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.