 Hi my name is Dani and welcome to Esoteric Moment. Today I am back in my community garden and I wanted to talk to you about leadership. Community gardens are this great place where people work together to create a whole garden, but they all have individual plots where they get to grow, plant, harvest, whatever they like, pretty much whenever they like. Whenever you bring a whole group of different people together there will be conflicts and it often is very helpful to have one or a few members of the community help guide the group so that there aren't conflicts with the larger neighborhood, so that the garden can accomplish big important improvements to the space and so that everyone gets along as well as possible. It can though however be very difficult to get people to step up in leadership roles and I find that this mirrors pagan communities in some respects. There are lots of people who want to be leaders and can be very vocal and prove to be wanting to be in a position of leadership for maybe the wrong reasons that it's more about power rather than working for the greater good of the community. But on the whole there are some really amazing leaders and teachers who work to make sure that the pagan community is doing as much than awesome. I have been a leader in a couple community gardens, one who I helped establish and start from the beginning and this one that I came into later and there are a few things that I learned that were really important I think. One listening more than talking is very challenging for me but is probably the most important thing when a leader is being called to be a leader. There's too much to learn and too many perspectives that you will disregard or miss entirely unless you take the time to listen and hear from the people who are different from you. In the community garden that might mean bringing in translators or learning a new language, focusing more on communicating in different ways. Maybe you're all online but you really need to call individual gardeners to communicate with them, finding different communication techniques and listening before talking in those methods is a great tip. The thing I wanted to bring up is that no one feels they're qualified. Maybe no one is an exaggeration but most people feel like they don't have the skills, they don't have the time, they don't have the connections to be a good leader. And in community gardens and I think the pagan community that just isn't true. We have some really amazing leaders who thought that they were just the wrong person for the job. That once they got started just thrive and accomplished amazing things for the garden and found new career paths and new things that they were really inspired by. Sometimes jumping into a leadership position is the best way to push your boundaries and try new things. And I hope that if you're joining a community garden you'll think about reaching out and being a leader in some way, running a committee, serving as an officer, just attending meetings. And I think in the pagan community we could really benefit from some more people stepping up and claiming that tighter leader and working to create the best community that we can have both online and in our local communities. If you would like to see more videos from the community garden let me know in the comments what kind of topics you'd like to hear about. And thanks for watching. As always may you find peace and the sacred growth.