Acknowledgment of me is an acknowledgment of Team!

Hey Team,

I had a meeting for one of my games in the world on Saturday and, a few hours later, received 2 emails from two of the attendees acknowledging me. The game is creating a structure that empowers animal advocates in the Bay Area to be most effective and working together intentionally as a team to cause bigger results. (In the past there has been a lot of individuals working on their own doing their own thing for all sorts of *reasons*.) I see the acknowledgments of me below as acknowledgment of Team, so I wanted to pass them along:

Here's email #1:

Hi Nora,

This is just a quick email to say....

Thank you for your loving and caring nature. Thank you for your kindness. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for always taking the time to listen to what each person around you has to say, then processing the information, and delivering a thoughtful response. Thank you for understanding that we are all different, but have something valid to bring to the table. Thank you for your openness, your honesty. Thank you for being so generous with your appreciation. Thank you for your sincerity. Thank you for opening your heart and embracing the tough issues with animal use and abuse. Thank you for pro-actively working on these issues. Thank you for sharing your insight and experience and heart with me (and everyone!), not just today, but every time I am lucky enough to work with you. I value you as a person, as an activist, and as a friend. I'm looking forward to all of the great things that will happen in 2009! I hope you have a great week and remainder of 2008.

And email #2:

Nora,

Thank you for envisioning, organizing and running the meeting today. More importantly, thank you so much for being such a constant presence in the Bay Area animal activist scene. As I had mentioned earlier, your activism (particularly your energy, consistency, and independence from affiliation) was a major influence for my own work. And, in the present, I continue to learn from your patience, openness, positivity and empathy.

I think it's dangerous to praise people, particularly activists, by their achievements (and, of course, we don't judge, right? ;-) ). I do think, however, from watching you in action that you have done a lot of internal work and that is something I think is to be commended. As you may know, I'm really big on local activism and how can we get more local than ourselves? So I really appreciate the continued modeling, whether intentional or not, that helps me in my efforts to be a better person.


GO TEAM.

blog,schmog, love your dog

Sorry can't be brilliant all the time. Odd to eat some veggies but wanted to salute the blog!
Actually I've ben sharing like crazy lately. My game "Take my Goat" is taking off!

xoSophie

I love you guys

Hey Team,

I have a present for you. It's this blog!

By the classroom on Friday, I will have invited everyone on the Team to be a co-author of the blog so that we can all post.

Blogs are great because they are a way for you to share yourself in real time and for there to be a coherent, chronological record of shares (versus a mishmash of emails in your inbox), and people can directly comment on what you write.

I am proposing that we use this blog to share with the Team -- to share what we're getting from this magical and confronting program, where we're stopped, what amazing things are being accomplished in our games in the world, who we are avoiding or making wrong, and where we request Team's support. Or anything else you want to!

I'll post here periodically since I'm addicted to my computer.

I'm thinking we can keep our emails focused on Team business, and keep the blog focused on sharing that may not be urgent or necessary for the whole Team to read.

A quick tutorial: Blogger (this site) is incredibly easy to use. You're smart people and you'll figure it out. If you have a question or problem, email me. You'll have to create an account name, etc., like with an email address. You might need a gmail account (?) -- which wouldn't be a bad thing anyway if you don't have one because gmail is so much better than hotmail or yahoo....

Everything you write on the blog can be edited, and blogger saves automatically every minute or so.

I don't love the physical look of the blog, and there are a bunch of other templates to choose from, so go crazy and pick another one (and then someone else can pick another one) if ya want.

I see this site as a possible resource for folks considering joining Team as well. Do we want this blog to be available for anyone who's doing an Internet search or who's looking at different blogs on blogger? We can choose not to make it public.

Either way, I request that we are mindful of not sharing information about others on Team on this site, as that may be a privacy breech.

Feedback?

xo

Nora
aka Eat Your Veggies