http://www.jackzen.com ...........................just noticing Fri, 09 May 2008 08:17:08 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.jackzen.com/2008/05/09/subtle-narratives/ 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? http://www.jackzen.com/2008/05/08/joy-3/ 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 ... http://www.jackzen.com/2008/05/07/our-greatest-gift/ 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 ... http://www.jackzen.com/2008/05/06/the-virtue-of-receptivity/ 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 ... http://www.jackzen.com/2008/05/05/reality-as-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. http://www.jackzen.com/2008/05/04/the-nounverb-to-care/ 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 ... http://www.jackzen.com/2008/05/03/the-new-era-of-both-and/ 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. http://www.jackzen.com/2008/05/02/baggage-management/ 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 ... http://www.jackzen.com/2008/05/01/wise-investments/ 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 ... http://www.jackzen.com/2008/04/30/hope-2/