Karen
Today, I am so excited to be in conversation with Brooke Hofsess. Brooke is a coach, a scholar, and an artist. And we're going to be talking today about her work, which is rooted in the pursuit of leadership as self expression.
So Brooke, you and I are fellow academics. We're also coaches who work with academics, and so we know each other through those channels. We're also both in the arts, which I think might have to do or have something to do with our instant connection, perhaps!
I have to say your newsletter is one of the most anticipated emails in my inbox every month. They are visually gorgeous and so insightful and supportive. I always take away something profound. So do go follow Brooke’s newsletter, sign up for her newsletter, so you can get that wisdom in your inbox as well. I am so delighted to connect with you, Brooke and to learn more about your beautiful and affirming approach to leadership. Welcome.
Brooke
Thank you so much. It's such a delight to be here. And there was a spark for me immediately. I think I landed on something that you had produced through Instagram and it was like, oh! This feels like a real full circle moment after you know following along your journey. So thank you, Karen, I really appreciate you letting me share some ideas.
Karen
Wonderful. So tell us about yourself!
Brooke
Yeah, I'd love to. So currently, I work within academia, as you mentioned, and have taken my scholarship around professional learning, and mentoring, through very creative relational approaches into the realm of coaching, and as a huge surprise to me, into the realm of leadership coaching. And yes, I think my way of being in the world as an artist really has a lot to do with my perspectives on leadership, my perspectives on mentoring and being the sort of guide that I think is actually really helpful.
To bring that down into the concrete that is really present in my scholarship is this idea of being an external mentor. So a lot of the folks that I have co-conspired with, in my scholarly practice, were my students or my graduate students who have gone on to do brave, bold work in the world. And I've really been interested in what happens after the relationship is allowed to shed those evaluatory, hierarchical pieces, and how it changes where we're able to go in terms of their growth, their transformation, they're becoming.
Even though I think for a lot of people, at first glance, they don't see the connections between coaching and scholarship, they are so layered and rich and nuanced for me in my work, and one really informs the other.
Karen
Can you tell me more about this connection between your scholarly work and your identity as an artist, and your interest in leadership and mentorship?
Brooke
Such a beautiful question. I think right away, you know, leaving art school, making my way in the world, I realized that a lot of the opportunities that were put in front of me, to learn and continue to grow, felt very static, like they were opportunities to sit, receive information, go back to my desk, or my practice and do that thing. And there weren’t a lot of opportunities for creative play, what I really cared about, deepening of relationships and true mentorship. And that struck me right away.
By landing in burnout, by landing on my knees in burnout early in my professional career, and realizing that those pieces weren't just add-ons, they were vital to my flourishing as an artist, as a teacher and eventually as a researcher. And so my scholarship really became a way to play around and see how those pieces spoke to others, and how we could create ruptures in standardized systems and bureaucracies, and little openings where we just got to know a slightly different part of ourselves, or see ourselves from a slightly different angle. And how that could really nourish and feed where we were going and the kind of things that we cared about.
Karen
What does your artwork look like?
Brooke
So I work in paper, but I don't make anything very practical. So I love to stitch on paper. I love to sculpt with paper. I love to really stretch the limits of the material, embed things in paper, all of that, binding books.
Karen
What comes to me is that you're looking at the paper, or engaging with the paper, far beyond a kind of two-dimensional object - the way that we often sort of collapse paper into two dimensions.
Brooke
Oh, I love that. Yeah, I'm always really excited by the sensory play that papermaking affords. If you have gotten any glimpses into a paper making studio, it's vats of water in pulp. And there's just so much there. The papers all come from different plants, so there's these earthy smells, depending on if you're working with cotton or abaca. And, yeah, there's just so many layers, I think, to the sensory experience, just being in the presence of a paper studio. That really calls to me.
Karen
You're giving me this sense of, this desire to be in the studio again. As an art historian, I'm so privileged to be able to teach in the art building and to be able to walk through the studios on my way to teach. I'm currently away on a research fellowship, it's I've not had that opportunity, and I'm having this deeply embodied craving.
Brooke
I can understand that completely. It's being in the presence of people working in the studio. It's like a hum in the background in my life. And it has been for so many years that even small breaks away from that, I feel it in a palpable way.
Karen
I think that there's a vitality to it, that folks who are not around it may not really grasp. My dad is a scientist and the way of being in the lab…we would go to the to the lab when I was a kid on the weekends, so my dad could finish things up, and just the smell and the way that he was always building things. I think that there's so much in common with the art studio.
