Julie's piece reminds me of how fun and compelling it can be to be around people who have a natural inclination towards truly thinking about what a single word means and how it may be defined and redefined over time, provoking me to do the same. Looking at a term in a new light from a diverse perspective always helps me to broaden my outlook and dig deeper. And I find it so cool how Julie alludes to her knowledge of the Chinese language to ponder over the meaning of English words, yet still is very open to varying interpretations to reach a more keen and profound clarity for herself. Thanks Julie!

- Amanda

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Amanda and I write lead ins to many of the pieces in part to provide a sense of the space of this backbeat of the community and perhaps to share what effect the writer had on one of us. I suspect this note from Julie might pack such a huge wallop for so many of us that my lead in is that I have no lead in that might fully do justice. I will keep processing for a long long while. Thank you Julie Sun! Pip

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(PIP NOTE: BETA #3 I think this note is about freedom and joy and passion and how they all mix together and perhaps that we don’t typically cultivate such spaces and/or spirit… Julie is the third of our ten writers I am so happy to spotlight… I aimed to foster a group of ten who would share deep values of community and would write from a space of "part of us all as a group of 260 ‘community advancers’” and not write “at us all”… And that each of the 10 would have uncorrelated thinking and topics that somehow would all work together inside the wrapper of a similar 60-second thought form… we also wanted the perspective of personal experience not concepts and our learning as opposed to our “expertise”… I will NOT be writing my lead-in like such for long… instead I will leave it to a professional like Amanda to build bridges as she does juuuust below.)

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