Last night when I stopped by G and McK’s to check in on their garden, I was greeted with McK’s proud announcement of focaccia making its way to culinary fulfillment, much the way I watched my grandmother baking bread broken alongside the same kind of wine and banter that accompanied the gift of food before us.

My grandmother’s hands always appeared as worn and supple as the bready legacies of her youth in Naples. She was a product of traditions from the century before the last, making her craft as relevant as any in this century. The kitchen was her domain of knowledge and social capital; her wealth was the same wealth we celebrate today. The subtle narratives of her bread are indistinguishable from those of breads from this kitchen where G and McK ply curious experiments no less worthy of hers. I am honored guest now, as much as I was then.

Ancient Egyptians considered joy a sacred responsibility.

They believed that when they die, the god Osiris would accept people into the afterlife on the basis of their responses to two questions: Did you bring joy? and Did you find joy?

Conversation today with my storytelling mentor and friend, Jim Kulma, who reflects on the role of listener as participant in the unfolding of stories. He’s looking forward to being storyteller in residence later this year. We were musing on how our culture has now confused strings of narrative fragments for a narrative aesthetic where stories have a felt sense of coherence.

He suggests that our greatest gift to others is to allow them to tell their stories without interruption, interpretation, criticism or advice.

Today was a faculty retreat for CRWU’s nursing school where we opened up with two conversations about gratitude and serendipity. People noticed the parallels … things we value that we can’t control. Things we have thanks to others.

These are the conversations that create the kind of receptivity that allows us to take in the abundance that is the nature of this universe. The power of these conversations is that they’re ones that people are unprepared for, that people can’t easily use as an opportunity to give away their power. They are rooted in two observations: we often get good things we don’t earn, and some of the best things in life happen unplanned. The message: be receptive.

It’s always interesting to meet people who read jack/zen. One of the things I’ve learned as a writer is that what people find amusing or useful is at least as much about them as about the piece. We love and hate what we love and hate, whether the author or artist intended either or neither. So much of reality is mirror.

Caring can be a noun and verb, an emotion and action. Nouns and verbs are qualitatively different phenomena; no amount of nouns can substitute for even one verb.

Working in Atlanta with southeastern leaders in sustainability, introducing them to the radical challenge of strengths based leadership. It’s interesting how embedded the problem perspective has been in the sustainability community. I started working in this space over 15 years ago in the early days of us-them advocacy that the current generation of new leaders was weaned on.

Those were the days when leadership was about overcoming the problems of the day showing up as violators of the environment. I remember vividly suggesting the heresies of partnerships and collaborations, which became code for “sleeping with the enemy.”

Thankfully, we’re in a new era where both-and is understood as a more intelligent and fertile ground than either-or. Where we’re entertaining the story that we may be able to do more together than we can apart or in opposition.

This is indeed the innovation challenge, to look at ways for profit organizations to realize profits in ways that engages rather than destroys the only earth we have.

It’s always interesting hearing airport announcements that we “report any unattended baggage.” A great life metaphor, that if we don’t pay attention to our emotional baggage, it can be hijacked by others lacking good intentions.

Today was a series of conversations with patient care teams as passionate as you can imagine about improving the patient’s experience in the hospital. These are the “A” players who made it obvious that investing in the strengths of A players yields more returns than those of the “C” players so many managers tend to over-focus on. It was yet another vivid reminder of the strengths-based mantra (heavily supported by the research) that more improvements and innovations happen when we invest in our areas of strength than in the areas of our weaknesses.

Hope lives alone at the edge of the village, quietly co-existing with good and evil. On its best days hope inspires its child perseverance; on its worst days hope excuses its child inaction. Hope is cordial in an arms length way with its neighbor fear. Hope’s secret is to one day become more like its neighbor, dreaming.