Due to Hurricanes Frances and Ivan and the subsequent cancellation of the Florida Association of Museums (FAM) Conference scheduled for September 11-15 in Naples, Florida, I have endeavored to capture some of the message I had sought to bring to the FAM gathering.  As the keynote message, Music and Musing: Leadership Through the Lens of Art, was conveyed through music, poetry, storytelling, and activities that highlighted participants balancing feathers, making holoprints, playing rainsticks, listening and thinking together, it cannot be distilled into words. However, I have selected some key points upon which to elaborate. These points I believe will have bearing upon our successful growth into the future. 

 

• We must be as passionate about bringing the ‘news’ we so value to our communities as we are of our ‘news’.
• We are co-creators of the places into which we would like our communities to come.
• It is in the turning to one another, the moments created when people connect to people, that magic occurs.
• We must allow the heartbeat of our communities to become a part of our heartbeats if we want ours to become part of theirs.

 

The success that we have of becoming the places in which people satisfy their longings for community as well as the nourishment of their core beings will determine our future. You may find an outline of the keynote including the poetry at www.donnawissinger.com in the Keynote and Consulting link.  Should you be intrigued, please do not hesitate to call upon me.

 

My heart rouses thinking to bring you news……….words of William Carlos Williams.  At the heart of who we are, artists and safekeepers of the treasures both of human hearts and of human knowledge, is passion.  We have passion about our news. Our news is not the black and white of the newspaper page or musical score, but beyond the black and white, the poetry, the ‘what is it really’? Science, history, and art are not only about facts.  The poetry of science is the ‘joy of finding things out’. History is a collection of people who composed their lives and who inform us as we write our own life stories.  Art is the putting together of who we are, what we dream and hope with the world around us. About this we are passionate. We must be equally passionate about bringing our news.  It is not an option to feel our communities should and will just choose to come to us.  It is not we and they.  It is us. 

 

 Who and what are we really? What is it we really want to do in our communities?  Have we expanded our own vision, our poetry, our listening, to hear, understand and include that for which our communities long?  What it is that we can authentically offer them? Do we know and care about their heartbeats?  We are the safekeepers of humans, of communities of humans.  If we can believe we are essential to our communities, that we are co-creators of a place in which people can come together to discover each other and expand their vision, the force of this belief forms the perception we have of ourselves, and the perception our community has of who we are and what we have to offer them.  Moments of discovery and ’the joy of finding things out’ happen when people come together to connect and to share their thoughts and their stories. Can our communities share their stories in our spaces?

 

 If community is what we offer, I believe we are the places to which people will come. Our hallways, my music, must be open in such a way as to invite them into our places, our poetry.  If we are as passionate about bringing our news as we are of our news, I believe we will become the co-creators of places of meaning, insight and community, and we will thrive.