Cultivating the Art of Leadership

I arrived in Utah with a large number of CDs and found them clunky to look at in their black towers. So, I decided to toss out the plastic CD shells, keep the album art in a bag (just in case I wanted them for some reason), and streamlined the corner of the family room where the stereo lived.

Roll forward seven years. I lost touch with my music. I had an iPod , but I never felt compelled to carry it around with me. Benign indifference.

Then I discovered the album art view in iTunes (late adopter, I know). It was like rediscovering old friends seeing album covers from my old CDs. I spent dozens of hours loading and organizing my music over the holidays, a bit obsessively, I confess. As an incredibly visual person, I realized that I had always picked up my CD cases and knew what to play when because of the emotional links I created to the images in album art.

My friend, Tess, who is an audiophile at heart, shrugged her shoulders when I shared my discovery. The album art doesn't matter to her. The visuals don't matter. She can remember the lyrics and song names already and loves her iPod, plain text and all.

My friend, Neil Kochenour, was in town last week, and we had lunch. He lost his wife, Edie, an amazingly vibrant woman with a joyful laugh, last year. I decided to play something for him after we talked about his life and loss in 2007.

I shared a track called "Living the Courageous Life" from David Whyte's CD, Midlife and the Great Unknown.

David Whyte has this gorgeous Yorkshireman's accent and lovely poet's cadence in talking and reciting his poetry. Neil and I sat there on Friday afternoon together, listening to Whyte talk about the "great questions" and how we cannot begin the conversation inside the subject of our questions.

Instead, we must "go to a place where you can see a landscape, you listen to a piece of music, you spend time in silence, you turn the lights off and sit in the kitchen in the dark..."

I have returned to Whyte's CDs over and over in the past few weeks, as Whyte reads his poetry so beautifully, repeating phrases that linger and echo in memory.

Here's one of Whyte's poems from the CD set whose last lines keep replaying like a song's chorus: "anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you."