Signs of a dangerously premature spring are everywhere! Daffodil yellow peeks through translucent green stem tips; fat oak buds swell; grainy elm seeds dangle in droops; lily blades slice through crimson, rose, and salmon-hued cyclamen.

And it’s only the first week of February! I worry about my precocious garden, even as I delight in its eagerness.

Down the hill, beneath the naked bois d’arc trees, I unlock the gate to the secrets of my private wildlife garden.

I see none of the wildlife I’ve earlier befriended scurrying beneath ground-clinging fog this morning. But, working my way through the underbrush, I know they are there. I hear their sporadic rustles and I see their burrows, their paths. Here, I see a decaying pineapple top, there a cleanly picked turkey breast bone—evidence that my nightly tossing of dinner leftovers into the wildlife garden has been well-received once again.

At path’s end the creek is low and flowing clear, the view intermittently marred by reminders of my thoughtless human brethren upstream: shredded plastic bags, newspaper, a rotting sneaker, all having snagged on low-hanging limbs from earlier flash floods. On another day I’ll perform one of my futile clean-up rituals.

On the chalk bluff overlooking the creek, I carefully unwind six strong honeysuckle tendrils attempting to overtake my youthful juniper—harming neither—as I have been doing regularly during the last three years of the juniper’s young life. Together, eventually, we’ll soar above the wild honeysuckle, whose energies I now direct to the underbrush, down the slope, and into the creek.

A sudden rustle upstream just beyond the bend breaks my concentration. Is someone exploring the creek so early this Monday morning?

No—it’s the wings of our resident blue heron, gracefully lifting himself above the bud-studded trees into the now cloudless sky. He glides west, beyond my range, then reappears in my narrow bluffview line-of-sight, coasting higher and northerly, disappearing beyond neighborhood chimneys. I await his southeasterly return. But, in his place, a lower-coursing herring gull appears, as if with the heron’s baton. The gull flaps briskly off to the east.

This surprise exchange startles me into an outer awareness of my pending work day as president of Richland College. It is now my turn with the baton, and I must head off north . . . to my family of teacher-learners and our sacred calling of teaching, learning, and community building.

I give thanks to my garden for launching my day from a place of inner peace.

I am blessed.

Throughout the rest of that busy, productive day, in and out of meetings, in and out of e-mail, returning calls, freeway-flying—I pondered how I might pass on that peace-induced baton to colleagues through my daily interactions with them, a baton connecting their busy daily agendas to some inner peace, as the heron-gull exchange had done for me.

Parker Palmer discusses the living paradox of action and contemplation in his work entitled The Active Life. He suggests that we might better speak of and strive for "contemplation-and-action"—a necessarily integrated concept rooted in "our ceaseless drive to be fully alive."

By 6:30 that evening, I had an idea. Hopping from one import and craft store to another, I purchased several brightly colored paper strips, three candle holders of varying heights and designs, a disposable candle lighter, and three white columnar candles in preparation for the next morning’s weekly President’s Cabinet meeting.

As the fourteen cabinet members began arriving that morning, they were greeted with a colorful, candle-lit centerpiece. The gathering was festive, as usual, with participants regaling one another with stories of the weekend. When it came time to convene, rather than plunging right into the pre-circulated agenda, I took time out to explain that the centerpiece—with the three candles representing mind, body, and spirit, connected by the colorful mobius strips, which move inalterably from their inner-side to their outer-side, just as we, at our most authentic, do as well—was designed to help us bring our fully focused, authentic selves to engage in the action items before us.

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