ABSTRACT
Nature sometimes gives us powerful examples of how to live our lives as busy school principals. This happened a few years ago when my husband and I stood over a small stream at Lake Tahoe and watched the salmon return to their birthplace. It was not pleasant to watch. These once pale salmon were now bright red as they swam furiously, paddling, jumping, and pushing their way against the upstream current. They were using every ounce of their energy to return home where they would bury their eggs in the stream bed and then die. How depressing and sad, I thought at first. Then I had another visual image. In a few weeks, this very stream would burst with thousands of tiny salmon who would join the flowing stream and begin a new life downstream. Every adult salmon that had made that painful, energy-consuming swim upstream to deposit eggs had challenged the imagination and had, ultimately, provided a creative new life force. But it was not an easy task.
