Community has been on my mind and heart this month. I've had amazing reminders of the beauty of authentic community alongside devastating examples of how fear divides us. A couple of weeks ago, I basked in the joy of community with our 2024 National Women’s Impact Leadership Institute (NWILI) cohort (thank you to Stephanie Shivar for partnering with me to start and grow this program) – we shared appreciation and gratitude with each other. There were belly laughs and tears, all of it. Even as I am taking in the love of this community, my heart continues to break with the wars around the world along with the politics of fear underpinning the 2024 election. And what I know to be true through it all is that we are meant to be in community. It matters for our health and well-being, it matters for our work and leadership, it matters for our souls. 
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Community is the outer layer of my leading from the inside out framework and for me it’s a non-negotiable. We are all wired for community and my wiring is especially sensitive, or maybe it’s tight.

After posting about time and abundance last month on Leap Day I have continued to get reminders about time and my relationship with it and I realized there is a Part II. 😀 I'm in San Diego for spring break. On a rainy Saturday (not typical here) we explored the San Diego Museum of Art. With every magnificent piece of art I found myself drawn to the description of the piece, specifically the artist, even more specifically the birth and death years. I couldn't stop calculating  ​how long each artist lived. For each artist's life I made a judgment, this life was too short, this life was really long (amazing how many artists I found who lived almost 100 years).

​And the thing is I don't know about the life in the time. The dash between birth and death year. This space in-between is where all of life happens. The numbers don't tell me about that, the numbers tell only the time in the life. I don't know about the joy, the pain, the ups and downs of these artists' lives. And I was reminded again that we are the ones who make the life in the time, we choose to make the time for what matters to us. We create the space in-between, we define the dash!

I wrote a post for my blog a couple of weeks ago and just didn’t put it out there – I wasn’t exactly sure why. It felt like there was something missing, it didn’t feel complete, it wasn’t ready. And I see now that there was a reason for my hesitation because the world has changed again – as I write I am listening to the constant hum of helicopters and insistent whine of sirens and I’m in a place of rawness. Layers of what I know and patterns of my life are being stripped away. With the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protest and unrest in my city and others around the country I’m left grieving and unbalanced. This is not my pain directly and yet I feel it. This is not my experience directly and yet I’m in it. I wonder how to show up in new ways for my whole community.

"In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect." Alice Walker