.
And sitting behind me were two women who were the softball coach for a softball, a guardians professional baseball has a volunteer softball team that they sponsor.
And these two young women were the coaches of that.
I'm telling you, I've never sat with anybody as knowledgeable of baseball as these two women.
They, I mean, they were just, you know, we could talk levels of baseball that people don't normally talk.
And, and so, you know, we, we started a, you know, kind of a little friendship, a little talking thing.
And, and one of the women said, we were talking about vacations, woman that's one of the, one of the women said, you know, I'm going to have to find the time.
to take a vacation because I never take a vacation.
And my comment to her was, can I give you another verb?
And she said, what?
And I said, another verb, but you know, not find the time.
It's just you make the time.
You decide to do it and you make the time.
It is, something we'll talk about today or in a little bit because we're getting close, is choice.
And I'll say to this too, and I'll add one more element of that too, is that I would have said to her, are you working right now?
And she would have said no.
I said, so this is kind of a vacation, yes?
I mean, how many of these kind of games do you get to go to?
And she would have answered, probably not a lot, right?
In other words, but I'm saying, honor this, this is a one game vacation.
In other words, begin to name the places we've already given ourselves the permission to make those choices.
You made this happen, I would say to her.
And now you're giving yourself grief because you didn't make a longer one happen.
And it is a decision, it is a choice.
You know, we're getting near the end of the show here.
And you know what I'd like to do is I would like to reveal, let's open ourselves up and let's reveal what would be, and it could be something you were already doing or something
new you want to do, but what one thing
not the top thing, but one of the several things you want to honor in 2025.
What would those be?
Or what would that be?
What I want to honor is that when I'm talking to my friend Charlie is I want him to go first whenever we have a conversation about this kind of thing.
what we're going to do is that the next time we talk, I'm going to let you host your show.
And then you can make me go first.
yeah, that reminds me back in the day.
I'm gonna...
I'm gonna honor treating more times of what I do as pilgrimages.
Because what I did was a pilgrimage.
And it made a difference in the way I walk through that time.
And so if I see a framework of whatever I'm about to do, I've already started to do that in little bits of 2025, I see it as a pilgrimage.
and it makes a difference in the way I...
In other words, I don't have to get to the end quite yet.
I like the pilgrimage part.
Also, you're taking the Journey motif very seriously.
extremely seriously.
And it's all part of the process.
It's the daily, everything we've been talking about.
It's the daily accepting the day, treasuring the day, enjoying the day, and knowing that that is going to be a part of who Terry is tomorrow.
And then if I do that, if I honor that more, which is back to the word honor, then it comes out in my writing, it comes out in what I do, and it comes out just naturally in
what I do.
In other words, it's not because I had the topic to write about it, it's just simply it's a reflection of what's going on there.
And so I've...
That's a new element for me, is the pilgrimage aspect of it, the gratitude for that.
Because there's always been, and part of my psyche going back to when I was young, is that I had to have all the T's crossed and all the I's dotted.
Yeah, no.
And in fact...
Where are they?
Where are the teased across or where are the eyes to dot?
plus they're unbelievably attractive to see uncrossed and undotted.
That would be fun.
That would be fun to write a paragraph that way.
Yeah?
Or, using your, when you're doing your painting thing, you start with painting that way too.
You don't know what the T's are gonna be crossed when you start.
painting, had no idea.
I had no idea.
It was a gut feel and they were all portraits of my soul because they would just be contemporary, just movements of color.
They would be portraits of my soul.
Yeah.
Well, I love that.
I love that.
I want to take that too.
Because I feel like that is much the way I've been living.
But I think this is just the idea of a pilgrimage.
It takes it a step further.
I think I want to steal your idea.
And it makes me think of...
How do I say this briefly about it?
It's an acceptance of myself, an acceptance of my situation, wherever I am in life and what I'm doing.
It's totally accepting that.
I have, I've told the story I think on the show, so I don't have to belabor it, but I had an interview with a best-selling author and his name was Andrew Miller.
Andrew talked about acceptance.
Acceptance that what I had done, what happened to me as a child in being abandoned and neglected and rejected and some pretty, it was pretty serious stuff.
That wasn't something that was done to Charlie.
That was something that made Charlie who he is today.
That abandonment and that rejection.
made me want to be a kind person, made me want to be an accepting person, made me want to show the stranger care and love.
And in doing that, if I think that life is a pilgrimage and that if indeed I am that person I was then, I will become this person that you're talking about now.
I will become this pilgrimage person.
of living life, considering life at the moment and that's really all that exists.
and the phrase that you and I have talked about before, because only then are you comfortable in your own skin.
Ha!
How true, how true, I love that.
Well, thanks, Hirsch.
Thanks for the first show.
yeah, I'm glad you're, I'm glad you finally are of the age where you can kick into video now.
Yeah, yeah, it took a few years.
think seven years.
This is show number 347.
Can you believe that?
And you can believe, you remember how it started?
Started with you and me doing nine, I think nine, 15 shows maybe.
Do you remember the name of the show?
It came from one of your sayings.
The permission to be you.
Seriously, that was the name of our show?
That was the name of our show that we did together.
Wow.
I think there's some in the archives somewhere.
So Hirsch, thanks buddy.
It's always such a delight being with you.
Well, keep it up, buddy.
Okay man.
I also want to thank everybody for tuning into the next chapter with Charlie and until next, this is Charlie Hedges signing off.
Bye for now.