Wheatley Quotes

My experience has taught me that what you know isn’t always important.” “What is important?” “Living and growing,” Mrs. Wheatley said with finality. “Living your life.

It's not differences that divide us. It's our judgments about each other that do.

Through thickest gloom look back, immortal shade, On that confusion which thy death has made.

Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone. —MARGARET WHEATLEY

Change always involves a dark night when everything falls apart. Yet if this period of dissolution is used to create new meaning, then chaos ends and new order emerges.

Look at history,” Eva continued, rubbing a temple. “Roxanne Shanté out-rapping grown men at fourteen. Serena winning the US Open at seventeen. Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein at eighteen. Josephine Baker conquering Paris at nineteen. Zelda Fitzgerald’s high school diary was so fire that her future husband stole entire passages to write The Great Gatsby. The eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley published her first piece at fourteen, while enslaved. Joan of Arc. Greta Thunberg. Teen girls rearrange the fucking world.

In organizations, real power and energy is generated through relationships. The patterns of relationships and the capacities to form them are more important than tasks, functions, roles, and positions.

It's obviously not impossible, because it's happening...

Listening is such a simple act. It requires us to be present, and that takes practice, but we don't have to do anything else. We don't have to advise, or coach, or sound wise. We just have to be willing to sit there and listen.

Ah, yes, pink camo,” I murmur, gesturing my chin at her tank top and hoodie. “Because you never know when you’ll have to hide in a bubblegum factory.

In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.

If wishes were horses, what the heck would I need wishes for?

We are, always, poets, exploring possibilities of meaning in a world which is also all the time exploring possibilities.

Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful

...age-old evil, tireless and vigilant, cloaked from the masses by modern skepticism, yet still a potent force stalking the dark ways of the night.

When African slave Phillis Wheatley wrote poetry, 18 men came to assess whether that was possible.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free. The Trial of Phillis Wheatley

The river never drinks its own water. The tree never tastes its own fruit. The field never consumes its own harvest. They selflessly strive for the well-being of all those around them. —Mewari proverb, India

He found Satan on his throne in the cavern of lava, reading a large-print edition of Wheatley’s The Satanist. 'It’s a rum way to warn people off from worshiping me,' Satan commented, indicating the book. 'It seems to be lots of fun, according to this. Still, I bet they all die horribly at the end. Oh well. Who wants to live forever?

The two skills of the warrior are compassion and insight. Compassion is easy - it arises spontaneously from an open heart. Insight or discernment requires more skill. We have to choose our battles.

The future cannot be determined. I can only be experienced as it is occurring. Life doesn't know what it will be until it notices what it has become.

To name is to make visible.

Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there's a God, that there's a Savior too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

The things we fear most in organisations – fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances – are the primary sources of creativity.

For racists like Franklin, it proved difficult to believe that many Blacks were capable of becoming another Francis Williams or Phillis Wheatley. Racists often understood this capable handful to be “extraordinary Negroes.” Joseph

When I read Jefferson’s disparagement of Wheatley, it felt like he had been disparaging the entire lineage of Black poets who would follow her, myself included, and I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is.

our tragedy begins humid. in a humid classroom. with a humid text book. breaking into us. stealing us from ourselves. one poem. at a time. it begins with shakespeare. the hot wash. the cool acid. of dead white men and women. people. each one a storm. crashing. into our young houses. making us islands. easy isolations. until we are so beleaguered and swollen with a definition of poetry that is white skin and not us. that we tuck our scalding. our soreness. behind ourselves and learn poetry. as trauma. as violence. as erasure. another place we do not exist. another form of exile where we should praise. honor. our own starvation. the little bits of langston. phyllis wheatley. and angelou during black history month. are the crumbs. are the minor boats. that give us slight rest. to be waterdrugged into rejecting the nuances of my own bursting extraordinary self. and to have this be called education. to take my name out of my name. out of where my native poetry lives. in me. and replace it with keats. browning. dickson. wolf. joyce. wilde. wolfe. plath. bronte. hemingway. hughes. byron. frost. cummings. kipling. poe. austen. whitman. blake. longfellow. wordsworth. duffy. twain. emerson. yeats. tennyson. auden. thoreau. chaucer. thomas. raliegh. marlowe. burns. shelley. carroll. elliot… (what is the necessity of a black child being this high off of whiteness.) and so. we are here. brown babies. worshipping. feeding. the glutton that is white literature. even after it dies. (years later. the conclusion: shakespeare is relative. white literature is relative. that we are force fed the meat of an animal that our bodies will not recognize. as inherent nutrition. is not relative. is inert.)