Brooke
The word that comes up in that description for me is tinkering. Tinkering with the ongoing relationship or question and really attending to all the different moving parts of a lab.
Karen
I love that so much. And I think one of the things that I've been experimenting with a lot in my own work lately is how do I bring that sensory, that physical kind of tinkering into my scholarship into my production of scholarship, because I think it makes such a difference, to engage that full spectrum of my existence, rather than just sitting at the computer and writing.
Brooke
Oh, my gosh, that resonates so deeply with me. And I feel like that's been one of my greatest leadership challenges in the academy is how to do that. And how to change the culture of what academic production looks like in that eventual flattening on the page.
Karen
I'm thinking of your newsletter that arrived in my inbox, I think, today or yesterday. And you have a story about meetings, and the grind of the kinds of meetings that we attend, and how you were really trying to shift that dynamic. And I'm wondering how tinkering kind of fits in with that.
Brooke
Yes. My approach as a department chair was very scrappy and iterative. I was constantly thanking my faculty and my team for the grace that they gave me to do that tinkering. I played around with all kinds of ideas and structures, showing up to meetings with a gift, a beautiful notebook for everybody in the room. Just little unexpected moments of “I see you, you matter to me.” That really, I think, made a difference, and you could see it in the levity of the group. Starting meetings with a check in which was completely new, something that I do in my teaching that was completely new to faculty meetings. But it led to so many friendships, people getting drinks after classes ended for this semester. I think that is one of the things I'm most grateful for, the trust that my team and my faculty gave me to do that tinkering. Because it's really important.
Karen
And it's countercultural.
Brooke
Yes, yes.
Karen
In my department, we have a tradition of talking about bad TV when we first get together for our meetings. It levels the playing field so beautifully to discover that the most dignified senior member of our department, he loves Outlander, for example. It just creates such a shift.
Brooke
Oh, that is wonderful. That brings me just joy. Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah, we would do things like, okay, first faculty meeting of the year, introduce yourself through a moment of connection you had with your practice over the summer—but please don't mention your rank. Please don't mention the kinds of things that automatically come out of our mouths when we interact with each other, and that create that playing field. Yeah, I'm gonna take that bad TV prompt in my back pocket!
Karen
You mentioned earlier that you're interested in leadership, and pursuing these questions about leadership came as a surprise to you. And I'd love to know more about what brought you into this sphere, what brought you into this space of reflecting on leadership and supporting folks as leaders?
Brooke
I love that question so much, Karen. There were a lot of things that happened, I think, in the last few years that were really impactful for me. And I think becoming a mother really kicked off. I've always been a person that's drawn to reflection, and self-inquiry, and play, and all of that kind of introspective world. But there was something about becoming a mom that put that in conversation with another person at a level that I had not experienced. And I think it opened up places in me that I hadn't really looked before. And words like leadership that I had a sort of wholescale rejection for, because of leadership that I didn't want to embody. And so becoming a mom, in my own way, happened around the same time that I had also made tenure. I felt emboldened to really go for what I wanted to go for in terms of new lines of research.
And I also became aware that I have a neurodivergent identity. All of these things that just were like peeling back the layers and seeing my leadership for what it was. And then there's a reason why I hadn't seen it reflected in the broader culture—because it's a unique vantage point. And really anchoring into that has changed my relationship. A big part of that unhooking has been grounding myself in my own versions of leadership and my own ways of self-expressing that light me up and that are so imperfect, and so good enough in so many moments. And that's perfect.
Karen
That word, tinkering, comes up for me.
Brooke
Yes, yes.
Karen
I worked with a faculty member who shared something so profound about the way that they were thinking about leadership. They were deeply introverted, and they said, I'm not a leader, I can't be a leader because leaders are not introverts. It was just such an interesting insight. We worked together on visualizing introverted leadership. And it was so freeing for them and, and also for me, to visualize and to really think about who is an introverted leader? What does introverted leadership look like? And I think it opened my eyes to the deep stereotypes of leadership that we have in our culture, but also specifically in academia.
Brooke
Yes, yes. And your story, your memory, is bringing me right back to the first day of our department chair training, when they brought in all these department chairs from all different fields and disciplines to give us pieces of advice. I was hearing things like, keep your door open all the time. If you have deep focus work to do, do it at night or on the weekends. Make yourself available for 20 minutes after faculty meetings, in case people want to chit chat with you. It was all about extroverted visibility.
