The story of kintsugi (golden repair)—this style of pottery—may be the most perfect embodiment of all our trauma-shattered lives… Instead of throwing away the broken beloved pottery, we’ll fix it in a way that doesn’t pretend it hasn’t been broken but honors the breaking—and more so, the surviving—by highlighting those repaired seams with gold lacquer. […]
I volunteer at the Asheville, NC, Habitat Restore. I was working the cash register recently, and a woman checking out remarked about my wedding band. She said, “That is an unusual design!” I told her I designed this and my wife’s wedding bands in lost wax 45 years ago. I learned lost wax jewelry design […]
The owner of Montford Deli, Asheville, NC, David Sweeting, apologized for comments about Anne Frank that generated controversy. “I want to apologize to the Asheville community… because of my stupidity.” Sweeting said that as a 9th-grade dropout, he had never heard the story of Anne Frank. After witnessing the hurt caused by his remarks, Sweeting […]
As I have written, I do not do New Year’s Resolutions. I focus on a word. The word seems to find me! Past words include carin, civility, and selfie. The word that has chosen me for 2025 is turbidity. “Turbidity is the cloudiness or haziness of a fluid caused by large numbers of individual particles that are generally invisible to the naked eye, […]
My leadership coaching sessions always involve conversations around spirituality and the soul. Some push back and say they don’t have a faith or religion. Others report they are members of a church. While religion can offer structure, the work on one’s soul is a connection to something bigger than oneself. In this work, one discovers […]
In my Teams Are Verbs© circle, trust is among the twelve essential verbs for creating a team and building a community. Everything begins with trust, including relationships, processes, operations, performance, and strategic plans. Trust has always been the opening conversation in any organizational development program or retreat I facilitate. Trust is my first conversation in […]
While I have plenty to be thankful for this season of gratitude, I am still dealing with the malaise of Hurricane Helene here in WNC and the election results. My prayer for this Thanksgiving: Holy Creator – Thank you for the opportunity to pause and reflect on all we are grateful for. As we gather in this […]
“The American electorate, knowing exactly who Trump is, chose him. This is, it turns out, who we are.” – Michelle Goldberg, author and columnist. There are good, compassionate, kind, and just people in the United States who are being dominated by a “This is who we are” minority who are anti-woke and anti-immigrant. They voted […]
When I became Venture Out Director at Camp Joy in 2000, a challenge was to build our adjunct pool to work with corporate clients such as Procter & Gamble, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Leadership Cincinnati, and many others. Adjuncts would come to Camp Joy on Saturday mornings to meet and learn how to facilitate and debrief […]
One of the tools I use with clients (and personally) is Joel Barker’s Implication Wheel. While the Implication Wheel does not predict the future, it can come close! We yearn to know the future (its estimated psychic services generated $2.3 billion in revenue in 2023!) In Heather Cox Richardson’s recent Letters From An American, many […]
