leadership

I gave this talk last Saturday at the Leadership Forum at Silver Bay.

It is a bit presumptuous to arrive on Saturday morning to offer reflections on the life of a community that has been intimately engaged with this year’s work for three days already. I am grateful for this privilege and the access that a 25 year history with the Forum affords me. I would like to open with a poem by Mary Oliver.*

Some of you know that I am currently in the middle of a radiation regimen for prostate cancer, sharing the fate of an estimated one third of my fellow males in our lifetime. No great consequence; not something one would willingly choose, but hardly worthy of the frame of fate; but how much of our lives do we live, willingly chosen? Few of us are so brave and free. But few of us would label this life as fated either. For there are choices we made and those we did not make. Letting go of the choices we didn’t make is part of growing up (growing old?). Letting go.

Hello and Happy late spring,

I wanted to inform you about this special program - info below - being initiated at RCC this fall, for your own interest or if you have friends or colleagues who might be interested in hosting. I met with Laurie Pina, the coordinator at Rockland Community College, recently. The program sounds well structured and intense, with an intention to prepare the women participants to make a significant contribution to their home country. A requirement is that they must return home after the two year program.

I have agreed to host a student in my home. This fits quite well with Whole Women Healing's mission to facilitate women's healing and empowerment, and our commitment to join FOR's delegation to Colombia in August, from which I will return to greet my student.