Day #758 - Wilderness
Nurture and Neglect
As usual, the grass is due a cut. Overdue in fact: most of the lawn has turned into a wild meadow, thanks to the glorious sunshine and well timed rain.
Right now it’s beautiful, so I’m more than happy. I like it, the bees like it, and the squirrels are happy to sit there, eating their stolen strawberries.
But it’s a feature of neglect by one measure: no longer the perfectly curated space, now something more shared and wild.
In my work on Community Building I explore this dynamic with leaders: what type of Community Builder will you be? Is your role to seek perfection, to move every piece into place, or simply to hold the boundaries and edges of a space, or to hold the rules, or to feed the chaos, or something else?
Are you the gardener, the farmer, the owner, or the enabler? Or a bit of all these things?
Of course it’s contextual: I will cut the grass before a party this weekend, but will let it go wild next spring.
Use your sixty seconds today to consider your role, this week. Are you actively managing in your leadership, or are you ‘within’ the landscape, and observing. Are you directing others, or taking direct action yourself? And by what criteria or rules are you making these choices?