Good grief. They're like the freaking poster family for the NRA.

My experience has taught me that what you know isn’t always important.” “What is important?” “Living and growing,” Mrs. Wheatley said with finality. “Living your life.

My experience has taught me that what you know isn’t always important.” “What is important?” “Living and growing,” Mrs. Wheatley said with finality. “Living your life.

The energy now spent on self-protection can be converted into positive energy if we're willing to encounter reality and see it clearly. Facing reality is an empowering act - it can liberate our mind and heart to discern how best to use our power and influence in service for this time.

Whatever your personal beliefs and experiences, I invite you to consider that we need a new worldview to navigate this chaotic time. We cannot hope to make sense using our old maps. It won’t help to dust them off or reprint them in bold colors. The more we rely on them, the more disoriented we become. They cause us to focus on the wrong things and blind us to what’s significant. Using them, we will journey only to greater chaos.

ผู้คนยังคงมีจิตใจงดงามและมีความห่วงหาอาทร เราอาจทุกข์ตรม จับต้นชนปลายไม่ถูก ด้านชาและหวาดหวั่น แต่ลึกลงไปภายใต้ความรู้สึกเหล่านี้ เรายังคงปรารถนาที่จะเรียนรู้ ปรารถนาในอิสระภาพ ความหมาย และความรัก

Amid all the information available in our environment, which identity filter(s) do you use? Are you dedicated to popularity, to a role, to a cause, an ethic, a nation, an ethnicity? What identity gives meaning to your life?

...Death is often as cruel in his asceticism as he is in his greed.

What? No. But every child’s first pony should be a little evil. It builds character.

Dennis Wheatley

You can't hate someone whose story you know by Margaret J Wheatley is one of the themes that propels BENEATH THE FLAMES.

Chess certainly isn't all there is”, Mrs. Wheatley continued. “It's what I know”, replied Beth.

You can’t hate someone whose story you know.” —Margaret Wheatley, EdD, author and community building expert

Do you do problems?” “No.” She had tried a few as a child, but they did not interest her. The positions did not look natural. White to move and mate in two. It was, as Mrs. Wheatley would have said, irrelevant.

It is possible to prepare for the future without knowing what it will be. The primary way to prepare for the unknown is to attend to the quality of our relationships, to how well we know and trust one another. Margaret Wheatley, “When Change Is Out of Control

Moral and ethical questions have no validity in Total War except in as far as their maintenance or destruction contributes towards ultimate Victory. Expediency, not morality, is the sole criterion of human conduct in Total War.’ Dennis Wheatley, Total War, 1941

Diminishing their intellect was yet another way to justify enslaving African Americans, and it had the added benefit of preserving some types of work for whites, and creating and maintaining clear social and economic boundaries between blacks and whites. In an explicit challenge to African Americans’ intellect, eighteen prominent Massachusetts white men—including John Hancock and Thomas Hutchinson, the governor of the colony—examined Phillis Wheatley in Boston’s Town Hall in 1772 to determine whether she could possibly have produced the poetry she claimed to have written.

The only antidote to the unnerving effects of such incoherence is integrity. People and organizations with integrity are wholly themselves. No aspect of self stands different or apart. At their center is clarity, not conflict. When they go inside to find themselves, there is only one self there.

