Thank you for dropping by! Thursdays are Servant Hearts day. Gracious leaders around the world guest post to NorthFork’s blog, A Servant’s Heart, sharing their fabulous insights regarding the serving nature of leadership. We’re delighted you’ve joined us. Be prepared for a variety of experience!

Today, we are happy to welcome John Paul. John is first and foremost a friend. He is also an artist with a great passion for photography. You can discover for yourself the Beauty that radiates from John and his work on his site, The Jeweledway. From time to time, John embarks on photographic excursions to remote places around the world. He refers to these enlightened expeditions as VisionQuests. Do join him sometime! When he is not busy with his life’s work, you are likely to find him doing his part to make our world a better place in his professional role as an IT Strategist. For John, love is the important thing and he sees all of us, all of humanity, as an ocean—an ocean of love.

Tapping into Servant Leadership
by John Paul

In the past, as I first began thinking about the process of making photographs, I became immersed in a quest for meaning. It started with a visual exploration of discovery wherein I tried to understand what was taking place in the process of making an image. The intent was to develop a watchful eye and set of techniques that could be relied upon repeatedly during the image-making process. This effort quickly evolved into a greater grasp of other forces at hand, working in mysterious ways to contribute to a final image and my understanding of it.

Somehow, unknowns would happen or “come together” that contributed to a peak experience for me in making images that celebrated, illuminated, and inspired greater seeing and the acquisition of truth. Through these experiences and the image-making of others, I have come to see this process as a key ingredient for creating great images. Sometimes these forces seemingly take on a life of their own, separate from the photographer who becomes merely an instrument of a higher creative self.

It is as if a force or other mind has orchestrated events as such that place you as an artist or, rather, a channel for the message that is to be conveyed. Art is an ever-flowing exchange of discovery and meaning that enfolds and unfolds knowledge in meaningful relationships. This meaning is different for each viewer and yet somehow meaningful. How Art conducts this mystery in such a broad way remains a mystery. It is like the multiplicity and complexity was designed in advance.

I see servant leadership in much of the same light. If we are to expect the photographer or the artist to create and define their art, we place too great a burden upon the individual to perform and, as such, things become contrived, insincere, or ineffective. So it is, too, with performance as a leader. There is a higher guiding element that, in a sense, selects a person as a leader, the type that is followed somehow magically by the multitudes. It is so uncanny that it seems like destiny has chosen the leader who is willing to select or take hold of the commission from a higher source.

We cannot contrive leadership, force its performance, or even claim it to be our own. Leadership is something that is brought upon us in such fashion that it carries the broad support of many and relates on a multiplicity of levels. In the TED video below, the poet sees her muse on a distant horizon and takes aim at claiming her work as it passes overhead. For me, this is the leadership that is authentic and so needed in our world. One does not choose leadership – it chooses you. Are you ready to accept the challenge when leadership chooses you?