I believe the future of leadership is #OpenLeadership and self-knowledge is a key part of the foundation to this, so sometimes I step into choosing to share where I am on life’s journey and what I am musing on.
Specifically, I am musing yesterday and today on the power of romance, idealism and romanticism. We can all be inspired in many ways in our life and work, and at the moment, this is a theme I am drawn to write about.
Yesterday I wrote: “Leadership: Romance, Life in Full Colour and Magical Reality“, and around one of those three themes, “Life in Full Colour”, I mused on Frida Kahlo and how her life oscillated between the vibrantly colourful and the darkest of darks.
I adore Kahlo, and I also adore the amazing curation of art (in many forms of Maria Popova of Brainpickings.org). Her work is wonderful and, like her friend, Amanda Palmer (see more on Amanda from me here, I’ve written about her several times), she is funded by her tribe, through contributions to her website. If you love her work as I do, please do contribute.
Maria has posted about Kahlo numerous times, and in: “Frida Kahlo’s Passionate Hand-Written Love Letters to Diego Rivera” we truly can sense, as Maria puts it:
“Kahlo’s love letters to Rivera…stretching across the twenty-seven-year span of their relationship, bespeak the profound and abiding connection the two shared, brimming with the seething cauldron of emotion with which all fully inhabited love is filled: elation, anguish, devotion, desire, longing, joy.”
Now, to another Brainpickings article: “Cry, Heart, But Never Break: A Remarkable Illustrated Meditation on Loss and Life”
Maria opens her piece with stunning lines of transcendent beauty from this gorgeous book, and that truly speak to the idea of “Life in Full Colour”.
“Who would enjoy the sun if it never rained?
Who would yearn for the day if there were no night?”
As Maria puts it: “Now comes a fine addition to the most intelligent and imaginative children’s books about making sense of death — the crowning jewel of them all, even.”
To apply Dave Eggers’ book title, this book is “a heartbreaking work of staggering genius”, and you can capture the essence and her thoughts in Maria’s article.
One piece I share that truly moved me:
“Some people say Death’s heart is as dead and black as a piece of coal, but that is not true. Beneath his inky cloak, Death’s heart is as red as the most beautiful sunset and beats with a great love of life.”
A wonderful addition to any library, hardback edition here.