Karen
…My face is just a mask of horror right now…
Brooke
And I could just feel myself shrinking. And finally, this one speaker came up and said, Yeah, okay, you know, that's all fine and good. But I'm an introvert, and here's what I do. And I was so grateful, because it just reopened that part of me that was just, Maybe this isn't for you. There's been so many moments in my leadership journey, where there were those little offerings from other people of just showing a little bit of an honest, vulnerable glimpse of themselves, where I could take a deeper breath, drop my shoulders and say, Oh, yeah. Okay. There's another way here.
Karen
What occurs to me as well is that we are white women. And we are feeling that even in many of the white leaders that we see, we're not seeing ourselves. And I'm thinking about for marginalized folks on our campuses, these feelings of separation of distance from embodying leadership, can really have such terrible effects on them as individuals, but also on our institutions, on our communities, on our campus culture. I'm using words that don't feel as kind of sticky and deep as I want them to, but I think that there's something here about reimagining leadership in a way that invites the participation of all kinds of difference.
Brooke
Oh, absolutely. I think one of the most common—I'm curious if you see this in your coaching practice to Karen—I think one of the most common sticky points when folks come to me to work is this deep values misalignment between who they are and how they want to show up, and the existing over-culture at their institution, and how exhausting and draining and laborious that is.
And to have someone in their realm in their corner saying, Yeah, you know, it's not you. These are really good ideas that are going unrecognized. Your passion isn't too much. You speaking up doesn't make you a troublemaker, and on and on and on. And I think that is something that I'm really passionate about when I bring leadership development to different campuses beyond my home institution is, let's look at the existing development structures. And let's look for the biases and the old ways of doing leadership that are built in that really haven't been interrogated to the degree that would be really helpful.
Karen
What are the consequences for tinkering, for trying out new ways? Because I think that there are sometimes institutional consequences, there are sometimes kind of communal consequences. And sometimes we imagine consequences that may or may not really be aligned with what might happen.
Brooke
That's bringing to mind a conversation I had with my coach around a risk I wanted to take with my scholarship. I wanted to do a piece that was a little bit of a departure. And I had been invited to give a talk at a kind of prestigious conference. She looked at me and said, Oh, so it's low stakes. And it just took my breath away, because I'm like, No, this is very, very high stakes! This is very, very high stakes, I know exactly who's going to be in the room, all these landmark thinkers in my discipline. And she said, you're just giving a paper, nobody's gonna get hurt. Someone may roll their eyes, you're gonna survive it. And without trying to minimize the consequences, sometimes I think, for me, the imagined consequences, and the ways that I can elevate the stakes, when there is more room for tinkering then I'm letting myself witness and live into.
Karen
And that self-censorship piece, the self-diagnosis of too-much-ness is a piece that we can practice. I think that is a space of autonomy and agency within these institutions that are oppressive. I find that space of rethinking, questioning my assumptions about what is possible for me and for my colleagues, to be such a rich space.
Brooke
It really is. And it makes me think about supporting junior faculty towards, let's say, a third-year reappointment. And as a department chair, I took that obligation really seriously, the consequences of supporting these folks to be successful. We also happened to have a group of junior scholars come in that were more interdisciplinary than we had ever seen in our academic unit, which is why they were brought in. And so, it was really my obligation as a leader to put the ownership on the promotion and tenure committee and the senior faculty to support the work that they came here to do, rather than coach the junior faculty to streamline their work and tighten it up and put it in this nice little box where everybody can understand it. I think that's what excites me about leadership and the change that it can bring. If we say we want a more inclusive, welcoming academy, how are we making that? How are we tinkering in that direction, while also holding the consequences of the structures that that do exist.
Karen
And that is a joy of leadership in academia, that it is possible for us to collaborate to change policy, to work together, to advocate for others. There are real possibility possibilities within many institutions, maybe not all, but certainly within many institutions, for real change. And I think that is so exciting and beautiful and hard. It's one of the most, the most compelling things about academic leadership for me.
Brooke
And where my mind kind of sparks to next is, I'm having a memory of a client who used that bureaucratic sort of sensibility and the know-how to get in there and change policy to advocate for her aging parents, or her teenage children. I think sometimes we forget it's a really deep and powerful skill set about creating impactful policy change that is alive in academic culture. But we can also take that into other communities and relationships that we care about and leverage it for social change.
