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Lead with Love: What a wonderful world

Gina Murdock/Lead With Love

What a wonderful world it is. Caterpillars turn into butterflies and water falling from the sky can turn light into rainbows. Double rainbows even! Frogs and birds and whales sing while frolicking in marshes, trees and oceans. Rivers carve through rocks with their patience and sometimes pounding force to deliver nutrients into the sea. Fish swim in schools and I imagine they must love learning and starfish open their hearts on rocks. Dolphins ride waves and sometimes smile at surfers. 

People fall in love and experience the weightlessness of Divinity (and maybe even learn it is part of them and does not belong to that other person). Trees grow out of rocks, flowers sprout from sidewalks. People still stop to help. Even in our darkest moments as humans and all of the things that are so glorious that we inadvertently (or not) destroy with our mere presence on this planet, we must pause to reflect, celebrate and acknowledge what a wonderful world it is. 

My life is punctuated by the beautiful and miraculous. It is the period and the exclamation point of every day. What made me stop? Nature. What made me excited and in awe? Nature. When I notice the beautiful things then I see more of them. We must stop to notice. We must slow to notice. We must not buy into the hype to notice. The less I believe in the division we witness and experience everywhere we turn, the more I remember our wholeness. We are part of this miraculous planet, our bodies and minds as miraculous, creative and complex as the vast oceans and jungles. Whatever is God is part of us, and the unfathomable infinite everything that surrounds us and is in us. Imagine the depth of our awareness, the complexity of our consciousness, the brilliance of it all and how we choose to spend SO MUCH TIME and energy fighting to be right and make someone else wrong.



I declare, admit and surrender to the fact that I am VERY, VERY, VERY upset and pissed and triggered as hell about what is going on in our world. Senseless wars, death and destruction, the absolute insanity of the gun violence. The whimpering of spineless senators hiding behind fake morality. The obliteration of our rights. 

Still, life is so beautiful. Still. I know I create my own hell by judging people. I don’t see the beauty when I judge people. I miss the miraculous when I judge people. And sometimes I allow myself to do it. I forgive myself for judging myself and others and then I try, try again to lead with love the best way I know how. It’s not by squashing or oppressing my thoughts. I have to give them a voice. When I hear them I can understand how hurt and angry I am that things I care about — the health of our planet, women, children — seem to be in peril because of decisions made by people who do not represent what I know to be true. 




In this world we cannot “check out” and just look to the rainbows and butterflies and ignore all else because we are meant to see it, or it wouldn’t be there. It wouldn’t be in each of our pockets — all of the wars and famine and greed and lies — it is there for us. What do we do with it? How do we process it? For me, the more negativity I consume the more negative I become. I have made a conscious choice to focus on myself and my own actions, to help where I can help with time or treasure, to offer sincerely, not out of obligation. My choice is to see the wonderful world. To marvel in it. To know there is cancer and to also know people survive cancer. To know there was and is slavery and that people become free. To know there is truth even when we are surrounded by lies and manipulation. To know we can transform from the depths of the chrysalis we seem to be in, the dark, dank, inert, oblivion, into creatures of awareness with wings meant to fly through the rainbows (until rainbows are outlawed because they are gay).

Gina Murdock is the founder of Lead with Love, an Aspen-based nonprofit dedicated to shifting culture from fear to love and a board member of CASA of the Ninth. CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) of the Ninth is a volunteer-based nonprofit organization serving Pitkin, Garfield, and Rio Blanco counties that trains and supervises volunteers to represent the best interests of our most vulnerable citizens – victims of child abuse, neglect, and severe domestic conflict. For more information about CASA, go to https://casaoftheninth.org/