37 bar rises 29.59 0mph SSW windchill 37 Samhain
Waxing Crescent Moon of the Long Nights Day 8hr 57mn
Lunch with Lonnie. We ate in Gallery 8, the first place in the city of Minneapolis I saw when I came to seminary in 1971. I met Lonnie back during the Leadership Minneapolis days, probably 1983/1984, sometime in there. She was a consultant to the program and did a good deal of work on creative leadership.
My fellow committee chair, Gary Stern, and I were so creative in our response to the question of defining leadership that the entire board got fired the next year. Although I don’t recall the process, Gary and I facilitated that years class as it sought to understand leadership in its terms. We all came up with love, justice and compassion as the key qualities of leadership.
Turns out the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce, sponsor of Leadership Minneapolis, did not think those terms fit their idea of leadership and cleared out the whole board the next year to start over. They never did give us their definition, but they must have felt a little stupid when Neal Pierce, a national columnist who focused on urban issues, wrote up our effort and commended its results to a national audience.
The chair of Leadership Minneapolis that year was Sarah Strickland. Not long after I finished my year as a participant with a year on the board (the one that got fired), Sarah’s husband, Paul, and Lonnie’s husband, Stefan invited me to join the Woolly Mammoths and the rest is hysterics.
Friends of diverse backgrounds and from different facets of life make life richer, like a soup with several ingredients. There is the comfort of being known and knowing, of seeing and being seen. Lunch today with Lonnie gave us both.
Today was mild. Pleasant.