Karen
I love that you mentioned self-advocacy, because I think so many academics struggle with self-advocacy. And I think it might undermine our understanding of leadership, or it might shut off opportunities to practice leadership earlier in our careers, when we are either afraid or too humble for self-advocacy.
Brooke
Yes, yes. A lot of junior faculty that I've worked with have felt this dissonance between being told to take ownership of programs or projects, but also feeling like they don't really have any kind of leverage, any meaningful kind of substance to make the changes that they really want to see.
And so I think where the self advocacy comes in, to use the language of one of my mentors, Joanna Lindenbaum, is finding the philosophy of choice. Are you actively choosing to throw your hands up and just go work on something else? Are you actively choosing to make this one incremental change? Are you actively choosing to take this colleague out to lunch so that you can figure out where are the points of connection and how to get them on board with your vision?
I think that a really big piece is that we can't change everything all at once. But where do we want to dig in a little bit around what we're choosing to do and how that really changes the game, the internal game because it can feel really disenchanting to feel like you're not moving the needle.
Karen
Tell me more about this internal peace.
Brooke
I find, and this is an overgeneralization, but I find that many academics, myself included, have gotten a lot of our self-esteem and our self-concept around being very good at specific things. And being able to see what the expectation is, and go all in applying our brilliance to those expectations and being successful in a lot of ways. Not that we haven't had rejections or setbacks. But I think that sometimes the inner challenges that keep us out of our leadership are the ways that our leadership is diffused by people pleasing, perfectionism, overworking.
For a long time, I mean, this makes me really tender to say this out loud, but for a long time, I was afraid to work in a balanced way. Because I thought that that was my edge. I thought that working all the time was what made me me. And it's not it's just not.
Karen
That just sends a knife to my heart. It just resonates with me so, so deeply.
Brooke
My brilliance waits for me. It shows up. I make myself a cup of coffee and I sit down, and things happen. They happen when I rest, and they happen when I don't rest. But I know that I feel better about my life, and who I am and how I'm showing up for everyone. Not just the outer relationships, how I show up for myself and my family and those intimate moments when it's easy to be exhausted and snappy or what have you from overwork. Right? My life is kinder and my confidence is more impactful, and I think that's why I'm so drawn to your work, Karen, is this idea of Good Enough. My sense is that by lowering the pressure, by lowering mistakes just a little bit, and learning to trust that there's so much more oxygen, there's so much more space. And I really think that, for me, that's what makes leadership and inside job.
I saw a meme recently, and I'm sorry, I don't know where it came from. But it was about the person who's the most powerful in the room is the person who's the calmest. You've probably seen it. The person who's taking the deepest breath has the most oxygen. It's that, oh, so it's not high stakes.
Karen
What comes to me is this idea, again, of tinkering. And how the way of being that you've just described facilitates tinkering. So yes, our brilliance waits for us, what a beautiful phrase. And perhaps, when we are better rested, when we are not so focused on getting it right, perhaps there's an expansion of that ability to tinker, and to play and to experiment that might express our leadership, our scholarship, whatever, in new and differently brilliant ways.
Brooke
Oh, it's so beautifully said. And, you know, there's a lot of ways I could define leadership, but the one that comes up, and what you just shared, is around this idea that leadership is showing up for the complexities of our time. Right. I think it's a choice, going back to choice, I think it's a choice, to choose to be rested, or choose to not force oneself to be extroverted, when that is not your way. To choose the kinds of guides and mentors who really listen and lean in, who aren't afraid to reflect your gifts back to you. All of that helps us opt out of competition and scarcity and the things that keep us running and out of breath.
Karen
I have this image of a network, transplant yet strong, that maybe exists outside of and around our institutional webs and networks that are less flexible, less supportive, but maybe these networks that we have that support our work can be just as strong as those columns on the library.
Brooke
Absolutely. The phrase connective tissue comes up for me. What you're describing, yeah, the columns are going to be there, the structures are going to be there. But how do we forge that connective tissue and the spaces in between? I love the part of your Good Enough Manifesto where you talk about the spontaneous lunch dates. And one of my very, very closest colleagues, we would have this long coffee at the end of this semester. And we would look at each other at the end and say, why don't we do this more often? Why do we wait? This is so good for us on so many levels. Why do we get too busy to remember how good this feels?
