On September 11, 2001, thirty-eight commercial aircraft carrying nearly 7,000 passengers and crew suddenly descended into a tiny airport in Gander, Newfoundland.

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The town had fewer than 10,000 residents.

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No one had planned for this. No one had trained for it. Yet for the next four days, the people of Gander quietly demonstrated what a field of caring looks like.

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Following the terrorist attacks in the United States, American airspace closed, as did the airspace around major Canadian cities. As part of Canada's Operation Yellow Ribbon, international flights were diverted to smaller airports across the country, including Gander.

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The stranded passengers had no idea when—or even if—they would continue their journeys. (Flights finally departed on September 15.)

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The people of Gander responded with remarkable generosity. Schools closed. Churches, community centers, and private homes became makeshift dormitories. Volunteers prepared meals, collected clothing, organized transportation, and found ways to comfort complete strangers.

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Donations poured in from surrounding communities. According to Gander's mayor, the community center's ice rink became "the largest walk-in freezer in Canada."

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None of this was planned. It simply emerged from who the community already was.

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Come From Away

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Neither Roger James nor I knew this extraordinary story until we attended the marvelous musical Come From Away at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland last week.

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Director Laurie Woolery wrote in the Playbill:

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"These current times feel challenging on so many levels. And what makes it even more difficult is we are divided… This communal isolation is what keeps us from seeing our humanity in the people around us."

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The people of Gander saw something different. They saw human beings before they saw strangers.

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As one resident explained:

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"For us, it was just every day. You don't turn your backs on people in need."

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The residents never expected anything in return. Yet gratitude has a way of creating its own field.

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Passengers from one flight established a scholarship fund for Gander's students. Since 9/11, the fund has raised more than one million dollars and helped over 200 young people pursue higher education.

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Generosity rippled outward long after the airplanes had departed.

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Seeing the Humanity Around Us

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Why did this happen?

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Was it because Gander was a small rural community? Because it was Canada? Because it was nearly twenty-five years ago, when perhaps we seemed less divided than we do today?

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I don't know.

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What I do know is that one of the deepest reasons Alan Briskin and I wrote Space Is Not Empty was to help cultivate our capacity for field awareness—to become more aware of the invisible relational fields we continuously create and inhabit.

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Looking back, I can't help imagining the fields already alive in Gander before those planes ever landed: fields of trust, mutual responsibility, generosity, and belonging. Those qualities didn't suddenly appear that day. The crisis simply illuminated and amplified them.

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The passengers brought fear, uncertainty, and exhaustion. The residents met them with warmth, dignity, and care.

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Something larger emerged between them.

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Creating Caring Fields

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Stories like this are inspiring because they reveal what is possible. They are also challenging because genuine caring is far easier to admire than to practice.

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A caring field begins within us.

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It grows from self-compassion that naturally extends outward toward others. When caring arises primarily from obligation, duty, or guilt, it often carries an undercurrent of resentment. Genuine care feels different. It is freely offered—not because we expect something in return, but because another person's humanity matters.

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Ironically, this kind of caring often invites reciprocity. Not always. But often.

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Caring fields are one of the most powerful antidotes to the communal isolation and polarization that characterize so much of modern life. They create the conditions in which people can truly encounter one another.

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Carl Rogers expressed this beautifully in On Becoming a Person:

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"If you really understand another person in this way, if you are willing to enter his [or her] private world and see the way life appears to him [or her], without making evaluative judgments, you run the risk of being changed yourself....This risk of being changed is one of the most frightening prospects most of us can face."

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That, perhaps, is what caring fields invite every day—not simply to be kind, but to become more permeable to one another's humanity. To soften our certainty. To lessen our isolation. To allow ourselves to be changed by genuine encounter.

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The place to begin is surprisingly close.

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Notice the field you are creating with yourself.

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Is your inner conversation compassionate or relentlessly critical?

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The quality of our personal field shapes every relationship we enter.

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Then begin small.

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Offer your full presence to the cashier at the grocery store. Listen a little longer to a colleague. Be a little more patient with a family member. Notice what shifts—not only in them, but in you.

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You don't have to begin with the people who set your hair on fire. Sometimes the most caring field we can create with them is one of simple civility that causes the least possible harm.

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Every caring field begins somewhere.

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Perhaps it begins with us.

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