The gods are being kind to me in my old age. Most beautiful women are either good, stupid or vicious. And you are the marvellous exception. Lovely as a goddess, clever as an Athenian and a bad hat like myself, yet one who still has decent feelings. I’m going to kiss the lips off you once we land in France.

Rosa Parks drew solace & sustenance from the long history of Black resistance before her time, placing her action & the Montgomery bus boycott in the continuum of Black protest. Her speech notes during the boycott read: 'Reading histories of others--Crispus Attucks through all wars--Richard Allen--Dr. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. & Jr. Women Phyllis Wheatley--Sojourner Truth--Harriet Tubman, Mary McLeod Bethune. For Parks, the ability to keep going, to know that the struggle for justice was possible amidst all the setbacks they encountered, was partly possible through reading & referencing the long Black struggle before her.

ความหวังไม่ใช่หนทางในการเยียวยาความสิ้นหวัง หากแต่เป็นการค้นให้พบว่า เราต้องการจะทำอะไรกับสิ่งที่เราห่วงใยต่างหาก

ความรักเรียกร้องเรามากมายเสียยิ่งกว่ากฎหมาย

A culture focused on individual freedom can only result in narcissism, polarization, conflict, estrangement, and loneliness. What is the meaning of life when it’s all about me?

… we don't need more command and control; we need better means to engage everyone's intelligence …

The laws of man are made only to be broken, because they are stupid and unjust.

Even as empress, she had known that she was only as powerful as she could make the world believe her to be.

This was a kind of ordered chaos, like the trees and the roots and the stones had been politely asked to mind the furniture.

But you make everything better. You are my fondest delight.

Thadred exhaled out his nose. “You know, all those times I said you needed to find yourself a girl? I didn’t mean one that tried to kill you.

On stormy tempests, ever-dreary seas, / The way to long-seek'd Britain's coast we bend

Charlotte," Leander said, laughing as he positioned a pair of speakers on the mantelpiece. "Really. You know, it's good to be acquainted with one's professors. Think of it as an opportunity to gather material, if you have to." "Blackmail?" I thought briefly of Mr. Wheatley, Watson's high school writing teacher, who had bugged his dorm room to "gather material. "Noted.

On Virtue O thou bright jewel in my aim I strive To comprehend thee. Thine own words declare Wisdom is higher than a fool can reach. I cease to wonder, and no more attempt Thine height t’explore, or fathom thy profound. But, O my soul, sink not into despair, Virtue is near thee, and with gentle hand Would now embrace thee, hovers o’er thine head. Fain would the heaven-born soul with her converse, Then seek, then court her for her promised bliss. Auspicious queen, thine heavenly pinions spread, And lead celestial Chastity along; Lo! now her sacred retinue descends, Arrayed in glory from the orbs above. Attend me, Virtue, thro’ my youthful years! O leave me not to the false joys of time! But guide my steps to endless life and bliss. Greatness, or Goodness, say what I shall call thee, To give an higher appellation still, Teach me a better strain, a nobler lay, O Thou, enthroned with Cherubs in the realms of day!

Even if you did become lost,” Daindreth murmured, “I think I could find you anywhere.” (return) Amira swallowed, telling him she had understood it as the promise it was-if you flee, I will chase you down.

We have created trouble for ourselves in organizations by confusing control with order. This is no surprise, given that for most of its written history, leadership has been defined in terms of its control functions.

He settled in his beautiful Georgian house in Lymington surrounded by beautiful things. He knew how to live well, perhaps without regard for his health. He hated exercise, smoked, drank and wrote. Today he would have been bullied by wife and children and friends into giving up these habits and changing his lifestyle, but I’m not sure he would have given in. Maybe like me, he would simply find a quiet place. Dominic Wheatley, 2013

In 1774, the year after her enslavers relinquished their claim on her, Boston poet Phillis Wheatley wrote to Mohegan cleric Samson Occom about the hypocrisy of leaders who rallied for freedom while practicing enslavement. “In every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance,” she wrote, adding, “I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us.

