We Can All Be Bees!

I found this a while ago and thought it was a really great idea.  It was a really great way of summing things up.  It is a post written a while ago by a man who wanted to do something very broad and who had a vision for cross discipline, cross culture, and interconnectivity that is similar to what we are striving for.  Creating a community.

I remember when I was starting my short-lived mechanical engineering career at Clemson, we engaged in a conversation about whether or not bumble bees should fly. Theoretically, they should not, especially if you look at the structure of the bee based on initial perception rather than in-depth analysis. There is a big, fuzzy thing, that has these small wings and defies all gravity and slips the surly bonds of gravity to go aloft. Based on cursory glance, a bumble bee should not be able to fly, but it does.

I was asked earlier to form a plan for what I was doing with Winnie Mae's. I was told to define, delineate, and quantify so that we could put out a plan to others. I was told that things needed to be in black and white so that we could convince others of what we are doing, yet Winnie Mae's is lifting off the ground.

Since beginning this, there has been meeting, after meeting, after meeting with other groups and I see the same people in each of those meetings, no matter what they are for. With Winnie Mae's our meetings are growing. I sit in rooms now with people who have gone to church together, worked in the same building together, and who have lived in the same community for years and only knew each other by sight and not by name UNTIL they got involved with Winnie Mae's. We are getting bigger, yet there is a lightness and our feet are leaving the ground.

Winnie Mae's is now a room, a house where people who otherwise would not be caught dead in a room with someone else are now gathering together. There IS more that unites us than divides us. We are more the same than we care to recognize sometimes, but we are. Our members are hunters and hippies, black and white, well off and poor, but they all sit in the same room and they all make us fly.

A bumble bee is able to fly because its wings vibrate rather than act in direct reaction to muscle movement, like plucking the strings of a guitar. It is about movement. Other companies, organizations, and groups work on direct muscle. The throw money at things and through sheer force, conquer the force of gravity at the expense or whatever they need that weighs too much; that holds them back and often, it is those things they jettison that have great value.

I have been met with very few tasks that I think are impossible, but this is a problem I cannot solve so easily. Explain what Winnie Mae's is. Explain why it works and why it is able to fly and I cannot; at least not easily. It works because it works and it flies because it does. Each person adds their strength, but that strength is exponentially greater than its input.

The engineers in the room took some convincing, but the poet in me understood immediately and I changed my major to English.

I find myself looking at the ashes of this undertaking and the resilience of its creator and I am motivated.  Ready to go.  I could have written something similar, but I think this about sums it up.

We are all bumblebees and we are not supposed to fly, but we do.