Courage | Curiosity | Creativity
Notes and Musings from Dr Judy Brown and guests writers circling the topics of leadership, stewardship, poetry, creativity, diversity, dialogue and appreciative inquiry and renewal.
The native woman
Spoke with tears of anguish
South of Leland, looking toward Whaleback
How the Westerners
Think you can own a place:
"How can you own
Something with spirit?"
She had asked us,
Brokenly. Then later
She had said, "The spirit
Of a place holds us,
We don't own it."
-Simple Gifts pg 52
Snow Days
There isn't anything
more full of life and joy
that one's own child
who doesn't have
to go to school
because of snow.
The snowstorms
are an unexpected gift,
a time to snuggle
in a chair before a fire,
a time to play and laugh
and soak the laziness
into our bones,
a time to be
exceedingly undone.
For grown-ups such free days
are rare. Our lives are focused by
the drumbeat of our work,
the cadence of impatient
fingers on a desk.
Perhaps my child's lesson
is the one I need to learn--
there isn't anything
more full of
joy and fun,
than one entire day
that's full of snow
and free of everything
I thought was life.
-From The Sea Accepts All Rivers and Simple Gifts
We just returned from a remarkable conversation, my White House Fellows classmates and I, with President and Mrs Carter. (This would qualify as not a typical Friday!) Somehow the last lines of this poem speak of how those two remarkable people, now in their 80's, have served the world since leaving office. And the words of the two fortune cookies in the poem also serve as encouragement to every one of us in our own life. To move forward with energy and hope.
Read MoreSo many of my friends are in the midst of one transition or another, and in many ways, so am I, as I muse on how to set a healthy pace for this time in my life. As I ask friends (and strangers) how they see “the third thirty years” of life, I find myself drawn to images of openings, and closings—the picture of this gate, on the nearby property of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center is a favorite such image.
Read More©Judy Sorum Brown 2012. Website designed by Lisa Brookfield