In my work I talk about the leadership atelier as the container for my coaching, and that comes from this very idea that a lot of us are walking around academia or the world wearing a very ill-fitting garment. Wearing something that is too restrictive or too big and it’s uncomfortable, it's burdensome. And so how do we create something that is custom made? That has all the beauty of a work of art, and that is lovingly stitched around you. And my sense is that that's possible, using the old garment, right? You know, you could take some of that fabric, you could take some of that canvas, and you could remake it in the right conditions.
Karen
That is so beautiful. I'm also connecting this idea of the atelier, which I'm familiar with in your work, and yet, it never occurred to me before now that that, of course, is a structure of apprenticeship and mentorship within the art world in art history.
Brooke
It's a tinkering space, a place of honoring side-by-side learning. And that's really important to me, as a coach and a mentor. I'm in this with my clients, and we're making it up together, right?
Karen
That space where there are—in this historical example—there's the practicing, established artist who has invited younger or emerging artists into this space. And there is this collaborative spirit, this idea of learning from and with each other.
Brooke
Yeah, that side-by-side, do-with-me kind of energy has been a big part of my scholarship and has definitely shown up in my coaching approach. And I think it gets at one of the leadership paradoxes: that we want to build things to break. We don't want to build things to last forever and ever and ever and be cemented. We want our mentees to evolve structures and systems beyond where we can imagine because they bring what's new, they bring what's alive for their time, and what's meaningful to them.
A tricky part about leadership, for a lot of people, is not tinkering with things that already exist, for fear of breaking it and being blamed for it. And also, not leaving space for tinkering after us, you know, really holding on too tight to the things that are policies and practices that we invent, and maybe not encouraging iterations after, because of what that says about us.
Karen
And what comes up for me around that is this idea of fear and scarcity. This sense that while our labor is so limited and so strained in academia right now that if we're going to do this, we're going to do it, and we're going to do it for good, we're never going to revisit it. But of course, we know that's ridiculous, because this is probably something that was done 10 years ago, that we're redoing.
Brooke
Yeah, and for different reasons and purposes, right. I remember when we had two new disciplines join our department, and we had to do a complete rethinking of our promotion and tenure documents, because we had different types of makers and designers and artists coming in that were not represented.
And what's been really interesting to me, too, is DIEB work on campus, when even just a couple of years later those documents were almost immediately outdated when it came to issues of inclusion and belonging. And nobody wanted to look at it because we all have too much to do. But it was agreed that when we have the capacity, this is going to rise up to the top of the list because we can do so much better and we know better now, we need to do better.
Karen
I think sometimes we think that's a failure. When in fact, it's certainly not a failure. It's normal. It's the way that our ideas change. Maybe it's even a mark of the success, of knowing better, and now we get to do better.
Brooke
I don't know what this brings up for you, but it strikes me is that that ethos, if that is the ethos that the leadership is creating in an academic unit or on a team, it does have a totally different feel. My capacity feels very connected to the way you're describing that work. Because it's about seeing in the policies how we are evolving, how we're listening, and attending to anything that's alive.
Karen
So this makes me think about some of my own challenges with leadership recently. I think I mentioned that I'm on a research fellowship, so I've been away from campus for a while. And it's been this opportunity for dreaming a little bit about what leadership means to me. What do I need of my leadership? What do I want from my leadership? And as contemplate returning to campus in the fall, I've really been struggling a little bit with how to think about that.
Brooke
These are really big questions. And something that comes up for me around the word dream, I love that you chose the word dreaming, I don't know how this lands with you. There's an awareness of what you could create in the imaginal realm and what you can create in the waking realm when you go back.
Karen
That feels so evocative for me. And what I like about it is that it suggests that this dreaming—which feels a little bit distant, I'm geographically distant, I kind of know what's going on, but I don't have that intimate sensory experience of faculty meetings. Which is maybe a nice break, definitely a nice break! But I wonder if I've been downplaying dreaming because of that distance, and what it seems like maybe you're opening up for me is this idea that dreaming is intimately connected to the awakening or the return.
Brooke
I wonder the benefits for your department if you go all in on the dream. Upon waking there's always that moment where you take the dream and kind of shake off the sleep and get into what does it mean, or what do I want to take from this? So just to spend time dreaming for now and trust that the waking will come. You'll be back on your campus and shaking off this whole experience that you've had while you're away, and then there will be a strong connection to parts of the dream and other parts will fall away or feel less important.
