Sonomabuzz

(Written 08/29/2000 upon departing from Children’s Services to work for Family Law.)

One child. One Voice. One Adult
This Time together
The time we spend in each other’s lives is all the time we have.
What we bring is not what was. Nor is it what will be.
What we bring is what we have here and now.

We preserve in our minds and our souls what is life giving,
or what drains our spirit.
Our spirit however, controls how we retain, what we retain.
Can adults give this piece of spirit to a child?
If we did not believe we could, we would not be in this work together.

Children and their parents and families are powerful and dynamic.
Those who would assume they can enter in, as a positive force,
should be both aware and brave, and a little foolish.
How else could they proceed like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza
into all these windmills
inhabited by little people?

There are lessons too many to explore in all this we do together.
There are lessons we wish we could impart with ink and paper and formal formats.
There are still more lessons lost in our hearts.
Oh, how we wish our fervent words
would magically be understood by parents, and administrators.
Like the Don and his friend on the donkey, we trudge on.
Some of us even change horses.
Yet we find the same windmills!

Occasionally the winds of change blow through our view of the world.
It takes our worldly experience, and indomitable hope,
to recognize opportunities within the winds of change.
Don Quixote jousted with the winds of change.
He saw a windmill, but attacked a dragon.

Each of us sees all kinds of dragons. We joust at them.
We cry when we fall off our horse.
We rise up again to find more children to rescue from the jaws of the dragon.
Your Sancho Panza is sitting next to you.
Your Sancho Panza is standing before you.
I’ll be around to share in your jousts.
Riding a different horse.
Together we do change the world, one child at a time.
If you don’t believe that, ask your Sancho, who’s sitting next to you.