The poet Galway Kinnell, a writer of exquisite and moving poetry, died this week.His poem 'St Francis and the Sow', which you can read in its entirety here, opens with these lines:
The budstands for all things,even those things that don't flower,for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;though sometimes it is necessaryto reteach a thing its loveliness,to put a hand on its browof the flowerand retell it in words and in touchit is lovelyuntil it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
This expresses so clearly a central responsibility of leaders (isn't that all of us?), parents, friends, coaches, consultants, doctors, nurses, teachers of all kinds - to act in a way that enables the people and systems in which we work to flower from within, of self-blessing.It is ridiculously easy to be cynical. Easy to create distance. Easy to forget the capacities that lie within us. And the easiest (and sometimes, in the moment, most self-satisfying) to pull people and projects apart with our knowing insight and sharp judgement, or with our world-weariness.And it's probably the hardest, and most necessary, to be someone who patiently, over time, brings about genuine flourishing by reminding us all of our most life-giving qualities - the ones we so easily forget - so they can be called into expression.
You may know the story of the 
The more I look, the more it seems to me that among the most personally damaging acts each of us can take is that of turning away from truth.I’m not talking grand universal truths here – the kind that people claim apply across time and space and across people. It’s quite easy to see that establishing truth in this way is fraught with difficulty.No, I’m talking about something more basic and immediate: what’s true about this moment, this experience, from the place in which you stand.If you pay attention, it’s not so difficult to tell when you’re turning away from truth in this way. The truth that you are sad, or joyful, or angry, or despondent, touched or numb, feeling whole or split apart. The truth that this is difficult or painful for you. Or the truth that this is bringing you to life.The truth that these thoughts you are thinking, whatever they are, are what you are thinking. The truth that what you’re feeling in your body is what you’re feeling. The truth that this place is where you are, and that what you are doing is what you are doing.When we deny these simple, basic truths to ourselves and others – when we speak of ourselves inwardly or publicly with deliberate inaccuracy – we assault our own integrity. And we cause ourselves tangible harm, in our minds and in our bodies, by putting ourselves at odds with ourselves, fuelling the inner battles that pull us apart.And then being whole again requires a kind of return, a turning back to the part of ourselves that understands how things really are. A turning back to something simple, and straightforward, the heart of which we’ve known all along.
I am on my way home from an evening of joyful, experimental playfulness. Ten people, mostly unknown to one another, gathered together by a friend and colleague for an evening of games inspired by the world of comedy improvisation.We've laughed, talked, experimented, and experienced some moments of surprising light and tenderness. And now, done, we head off into the damp London night.I'm struck by how little space genuine play has in many of our lives, and particularly how absent it is in most workplaces. Since the days of the industrial revolution we have largely thought of work as a place of utmost seriousness. We have play progressively schooled out of ourselves by an education system obsessed with predictability and measurement. We've relegated it to the margins, thought of it as a distraction, boxed it in to prescribed spaces and times - away days, workshops.Our most productive, inventive, connected and generative moments come when we abandon our pretensions and tendency to over-think and allow ourselves to be playfully drawn out of ourselves by situations and by others. Such play has enormous restorative power, bringing us back to the aliveness of our bodies and the richness of our interactions with others.It seems we'd rather ignore the signs of our own stiflement - boredom, tiredness, fogginess and stress - and plough on with our processes and structures even when they no longer serve us. Seriousness has become equated with professionalism, play with taking liberties.And, yes, play is the taking of liberties - a necessary act of freeing ourselves from our rigidity so that something surprising and fresh and alive can happen.
"It's different. It's not like it used to be."or"She's different. She's not like she used to be."Perhaps so.When you're so sure that the world, groups you're part of or people changed in ways you don't like (or find difficult to make sense of) it's tempting to want to fix them, to pus them back into a form that's familiar. This is the way of complaint, of resentment, of dissatisfaction, of judgement.And it locates all the responsibility far away from you.But maybe what's happened is you're not like you used to be.If you were prepared to entertain the possibility that you're the one who's different now - that you've developed or grown or shifted in some way, or maybe that you've momentarily lost touch with something that used to be important to you - what would it open up to you?Maybe a new kind of curiosity. Perhaps a new kind of acceptance. And maybe some new ways of engaging with what is rather than an outdated idea of what ought to be.
An early and necessary step in taking care of your own development is being able to say no to yourself, especially the part of you that acts unreflectively and habitually to soothe you, calm you, or keep things familiar.
Around some people 
It's a new moon tonight.Did you know?Did you notice?How much do you let the cycles of the natural world touch you, shape you?Is there a cycle to your months? Your years?Are you different in summer, autumn, winter?Is your work different?Do you do anything to respond to the changing energy of the seasons?Do you demand that you, and maybe those around you, act as if constant, uniform: dependably busy, dependably productive, dependably dependable?Or can you allow yourself the kindness - and the aliveness - to be someone with cycles and seasons of your own?
Trust is easy to misunderstand.The most common mistake is to say "I'll only trust when I know you're trustworthy". But this is trust without risk. Trust without putting yourself on the line. Trust as a demand. Trust without trust.Genuine trust does not come about this way. Instead, it's brought into being by your courage, openness, and willingness to risk that things won't work out the way you hoped. Genuine trust requires you to not know how things are going to go. It can never be a demand, but must be an invitation to act, and an invitation to keep talking when things don't work out as you'd hoped. More than anything else, genuine trust is an invitation into a relationship that you're committed to even when things go wrong.When you offer trust, but only on condition that nothing is placed at risk, can you say that you're really inviting trust at all?
One of the reasons that culture change is often so difficult is that we see it as a change of behaviour without understanding that it always involves the capacity to change our habits.