Karen
I think resisting the rush to a decision or to closure of some kind…which feels uncomfortable, it feels deeply uncomfortable to leave things so open. And at the same time, I don't want to make a decision. There's no decision, there is no one path.
Brooke
Oh, that's so beautiful. And you know that the other thing that really strikes me about what you shared was what do you need? It just feels like such a problematic question for so many of us. What do we need? And what do we want? These are really opening questions that are often kind of stunners. And I'm curious when you think about your best leadership, what was in place for you that maybe you didn't even know that you needed?
Karen
You know, I got an email yesterday from a colleague in a different department who wanted to see documents from our external review that we did a couple years ago. So I'm thinking about that process. It's very present to me, because I had to go back and add all these folks to the document. That was a space where I was department chair, when we did our external review, which was also during the pandemic, the focus years of the pandemic. And one of the things that I felt so strongly in that moment was a kind of expansion of possibility, which, even though it was so challenging, I think I've talked to many folks who've felt similarly. That this was this time of being able to do things differently.
And because we're an art history department, I thought, why are we doing all this writing? I don't want to write an external review. And so we ended up creating a slide deck with tons of images and really focused text. And it was fun, dare I say that our external review was fun! Because it was so different, it felt really aligned to our skills as a department, and to my strengths as well. And when I think about that, I want more, I want more of that, I want more expansion, I want more letting go of the assumptions. What would be possible for us and for me if I didn't take those precedents so seriously?
Brooke
I've got full body chills. Yes, and I'm just so present to the ripples that this is already creating. You have this muscle memory now, what it feels like to be energized and expansive and motivated. And having fun, having joy in your work, even the most…I mean, doesn't get much more bureaucratic than the external review, dare I say! But the fact that other colleagues are seeking out your wisdom around this, and it's not even that they will go do the same thing, it's the invitation and seeing how you leveraged your joy and your creativity and your wisdom.
And also think about that part of your manifesto, where you talk about the facets of wisdom that come from bringing our whole emotional selves to the academy. How does that get to play in your leadership, because you were lit up when you were talking about the slide images! It's so expressive for you. It's a place where your brilliant shows up for you in that curation, in that combining text and image together.
Karen
It's so funny to me, because intellectually, I'm totally on board with what I said, bringing our emotional selves in. When I think about it for myself, I think, oh, gosh…my breath gets tight. Isn't that so funny? Something that I absolutely, truly believe in? And it's also hard.
Brooke
Of course it is. I mean, there's a lot of defensiveness in the academy. And one of my very most favorite memories of something that happened on my campus in terms of self-expression and leadership was a colleague of mine who was teaching in my program. We had known each other for years. She was also going through her dissertation process at the institution. And when it came time to defend her dissertation, she said, this is just not how I want to show up for my work. This is my body of work, this is the last 30 years of my life, and I don't want to be in the energy of defending it. I want to be in the energy of my community upholding my body of work. And not that she didn’t wanted to be challenged, she wanted to get other people's opinion and thoughts and perspectives on her work, but in a very, very different energy.
As we recreate these policies and structures, that emotional wholeness will come easier. I have a totally different sense of my body of showing up to a dissertation upholding than I do a defense. I'm literally gripping my hands to go about defending my work, and how even just the placeholder language signifies so much on an embodied level.
Karen
The images are so different than come to me, you know, a dissertation defense is rooted in a kind of medieval examination sort of format. And when you say upholding, I have a whole different architectural imagination, with medieval robes, I think of everyone wearing robes and the homogeneity of it. And when I think of an upholding, I think of this open space with colorful, wonderful humans, it's just it's such a different energy. So beautiful.
Brooke
It is, and her leadership in that way changed forever doctoral dissertations on our campus in that program. And now when you go in, there's colorful fabric draped over the very executive wood table, and friends and family bring potluck dishes to share, and you might sit down in your seat and someone has put a soul card in front of you. It's amazing.
Karen
I'm wiping away tears here. It's such a shift.
Brooke
Such a shift. And yeah, and it wasn't that long ago, maybe four or five years ago. It makes me feel that it is possible, that the kinds of things that we're talking about aren't just dreams, that we are rooting those dreams, we're giving them new ground.
Karen
And that these dreams have life in the waking world.
Brooke
Yes. Beautiful. I love that.
Karen
I think that's a perfect place to end our conversation.
Brooke
Thank you so much. This has been a total joy and delight.
Karen
Thank you so much, Brooke.
Brooke
Thank you, Karen.
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