Letting Up Despite Great Faults

This week I had the opportunity to attend the pre-Women’s Conference mixer event hosted by Maria Shriver and a slew of other influential and inspiring women who are making great professional and personal strides in society.  Will try to get tickets to the actual conference day itself next year, as this time around it sold out in 2 hours!  I did meet some wonderful organizations, handed out a few of my new business cards, and got plenty of free samples.

What I really got out of the conference though goes hand-in-hand with the title of this post-  Letting Up Despite Great Faults- and I’ll explain it in just a minute.   The underlying message was that we are all here to share our specific and unique talents with the world.  Each one of us possesses gifts that we must honor and cultivate by actually using them and sharing them with others. I’m talking about our passions, what we innately love doing, what make us want to get up in the morning.  Dedicating ourselves to nurturing these talents allows us to not only honor our soul but allows us to share and participate with the world in the fullest, most satisfying way possible.  So by being authentic, listening to our inner voice, and striving to use and exhibit our passion is the best thing we have going for ourselves.  We may not be masters or leaders in whatever we do, but that is not the point.  Our job is to share what we have, to the best of our ability. And sometimes that requires that we just let go and give in to what we already know inside to be right.

This is not novel.  In fact I’m sure you’ve heard it before. I know I have. Even though it sounds quite logical, we need to hear it time and time again because for some reason we all have this exquistely well-honed quality of not allowing ourselves to feel great about enjoying what we do, to really love our work, to seek out jobs and opportunities that give us pure joy.   For some reason we feel like it’s cheating, that we are taking the easy way out because it actually feels good.  We dramatize the drudgery of the boring stuff as if it adds accolades to our resume, as we meanwhile hit our heads to the wall whispering…is this really what we are here for?

As this post now diverges off course, I return to the title.  A very special friend of mine, Mike Lee, is the master talent behind the band, Letting Up Despite Great Faults.  I’ve known Mikey since freshman year in the dorms at UCLA, back when the Lakers and the Smashing Pumpkins were all we talked about, when e-mail was in its infancy and we’d exchange them back and forth between my 3^rd floor room and his 8^th.    From there we accompanied each other through graduation, on to the real world, and managed to live in the same apartment complex as neighbors in Silver Lake (honestly who gets to live next to a best friend as an adult?) Mike is the kind of guy that moves you out of your furnished apartment when you are more than a thousand miles across the globe and can’t do it yourself.  Mike is also an incredibly talented musician who has a day job to pay the bills and exercises his passion in the free moments that lie squished between the traffic and noise of the working world.  He just produced his second self-released album that has already gotten tons of acclaim from the music world and he’s prepping for his first round of live shows, where he’ll be joined by his band members.

So this is my little shout out to all of us who have beautiful talents that need to be shared with the world.  It takes courage to put yourself out there, exposed and vulnerable, but the rewards are great.  Here’s to Mike and his band, Letting Up Despite Great Faults.  I’m grateful to have friends like Mike who live humbly and honor their spirit, trekking down the creative path, shedding the self-consciousness and just letting go to share their gifts with the world.

Check out their site for song samples then go buy some at iTunes or come to a show!

(This is probably the same expression Mike will have after reading this post. Some things never change. My hair clearly has.)

~ by maureenmoore on October 28, 2009.