You may have noticed that I have not written a blog post in almost a year. This past 14 months has been filled with family needs, and...

“Two questions have been with me most of my life: How do people change? How do systems change.” These words open the introduction of...

These last couple of months have been overwhelming, on so many levels. For me that overwhelm has included the death of my father (and all...

I am a super competent person. Or at least, I am super attached to my sense of myself as a super competent person. I have always known I...

My last two weeks of December have been… not at all what I expected. My elderly parents came down with COVID right before Christmas, and...

This is the Winter Solstice – the longest night of the year. For me, it’s a time for reflection, for sitting with and in the darkness, in...

Over the last few weeks, as the days have gotten shorter and shorter and shorter, with darkness arriving by 4:30 now here at 45.5152° N,...

I’ve been helping groups build their capacity for participatory decision-making for decades now. When I started that work, and, indeed,...

In my last blog post, I wrote about softening into change. For me, stillness is often a pathway to softening. Creating a pause can create...

I wrote this poem in November of 2003, in Syracuse NY, where I was teaching at a national conference. It was a time in my life when I...

My parents are in their late 80s, and my mother is descending into dementia. It’s been a slow fall, over more than a decade now, but it’s...

My partner and I were talking, years ago, with my brother, his wife, and their then almost 6-year-old son. The four of us adults were...

When we are navigating difficult and demanding situations (making tough decisions, managing big transitions, etc.), it is helpful to...

Image of leaf-covered tree branches reaching down toward a pool of blue water, the shadow of the branches visible in the water. A sliver...

In this recent post, I talked about shifting from the “Am I (doing/being) enough?” framework to a framework of “Is what I’m doing...

Why do we resist things we know would be good for us? We all have things that we know we want to be doing – or want to have done and...