Poem for a Sunday Morning

The Facts of Life That you were born and you will die. That you will sometimes love enough and sometimes not. That you will lie if only to yourself. That you will get tired. That you will learn most from the situations you did not choose. That there will be some things that move you

Poem for a Sunday Morning

from “Vacillation” {W.B. Yeats} My fiftieth year had come and gone, I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my

#45 – Integrity

“The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more one fully enters into the communion of all creatures.” {Wendell Berry} When my daughter was in elementary school one of her classrooms had the following sign over the door: THE DOOR OF INTEGRITY: I am responsible for everything I think, say, do and

#44 – The Greater Good

“Social distancing” “Hunker down” “Self-isolate” “Flatten the curve” I did not plan to include “The Greater Good” on my list of “50 Ideas Worth Fighting For” but it’s never been made more real or more important to fight for it than right now. Yes, it’s possible that we are already too late, that a surge of

#43 – Compassion

Pandemic What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath— the most sacred of times? Cease from travel. Cease from buying and selling. Give up, just for now, on trying to make the world different than it is. Sing. Pray. Touch only those to whom you commit your life. Center down. And

#39 – The Real Conversation

Open. Authentic. Honest. Vulnerable. Expressive. Sometimes painful, always a catalyst for new learning. The real conversation is the one below the surface of the one that is familiar and comfortable. It is the one hinted at but only entered into when two people agree to ask the un-askable questions give the un-giveable answers. I am

#37 – Eat What You Want (It’s your birthday)

Years ago when I was downplaying another birthday as “just another day” and “not a big deal,” a friend suggested otherwise. She said that the day of our birth is inherently important because it is the day we started being us. It matters that we are here and because that wasn’t always so – and

#29 – Little Things Are Big Things

Mossbawn: Sunlight {Seamus Heaney} There was a sunlit absence. The helmeted pump in the yard heated its iron, water honeyed in the slung bucket and the sun stood like a griddle cooling against the wall of each long afternoon. So, her hands scuffled over the bakeboard, the reddening stove sent its plaque of heat against

#24 – Empathy

This is #24 in the series, “50 Ideas Worth Fighting For.” Here’s another one you might like. “So compelling is the evidence of our own eyes and ears, so swift is your mind to assemble your own version of the story, that one of the hardest things in this world is to understand there’s another

#18 – Build Capability Before You Need It

This is #18 in the series, “50 Ideas Worth Fighting For.” Here’s another one that I like a lot. Since we know that nothing lasts forever, a healthy, necessary and realistic point of view for leaders to take is that whatever is working right now will not necessarily work next year. Rationally, we understand that.