Thursday, November 18, 2010

Update

November 18, 2010

Since I last posted to the blog, I've accepted a role as a blogger on Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com) and a position as Executive Director of Soulforce (www.soulforce.org). It is interesting to reflect on both in terms of my blogging on this site---I find it much more palatable to blog in behalf of the issues confronting our community in those venues than blogging about my life in general. I have never been particularly faithful to journaling, so perhaps personal blogging is similar. Maybe, if I am truthful, I feel vulnerable as a person who is "out there" when I share too much about my daily life or family.

I have a mantra when I feel afraid about anything (ranging from rattlesnakes in our garage to death threats on our phone). It is simple and it helps me. Faith.Faith.Trust.Trust. Repeat until real. I will go to sleep speaking it tonight.

The work at SoulForce has been very intense and great. I love working with the Equality Riders and our Board has been very supportive.

Sue is well, enjoying her work at the Center, taking good care of her mom (and of me!). Joshua and Hannah are amazing and wonderful and teaching me new things every day. I am blessed to be their mother. Joshua and I were able to do a "joint blog" on Huffington last week about our family and that was really fun and felt great to do. I hope we get to do more. He is a fabulous writer. I like to "tee up" an idea and see him run with it.

I also read something this week that I love. The engineer Buckminster Fuller is often cited for his use of trim tabs as metaphor for leadership and personal empowerment. I love nautical language so this appeals to me. In the February 1972 issue of Playboy, he said, "Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary--the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called the trim tab. It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it is going right by you, that it's left to you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole ship of state is going to go."

Fabulous!


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