Jimmy Alden called to say Rosalind had fallen and would need support at home. My stomach dropped, because I already knew what I had to tell him.

One season we had more clients than caregivers. The next, more caregivers than work. The wind has steadied, and that changes what we can build.

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence sent me back to Sunday mornings with Martha, in a cloud of her Shalimar.

In Paris, asked how we use AI, I started with the New Deal and who was deliberately left out of it.

Harvard and Tulane came to Santa Fe, and we started with a 90 minute empathy clarity workshop. Five working caregivers ran the room.

“Even Tammie was on her phone.” Twenty hours of training, and Nina was telling me the problem was not motivation.

A physician asked me twice and would not take my answer. Here is the real one.

Caregivers were coordinating coverage beautifully and nobody had opened the AI tool. Not once. The constraint was friction.

Gerhard Maschkowski was 97, a Holocaust survivor, and the most directive person any of us had ever supported. He co-created his own care.

Caregivers took over their own coverage and it worked immediately, in WhatsApp. The AI assistant sat unopened. We are not accelerating.

Every night that summer I turned the stone hearth oven to 500 degrees and filled the kettle. The oven only worked if you knew it.

Jack Dorsey cut more than 4,000 jobs at Block, and his reasoning was sound for a company built on efficiency. We are built on something else.

We are moving the whole organization to collaborative scheduling. That decision is not the experiment. It is the starting point.

I thought an organization without hierarchy needed a new kind of manager. We grew by removing what was not necessary instead.

Randy Lopez and Porfirio Lovato light the Plaza every Christmas. The first story they told me was about their old supervisor, the Wizard of Oz.

“If a foundation wanted to support you, what would you do with the money?” I paused. What I said next came out of years of lining structure up with values.

I threw a cocktail party and dragged my friends to experimental theater. Halfway through Hamlet, the container the ensemble had built melted my stiffness.

Sha’Tara Robinson got us licensed in Texas, built the relationships, trained wonderful caregivers. We got no business. Here is how we ended it.

“The why is getting lost,” Andrea Pacheco said, and she was completely right. Four years of frameworks, and the magic is in the people who embody the practice.

Answering phones, processing invoices, designing marketing materials. Regular workplace tasks, and everyone doing them has feelings at work.