Is Servant Leadership part of Humanity’s Song and Dance?

I went to my eighth grade daughter’s parent-teacher conference this afternoon and came a way with a Chinese proverb worth remembering. Her art teacher showed me my daughter’s calligraphy project of the proverb “a bird does not sing because it has the answer, it sings because it has a song”. It seems that too often as human beings we have forgotten what our song really is. I like to believe that the practice of servant-leadership is more in line with “singing our song”, then it is about professing an answer.

And on these same lines, I came across some interesting questions from the Wisconsin Public Radio show “To the Best of our Knowledge” yesterday while driving my daughter’s home from doing some service work of their own. The host Jim Flemming was interviewing Ann Gibbons, the author of the book "The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors." Her book is about the teams of paleontologists she met in Africa who are studying four to six million year old fossils of human ancestors. At one point she discussed the significance of finding these fossils and the questions the searchers are asking, such as “How did this upright walking evolve, and why? Was it to dance?” I certainly hope that our ability to walk upright and at times dance, has to do with celebrating the creation that surrounds us, and not dominating it, or subduing it and our fellow human beings as our organizations and institutions so often seem to do.

One of my favorite sections from Don Frick’s autobiography of Robert Greenleaf is from the chapter titled “Awe of the Stars”. Don describes how Greenleaf had the opportunity to observe a great nebula through a telescope. Greenleaf exclaimed, “What a sight! I shook with awe and wonder at the majesty of all creation. This primitive unstructured feeling, the powerful sense of awe and wonder, is to me the source of religious feeling at its greatest depth.”

Like the bird that sings, or our first ancestor to dance, I like to believe that Robert Greenleaf came up with his ideas on servant leadership as a natural response to celebrate the joys of the universe that we present day humans are simply a part.

And for more on this I would encourage you to read the attached link that quotes Carl Sagan’s thoughts on the “pale blue dot” that shows up on today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day web-site and is posted above. Can you find the “pale blue dot” of Earth in the background of Saturn?