User:GYoung (WMF)

See http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Gyoung for the official blurb.

Thoughts about WMF
As I start to coalesce my thoughts about my role at WMF, I'd like to make them as visible as possible by putting them here. I wrote up this quick summary of some observations after my first month. User:Gyoung/WMFJan2012Thoughts

Some Quotes I Love:



 * “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” - Viktor Frankl


 * "How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradictions were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great passing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light." - Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams


 * "It does seem that we suffer from a collective cognitive dissonance. We know the children are starving; the ice caps really are melting. We know our designer sweats are connected to designer sweatshops; our automobiles to the turbid atmosphere; the food on our table to the dwindling water table and the chemicalized soil…We also know there’s already enough to feed, clothe, house, heal, and educate everyone, without exception. It’s less a shortage of resources than a short-changing of imagination: compassion being an ability to imagine – to see – the connection between everyone and everything, everywhere.” - from "Field Notes on a Compassionate Life" by Mark Ian Barasch


 * "This is the reality we live: aspiring to be our best, longing for and sometimes finding meaning and connection within ourselves and that which is larger than ourselves, we are undone by messy bathrooms, traffic jams, and burnt toast. I am not interested in a spirituality that cannot encompass my humanness….Beneath the small daily trials are harder paradoxes, things that the mind cannot reconcile but the heart must hold if we are to live fully: profound tiredness and radical hope; shattered beliefs and relentless faith; the seemingly contradictory longings for personal freedom and a deep commitment to others, for solitude and intimacy, for the ability to simply be with the world and the need to change what we know is not right about how we are living.” - Oriah Mountain Dreamer


 * "If not to hunger for the meaning of it all, then tell me what a soul is for? Why have the wings unless you’re meant to fly? And tell me please, why have a mind if not to question why?" - Yentl


 * "Not all who wander are lost." - J.R.R. Tolkien


 * "The rule of no realm is mine...But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, ... if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in the days to come. For I am also a steward. Did you not know?" - J.R.R. Tolkien