Life offers us this great gift of self-organization, how we can be held in the basin of shared meaning and, within that, exercise individual freedom. It is such a shame to waste it on fear and doubt. Or to seek to contain and control it.

Half the people in our asylums may be suffering from a physical lesion of the brain but the others are unaccountably insane. The real reason is demoniac possession brought about by looking upon terrible things that they were never meant to see.

It was not swords that had played the largest role in building the empire. Pretense, more than anything, had allowed the Fanduillion bloodline to seize power over the entire continent. Two-thirds of a battle was convincing your enemy he was beaten—

Armies were like candles. The only way they served their purpose was to be sacrificed. Every good general sought ways to minimize the sacrifice just as every good candlemaker worked to make his candles last longer. But it remained an inevitable and unchangeable fact.

Look at history,” Eva continued, rubbing a temple. “Roxanne Shanté out-rapping grown men at fourteen. Serena winning the US Open at seventeen. Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein at eighteen. Josephine Baker conquering Paris at nineteen. Zelda Fitzgerald’s high school diary was so fire that her future husband stole entire passages to write The Great Gatsby. The eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley published her first piece at fourteen, while enslaved. Joan of Arc. Greta Thunberg. Teen girls rearrange the fucking world.” An electrified

It was odd, be taken care of. It made her feel helpless and lazy, but at the same time…she might be able to get used to it. There was a relief in having someone take care of her, like she’d been free climbing a cliff her whole life and now suddenly had a rope to catch her if she fell.

ELOS INSTITUTE, BRAZIL FROM POWER TO PLAY On the warrior’s path, it is up to you to discern which threads have been woven by divine hands and which have been woven by human hands. When you begin to discern the difference, you become a Txucarramãe—a warrior without weapons. … When you discover what you have been doing with your life and how it is you dance through the world, little by little you let go of your weapons, those creations made to kill creations. Suddenly, you discover that when we stop creating enemies, we extinguish the need for weapons. —Kaká Werá Jecupé Indigenous teacher in Brazil

possible if we spoke to those we most fear. I hope we can reclaim conversation as our route back to each other, and as the path forward to a hopeful future. It only requires imagination and courage and faith. These are qualities possessed by everyone. Now is the time to exercise them to their fullest.

What the most advanced researchers and theoreticians in all of science now comprehend is that the Newtonian concept of a universe driven by mass force is out of touch with reality, for it fails to account for both observable phenomena and theoretical conundrums that can be explained only by quantum physics: A quantum view explains the success of small efforts quite differently. Acting locally allows us to be inside the movement and flow of the system, participating in all those complex events occurring simultaneously. We are more likely to be sensitive to the dynamics of this system, and thus more effective. However, changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in distant places. Because of these unseen connections, there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In what Wheatley calls “this exquisitely connected world,” the real engine of change is never “critical mass”; dramatic and systemic change always begins with “critical connections.”14 So by now the crux of our preliminary needs should be apparent. We must open our hearts to new beacons of Hope. We must expand our minds to new modes of thought. We must equip our hands with new methods of organizing. And we must build on all of the humanity-stretching movements of the past half century: the Montgomery Bus Boycott; the civil rights movement; the Free Speech movement; the anti–Vietnam War movement; the Asian American, Native American, and Chicano movements; the women’s movement; the gay and lesbian movement; the disability rights/pride movement; and the ecological and environmental justice movements. We must find ourselves amid the fifty million people who as activists or as supporters have engaged in the many-sided struggles to create the new democratic and life-affirming values that are needed to civilize U.S. society.

So many books. Cookbooks with garish colors, full of pictures of plump brown birds and things mummy-wrapped in bandages of bacon. Plays and slender volumes of poetry with surnames I didn’t recognize. Endless books on World War II and Adolf Hitler, branded with the ubiquitous stark and menacing swastika. The Joy Of Sex, Ribald Rhymes, Dirty Limericks, Hemingway, Mailer, Fitzgerald, Salinger. Montague Summers. Wheatley, Crowley, Castaneda. Manson. Edgar Cayce, LaVey, Margaret Murray. Abrecan Geist. Colin Wilson. Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, many volumes. Dirty Jokes—hundreds of paperbacks with spines whitened with a thousand cracks. Lovecraft, Kuttner, Silverberg, Heinlein, and Sturgeon. Vonnegut. Older books whose names had long been rubbed from their ancient covers.

