Collaboration and the Gift of Community by kristin

Today several of us took a few minutes off from our computer tasks to make some brightly colored paper flowers for the Day of the Dead Altars we are creating together as a company, and as a community on the Mendocino coast. 

We got the idea of making the paper flowers when I stopped by one of my favorite shops, Art Explorers. As we were working together, fashioning the paper flowers, we talked about making crafts in school, and shared some school memories of ourselves as children, and of our own children’s experiences in school, and I realized that in some way, doing a very simple task like this is a microcosm of how we can collaborate together in bigger ways. We did the altars last year for the first time, and this year we are seeing them come together almost easily and effortlessly as each person becomes a part of the effort.  Someone is bringing a tablecloth, someone else found candles, I found some gorgeous little flower shaped orange plates at the thrift store, a couple of us are making cookies, and besides making the load lighter for each of us, there is a true sense of joy in a shared project. Everyone is eagerly “pitching in” to make it happen, and in the process we are seeing how easy it can be to support each other in a shared experience.

This seems particularly significant because Day of the Dead celebrates our ancestors – those who came before us and paved the way for us to become who we now are. And Mary Elizabeth just wrote a blog about the United Nations and all of the work it is doing to bring the world together and offer help and sustenance to people in a variety of ways. I really do believe that this is the new paradigm for the 21st century. It’s how we will get things done.

Here at Living Light, I won’t say that everything is always easy or completely stress free, but I will say, that over time we are learning better and better ways to cooperate and support each other, and the more successful we become at nurturing each other as a Living Light family, the more our potential power to transform lives is translated to our students. Like I said, we are a microcosm of what is possible in the world around us, and for that I am grateful.