Clippings

Spiritually Literate New Year's Resolutions, by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

1. I will live in the present moment. I will not obsess about the past or worry about the future.

2. I will cultivate the art of making connections. I will pay attention to how my life is intimately related to all life on the planet.

3. I will be thankful for all the blessings in my life. I will spell out my days with a grammar of gratitude.

4. I will practice hospitality in a world where too often strangers are feared, enemies are hated, and the "other" is shunned. I will welcome guests and alien ideas with graciousness.

5. I will seek liberty and justice for all. I will work for a free and a fair world.

6. I will add to the planet's fund of good will by practicing little acts of kindness, brief words of encouragement, and manifold expressions of courtesy.

7. I will cultivate the skill of deep listening. I will remember that all things in the world want to be heard, as do the many voices inside me.

8. I will practice reverence for life by seeing the sacred in, with, and under all things of the world.

9. I will give up trying to hide, deny, or escape from my imperfections. I will listen to what my shadow side has to say to me.

10. I will be willing to learn from the spiritual teachers all around me, however unlikely or unlike me they may be.

via spiritualityandpractice.com

From the Brussat's Spirituality and Practice site, some real food for thought.

2009's great examples of women speakers

  • Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo! in her first speech as a new CEO
  • Actress Jane Fonda and her voice lessons before a new play
  • Speakers who participated in major speech competitions: Writer Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson on her first PowerPoint presentation and Ignite! talk; Anne Medlock and her "near-TED experience;" and marketer Jennifer Cohen, who gave her very first talk at Ignite!
  • Posted on International Women's Day, speeches by author and activist Isabel Allende, Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, scientist Nalini Nadkarni and singer Nellie McKay
  • Our top women speakers series, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Bishop Kathryn Jefforts Schori, athlete and disability activist Aimee Mullins, First Lady Michelle Obama, Governor Jennifer Granholm and chemist and professor Carolyn Bertozzi
  • Top women commencement speakers highlighted by one of our speechwriter-readers: performers Meryl Streep and Melissa Etheridge; writers like Gloria Steinem and Anna Quindlen; first ladies Michelle Obama and Barbara Bush; executive Carly Fiorina, impresario Oprah Winfrey and playwright Margaret Edson
  • Debra Davidson, a sander at the Martin Guitar Factory and my tour guide there
  • Blogging entrepreneurs Katie Kemple, who used experience bellydancing to improve her speaking, and Leah Garnett, who took her inspiration from performing on guitar.
  • Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who raised the issue of women getting talked over in meetings, and Sonia Sotomayor, who used storytelling in her confirmation hearings to good effect.
  • Kenneth Cole CEO Jill Granoff and Elle Group chief brand officer Carol Smith, both of whom highlighted challenges women face in workplace speaking and presenting
  • Speaking from the nonprofit sector were The Acumen Fund's Jacqueline Novogratz, who ably demonstrated how to speak up for a good cause, and Red Cross President Gail McGovern
  • Author Elizabeth Gilbert, whose TED talk demonstrates great speaker presence
    • via eloquentwoman.blogspot.com

    Denise Graveline's examples of great woman speakers for 2009. I specially agree with the selection of Elizabeth Gilbert after I watched the TED video.

    Letter or Email?

    Women's Wear Daily checked with magazine editors and found--no surprises here, methinks--that letters to the editor, while not completely dead, are far outpaced by emails, tweets and blog or website comments, as well as commentary on readers' own blogs. From the article:
    Glamour receives 30 to 40 handwritten notes a week, compared with 1,000 e-mailed letters. Both are a fraction of the 5,000 comments glamour.com receives online. New York magazine editor in chief Adam Moss noted the publication gets roughly three snail mail letters and 100 e-mails a week — that’s only 1 percent of the feedback it compiles. One story on nymag.com can illicit [sic] 3,000 comments in a week on the site. In effect, letters to editors have not, or will not, die. Instead, they’ve simply morphed into different forms.
    Now that we've settled that, perhaps I shall elicit an RSS subscription to my blog's weekly writing coach feature for the author of the illicit usage seen above....
    via dontgetcaught.biz

    For years I've been preaching about the power of a personal thank-you note. It's not exactly the same thing, but maybe it's time to rethink.

    Searching for the Soul of Government | Innovating with Meaning | Fast Company

    I would add that our nation, as well as so many others around the globe, suffers not so much from a "crisis of competence" but a "crisis of spirit."  In this regard, it is the essence of government, at its most fundamental level, that is at risk, not the capacity of elected, appointed, and career public officials to discharge their responsibilities effectively and efficiently.  Only by reconnecting with its "soul" can good government be exposed and the challenges of guarding the public's interest be accommodated with integrity, dignity, and, yes, transparency.
    via fastcompany.com

    From a thoughtful post by Alex Pattakos. I wish more people would not only read it, but think about it and act on it.

    A quote to remember

    What has happened to me has been the very reverse of what appears to be the experience of most of my friends. Instead of dwindling to a point, Santa Claus has grown larger and larger in my life until he fills almost the whole of it. It happened this way. As a child I was faced with a phenomenon requiring explanation. I hung up at the end of my bed an empty stocking, which in the morning became a full stocking. I had done nothing to produce the things that filled it. I had not worked for them, or made them or helped to make them. I had not even been good-far from it. And the explanation was that a certain being whom people called Santa Claus was benevolently disposed toward me. What we believed was that a certain benevolent agency did give us those toys for nothing. And, as I say, I believe it still. I have merely extended the idea. Then I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking; now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house on the planet, and the great planet in the void. Once I only thanked Santa Claus for a few dolls and crackers; now I thank him for stars and street faces and wine and the great sea. Once I thought it delightful and astonishing to find a present so big that it only went halfway into the stocking. Now I am delighted and astonished every morning to find a present so big that it takes two stockings to hold it and then leaves a great deal outside; it is the large and preposterous present of myself, as to the origin of which I can offer no suggestion except that Santa Claus gave it to me in a fit of peculiarly fantastic goodwill.

    G. K. Chesterton

    This is a long remembered quotation that I spent most of the month looking for and found only now.