In Yellowstone National Park, human-imposed stability thwarted for many years the natural process of small fires, which regularly clean out brush and dead trees. The result was a fragile equilibrium completely vulnerable to the cataclysm of fire that destroyed large areas of the park. The attempt to manage for stability and to enforce an unnatural equilibrium always leads to far-reaching destruction. The

War, Plague, Famine and Death. We all know what happened the last time those four terrible entities were unleashed to cloud the brains of statesmen and rulers.’ ‘You’re referring to the Great War I take it.’ Rex said soberly. ‘Of course, and every adept knows that it started because one of the most terrible Satanists who ever lived found one of the secret gateways through which to release the four horsemen.

Sociologist James Evan reviewed citations in more than thirty-four million articles published in academic journals and noted how the number of different citations declined after the advent of search engines. These information-filtering tools, he observed, “serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what isn’t.”36

In 2003, while working on my third book of poetry, I read an essay on Wheatley written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in The New Yorker. It was an excerpt from his soon-to-be-published book, a treatment of Wheatley juxtaposed against the racism of Enlightenment scholars such as Immanuel Kant, and more specifically, Thomas Jefferson. As someone who explored American history in my poetry, I found Gates’s thesis fascinating: He believed Wheatley was important in dispelling derisive eighteenth-century notions about black humanity; her poetry had rebutted Kant’s ordering of the nations with Africans down at the very bottom. Because of Wheatley’s important symbolism for black humanity, Thomas Jefferson’s negative response to Wheatley’s poetry—“[t]he compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism”—was a symbol as well. It meant that the struggle for black equality on all fronts was not yet won.

You’ve probably also noted the impacts of virtual distraction on your own and others’ behaviors: memory loss, inability to concentrate, being asked to repeat what you just said, miscommunication the norm, getting lost online and wasting time you don’t have, withdrawing from the real world. The list of what’s being lost is a description of our best human capacities—memory, meaning, relating, thinking, learning, caring. There is no denying the damage that’s been done to humans as technology took over—our own Progress Trap. The impact on children’s behavior is of greatest concern for its present and future implications. Dr. Nicolas Kardaras, a highly skilled physician in rehabilitation, is author of Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids—and How to Break the Trance. He describes our children’s behavior in ways that I notice in my younger grandchildren: “We see the aggressive temper tantrums when the devices are taken away and the wandering attention spans when children are not perpetually stimulated by their hyper-arousing devices. Worse, we see children who become bored, apathetic, uninteresting and uninterested when not plugged in.”17 These very disturbing behaviors are not just emotional childish reactions. Our children are behaving as addicts deprived of their drug. Brain imaging studies show that technology stimulates brains just like cocaine does.

The Dalai Lama’s Principles for Ethical Strategies3   Ensure that compassion is the motivation.   Any problem must take into account the big picture and long-term consequences rather than short-term feasibility.   In applying reason, we must stay honest, unbiased, and self-aware, vigilant to avoid self-delusion.   Stay humble—know the limits of our knowledge and also realize we can easily be misguided in a rapidly changing reality.   The foremost concern is the well-being of humanity and the planet we inhabit.

