Maya KNOWS what love has to do with it. And Sophie B. Hawkins sang that “only love can make a miracle of life.” Excuse my corny self. Excuse me, but I want miracles in our schools, and social service agencies. I want patients in hospitals to have their healing sped up and their hope restored by the enormous kindness they receive with their medical services. I want our parents, teachers, counselors and police to be so respectful, so warm and wise, that our young people are not getting pumped into a 100 billion dollar prison system!!! I want a generation of progressive politicians that are not intimidated by scared and angry conservatives that think money will solve all of their problems–progressive politicians that can move forward their vision of a great, loving and fair society in the face of the harshest attacks–and find true rapport, common ground and common goals with their now hopeful former attackers.

Keeping our hearts that open in our work requires a basic change in how we think about ourselves. We have to equate the beauty of our best dreams with the quality of the support, training and inspiration that we receive.

For example: a teacher’s vision of the life-changing things that could happen in her classroom moves her to regularly travel to trainings by the most inspired educators she can find, moves her to read biographies about the leaders whose successes she finds most uplifting, moves her to play the most powerful music she knows in her car, earpiece and classroom every day.

A triathlete will consume four thousand calories per day to keep up with the demands of their sport. A caring police officer surrounded by cynical co-workers, a counselor of battered children, an inner city principal: all need their four thousand calories of uplift, of loyalty, of love, of awareness of the sacred in the world, of histories of struggle and triumph.