It doesn't have to be a choice between hooves and hoofprints

'tis a season of top-up-ness.  Driving home last night was driving into driving rain and rooster tails of splashing water thrown up by other cars. Driving in this morning was at least dry, but with low-lying swirling fog.  The sort of fog that's almost invisible to the eye in the dusk of early morning and which reveals itself only in the sense that more than morning dusk is keeping you from seeing all the way down the street and, of course, which dances and twirls when caught in the beam of headlights.

Cockburn's song Incandescent Blue, from the album Dancing in the Dragon's Jaws (1979), which popped up midway through this morning's random playlist, is a wonderful piece of poetry with powerful themes and imagery. Funnily enough, I was thinking about the last line of the first verse just yesterday:

I sneaked across the border -- it was threatening rain --

So I could stand in this tunnel, waiting for the roaring train

And watch those black kids working out kung fu moves

If you don't want to be the horses' hoofprints you got to be the hooves

My context for the quote was different than the one Cockburn so aptly describes.  As we grapple with wave after driving wave of increasingly worse budget news and resulting cuts in our state funding, we face correspondingly increasingly more difficult budget decisions.  These decisions impact the lives of our employees and our students, and can't be taken lightly.  When push comes to shove, I hope we will all be pulling together as we make these decisions, working with a common set of values (already articulated) and not degenerating into the panicked divisions of scarcity thinking. Scarcity thinking and the emotional (while understandable!) reactions that come with times like these can lead some to operate from a decidedly hoof-rather than-hoofprint perspective. Little that is positive or sustainable comes from that, and we need to be intentional and careful to ensure our processes and actions don't inspire this kind of counter-productive reaction in reasonable people.

People getting ready behind all those rectangles of light

"Put on your grin mask, babe, you know we're steppin out tonight"

You hear that sound, like hammers only small?

It's what the people's heads say when they beat them against the wall

Transparency and honesty combined with a truly participatory process is the best way to move forward as a cohesive organization. There are, however, always some who view any impact to themselves or their operational area as inherently unjust and unfair, regardless of the similar (or worse) impacts also being experienced across the institution. They lack a larger context through which to filter change; it is about them and it is both personal and intentional.  Fortunately, this is a minority.  Most folks roll up their sleeves and start pulling together when faced with the kinds of challenges we now face, and we will need every creative mind on our campus to come up with the best range of options and solutions now.

Concrete vortex sucks down the wind

It's howling like a blinded violin.

Oh -- tongues of fire, come and kiss my brow

if I ever needed you, well I need you now

Finding grace in the midst of such challenges is also important. Seeing the human stories and sacrifices, knowing the extra hands pulling with us on the rope, offering the hand up to our colleagues, and shouldering the heavy decisions as a community – these are the things we will hang our hopes on.  The good news in these difficult times for our college is that we have plenty of this kind of community to draw on, and it always surfaces when things get tough.  Our actions, therefore, need to be designed to draw out and on this most important resource and spirit.

In contrast to my pensive mood this morning, my iPod was alternating between pensive and unashamedly whimsical:

• A Fine Frenzy: You Picked Me
• Billy Bragg & Wilco: Ingrid Bergman
• Bruce Cockburn: Incandescent Blue
• Bela Fleck & the Flecktones: Flying Saucer Dudes