This morning I learned that my first CEO passed away. He was Ted Turner of the original CNN and Headline News.
I learned a lot from my first CEO. What to do, how to dream, how to say, “if that’s a no, where’s the yes?”, how to partner with the best and let them do what they do best, how to overcome obstacles and also several instances of what NOT to do. Everyone is complex. The things I will miss most about him is his love for the environment and his belief in, and support of, his employees.

I was fortunate to work in an era when CEO’s knew investing in their people first was the way to build corporate loyalty. The tech came 3rd, after the dream and the employees to make the dream come true. Now it feels like the mentality is to replace the employees with tech, not train them on it, to ignore institutional knowledge and expertise and take that golden parachute once you have sold them off to the highest bidder. What lessons will we learn from uncontrolled Capitalism as we round the corner on 250 years of building a country? So many of the younger generation are shunning social tech because they feel preyed upon – what communication forms with they create? How will that change our society as a whole for the better or worse? Those things along with virus and toxic outbreaks are most definitely going to have major impacts. It’s hard to know where young people’s careers will lead them. I tell many of them, “the jobs I worked in, did not exist when I started college”. New tech changed everything. I think it will again. Some tech will fail from not having a viable profit path and some will emerge out of seemingly nowhere (like a family garage).

The latter part of Ted’s life was well publicized. He had to work around people who betrayed him and work with physical challenges. However, I also know (less publicized) that it was filled with support and kindness from others. We all get a mixed bag don’t we? And yet he definitely was a force of change for the positive in many ways. I value the lessons he taught me and the signed congratulations letter from him for my 15th anniversary (that my husband procured for me and surprised me with).

Rest in peace Ted, and thank you.

While I spend this month scanning and documenting family history to share with family in person next month, I am also working with volunteers to help heal the natural places in this area that have suffered from abuse and or neglect. It’s been made profoundly clear that while corporations have big dreams and risk a lot to achieve those dreams, they rarely if ever, clean up after themselves. That’s a principle my parents drilled into me. “Life is messy, clean it up.” I am grateful also for the two and a half centuries of people who came before me in this country that also worked to make their little corner better. It’s fun meeting them through old photos and letters.

I read an article yesterday on the importance of trees in making our daily lives, comfortable, especially in urban areas. You can read about it here. So one of the many things I am doing this year is working with a volunteer group to propagate oaks from acorns, pot them, dig baby oaks up from under the drip line of trees before they are mowed over and potting them also. Once these “babies” are strong enough, we replant them in areas where we are given permission by organizations or businesses that need to do it at low or no cost. Making the world a cooler place seems worth a few hours of my time a week. And I get to meet really nice people.

I have traded in spending my time with people who justify wars out of fear and try to control your finances without allowing your input – with humble people who think of others. Anytime I run into groups that say, “My way or the highway”, I “highway” every time. It’s fun to turn that word into a verb! I now spend my time with positive, peaceful people who are thinking many generations ahead. Not about control of those generations. About survival of a planet for those generations to live on. They deserve a chance to make it better or worse, just like we have had the chance. I always think of Newton’s Third Law of Motion. For those who need a refresher: “Whenever one object exerts a force on another, the second object exerts an equal force in the opposite direction of the first object.”

I have recently started contributing to citizen science with the Merlin Bird App, connected with Cornell University. To be clear, I have never been “a birder” before. However with this app, it makes it so simple to record the birdsong in your area, along with tens of thousands of people (fun!). And I am actually recognizing bird songs with very little effort due to the pictures, information and educational recordings that the app shares. A great way to get your average person more informed and caring about birds, trees and our world. Here are a few of the birds I recorded from our front porch this morning.

Power is an amazing subject. Soft power, hard power, under the radar power, the power to influence, the power to share, the power to harm and the power to heal. Brain training can help you shift from anger over powerful injustices to a more positive, pro-active mindset of shifting balances. I was reminded of that when I went into a negative spiral about pros and cons of working with different genders, with a young man who is just starting out and not yet headed down a negative path. I was grateful for his abrupt shift of conversational focus, because I had not realized that I had gone into a (yes justified) yet negative conversational spiral. Sometimes, all it takes is a gentle nudge to get you thinking more positively and realizing that not everyone uses their power in harmful ways.

My creative energies this past week have been on web and e-mail work, ancestry work and working on healing places near me. I am looking forward to a delivery tomorrow that will conclude a 2 month project that was presented as “a few weeks” project. So patience with misdirection and yes, incompetence is the lesson this spring. Things will work out, just not at all how they were presented. That slows my analog creative time. I look forward to getting more sketching, painting and instrument playing done this summer.

What creative projects have you worked on? Have they helped others, calmed your mind or produced something positive for the next generations?