Almost 20 years ago, Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers began A Simpler Way, a prophetic book about what organizations could be, with these words: There is a simpler way to organize human endeavor. It requires a new way of being in the world. It requires being in the world without fear. Being in the world with play and creativity. Seeking after what’s possible. Being willing to learn and be surprised. The simpler way to organize human endeavor requires a belief that the world is inherently orderly. The world seeks organization. It does not need us humans to organize it. This simpler way summons forth what is best about us. It asks us to understand human nature differently, more optimistically. It identifies us as creative. It acknowledges that we seek after meaning. It asks us to be less serious, yet more purposeful, about our work and our lives. It does not separate play from the nature of being. … The world we had been taught to see was alien to our humanness. We were taught to see the world as a great machine. But then we could find nothing human in it. Our thinking grew even stranger—we turned this world-image back on ourselves and believed that we too were machines. Because we could not find ourselves in the machine world we had created in thought, we experienced the world as foreign and fearsome. … Fear led to control. We wanted to harness and control everything. We tried, but it did not stop the fear. Mistakes threatened us; failed plans ruined us; relentless mechanistic forces demanded absolute submission. There was little room for human concerns. But the world is not a machine. It is alive, filled with life and the history of life. … Life cannot be eradicated from the world, even though our metaphors have tried. … If we can be in the world in the fullness of our humanity, what are we capable of? If we are free to play, to experiment and discover, if we are free to fail, what might we create? What could we accomplish if we stopped trying to structure the world into existence? What could we accomplish if we worked with life’s natural tendency to organize? Who could we be if we found a simpler way?143

He had to backtrack immediately to account for the most famous and most acclaimed poet in America, Phillis Wheatley, who was, very unfortunately for Jefferson’s argument, unquestionably black. She had been brought to Boston as an enslaved African at the age of about six, learned English and Latin as a child, and began writing poetry as a teenager. Her published works earned accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. Among her admirers were Voltaire, who praised Wheatley’s “very good English verse,” George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and even the naval hero John Paul Jones, who addressed her as “the celebrated Phillis the African favorite of the Nine [Muses] and Apollo” when he sent her some of his own verses. Dr. Rush cited her as a proof of black ability, listing her accomplishments when he wrote in 1775, “We have many well attested anecdotes of as sublime and disinterested virtue among them as ever adorned a Roman or a Christian character.”14 Franklin went to see Wheatley when she was in London, a literary celebrity on book tour. The acclaim irked Jefferson: “The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.”15

Are you sure of that? Baptism into the Christian Faith doesn’t ensure one going to Heaven, why should this other sprinkling be a guarantee of anyone going to Hell?’ ‘It’s such a big question, Rex, but briefly it is like this. Heaven and Hell are only symbolical of growth to Light or disintegration to Darkness. By Christian, or any other true religious baptism, we renounce the Devil and all his Works, thereby erecting a barrier which it is difficult for Evil forces to surmount, but anyone who accepts Satanic baptism does exactly the reverse. They wilfully destroy the barrier of Astral Light which is our natural protection and offer themselves as a medium through which the powers of Darkness may operate on mankind.

But as people become anxious to be accepted by the group, their personal values and behaviors are exchanged for more negative ones. We can too easily become more intense, abusive, fundamentalist, fanatical—behaviors strange to our former selves, born out of our intense need to belong. This may be one explanation for why the Internet, which gave us the possibility of self-organizing, is devolving into a medium of hate and persecution, where trolls6 claiming a certain identity go to great efforts to harass, threaten, and destroy those different from themselves. The Internet, as a fundamental means for self-organizing, can’t help but breed this type of negative, separatist behavior. Tweets and texts spawn instant reactions; back and forth exchanges of only a few words quickly degenerate into comments that push us apart. Listening, reflecting, exchanging ideas with respect—gone. But this is far less problematic than the way the Internet has intensified the language of threat and hate. People no longer hide behind anonymity as they spew hatred, abominations, and lurid death threats at people they don’t even know and those that they do. Trolls, who use social media to issue obscene threats and also organize others to deluge a person with hateful tweets and emails, are so great a problem for people who come into public view that some go off Twitter, change their physical appearance, or move in order to protect their children.7 Reporters admit that they refuse to publish about certain issues because they fear the blowback from trolls.

The clear transmission of facts and evidence becomes irrelevant in the hyperemotional space of social media. Facts come from a world external to ourselves—namely, reality. Actually, that’s the whole point. But in the social media world, they are either meaningless or threatening to the self we’re constructing and protecting. The world can’t help but degrade into “It’s all about me.” Deluged with information filtered through the lens of popular self, our internal monitoring causes the world to shrink: Did the news make me feel bad? Turn it off. Did that comment upset me? Blast the messenger. Did that criticism hurt me? Get depressed or strike back. This is the tragedy of self-reference where, instead of responding to information from the external environment to create an orderly system of relationships, the narrow band of information obsessively processed creates isolation, stress, and self-defense.6 Focused internally, the outside world where facts reside doesn’t have meaning. Our communication with one another via the Web generates extreme reactions. Think about how small events take over the Internet because people get upset from a photo and minimal information. There doesn’t have to be any basis in fact or any understanding of more complex reasons for why this event happened. People see the visual, comment on it, and viral hysteria takes over. Even when more context is given later that could help people understand the event, it doesn’t change their minds. People go back to scanning and posting, and soon there is another misperceived event to get hysterical about. One commentator calls this “infectious insanity.”7

The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections

1. Recall those leaders you’ve most admired, those you were happy to serve under. What were their behaviors? How did you feel working for them? What kind of worker were you, including the quality of what you produced? How do you feel about them now? 2. Recall your own moments when you were proud of the leadership (either formal or informal) you provided to your organization, family, friends, community. What did you do? How did you behave toward others? What were the results of your leadership? Are you still in a relationship with any of these people?

a shiny metal sign nailed to the house, just to the side of the door. Her fingers traced the graven words, Lost Are Found. “What is this?” she asked Carpenter. “Mr. Wheatley’s work, at Joy’s request. A reminder to us all that God knows where Edmund is. A reminder to us all that we are to pray and not give up hope.” Tabitha stared at the sign with new understanding. Then she placed her hand on it and prayed aloud. “O Lord, we do not forget. We have asked you to bring Edmund home. Your eyes are upon the whole earth, and you see him, even right now. Father, we trust you to bring him back to us, for in you, the lost are found.” “Amen,” came Carpenter’s heartfelt response. When Tabitha opened her eyes, his palm was upon the sign, next to hers.

As Grace argues, echoing author Margaret Wheatley, movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass.

You have to take a stand, and stand there. Daniel Ellsberg

Phillis Wheatley had auditioned and proven the capability of Black humanity to the assimilationist scions of Boston. But unlike the publishers, these men did not have much to lose.

As long as you think you are right, you can engage in an act of violence on behalf of justice and righteousness as you define it.

That may have been necessary during the war, but by forcing it on us for six years afterwards they destroyed the whole organisation that had been built up over centuries of private firms importing our food from the best markets at the best prices. It will be years before the incredible muddle they made can be unsorted.

Phillis Wheatley, a young slave girl, published a collection of poems titled 'Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral' in 1773, when she was around twenty years old, becoming the first enslaved African in America to publish a book of poetry.

Sane leadership is the unshakeable confidence that people can be generous, creative, and kind. The leader’s role is to create the conditions for these qualities to be evoked and utilized to accomplish good work.

Sanity is an honest relationship with reality. Sanity is seeing clearly, free of our filters, judgments, biases. When we see what’s going on, then we can discern what actions might be useful. Sanity creates possibilities.

Old soldiers never die, you know; they only fade away.

One could never hold happiness for very long, one had to snatch it whenever it came one’s way.

Phillis Wheatley,

partial contrast to these images of disintegration stands the fact that most of the French combat units managed to maintain a modicum of cohesion and reach safety more or less intact. During the entire pursuit, the Prussians failed to capture even one Eagle, a sign that, at least as far as its regimental standards were concerned, Napoleon’s army did not in fact disintegrate. Moreover, the French brought along on their retreat a large number of Allied prisoners, who were not set free until many days or even weeks later. One of them, Lieutenant Wheatley, had

It seems a thousand years since I’ve seen you but I’ve been dreaming of you ever since. Now I’ve found you again I absolutely refuse to let you go.