With Gratitude. A letter from Susanne
The birth of the Lightyear HUB is possible due to the love and contribution of many many moments and human beings.
First and foremost gratitude to my dad, Ken Gablin for teaching me to be bold and belly laugh. To my mom, Trula Gablin, for being a Romper Room teacher and demonstrating creativity and intuition to this day.
To my husband Brett, for always believing that I am a gift, for letting me squeeze his hand within an inch of his life while important things happen, and for always standing in the back row of my programs, doing some type of exercise, smiling wide with his glorious gap.
To my eldest son Surya for raising ourselves together, being a great husband to Mandy and dad to Rhyder and Scout, and for bringing old soul energy into our family with such love and stability. To Chandra for teaching me about unconditional love, passion and how the brain works AND for having me meet my teacher Dorothy Wood Espiau. To Hunter my only daughter for being brave enough to release negative things from me while in my presence and for living the life of a true artist. To Curtiss to taking me to one hundred reptile shows, fishing boats and aquariums to teach me to love all God’s creepy crawler squirmy and slimy beings as my own.
To Melissa Lane for her steadfast love of language and its precision and her capacity to bring structure to ideas. To Matt Hoglund for standing by me and seeing who I could become and helping me become someone who could birth this HUB. To Sophie Allen for her gentleness, awareness and strength. To Sapna Dayal for her vision of imagine1day and her capacity to see pathways. To Dianne Dickerson for taking me to Mt. Rainier and for watching Aristocats with Hunter 27 times when Curtiss was born. Thank you.
To Chip and Shannon Wilson for trusting me with the people of their wonderful company - for living a love story and rising above judgement and hate. To the fabulous and beautiful people of lululemon, who set their problems down and together we lit them on fire and built a transformative light for all the world to see! To pioneers such as Parker Pearson, Paige Kerr, Deanne Schweitzer, Delaney Schweitzer, and Daria Matza our first videographer. For this category of contribution I am at a loss for words. I was granted an extended moment in time to positively alter the lives of lululemon executives, staff, ambassadors and guests for almost one and one half decades. To the mothers and fathers, some of whom I met, that released their bright and loving adult children to sculpt this company with their unedited love and passion, I am truly grateful. For every business person, or academic you parents had hoped to spawn, through Lululemon a thousand more lives were touched. Thank you. Thank them, Thank us. The loving power of lululemon Diaspora and their children are guiding this planet for generations to come.
To Steve Rio for seeing a digital future while I was still learning how to use gmail. To Michael Abraham for creating our first user interface. To JJ Wilson my nephew for believing in the power of mentorship from the younger generation, and for teaching me to receive it.
To Igsaan Salle our Project Manager that to this day I have not met in the flesh - thank you for “getting” what Lightyear is about and giving us the place to actually begin. Thank you for Slack, for heart, and for love of the future.
To Seid Amen, my partner in Ethiopia who for ten years has cultivated the possibility of guiding an entire nation of 120 million people into the reality of their vision and goals. Seid’s team has lead over 500,000 people in Ethiopia through Lightyear.
to Jacob Bain, for traveling to Africa with us and creating the short “Shareback Your Leadership” - for his visual and musical artistry in creating our content videos.
To Mo Jessa of Earls for his giant heart and great trust and Laura Appleton for being the mayor of Arc’Teryx and sharing her hilarious stories with British style.
To everyone that ever studied and believed in igolu I thank you for understanding that to reach the world on time and in time, we needed to no longer be igloo. Thank you for your love and patience and kindness. Thank you for letting go of the river’s edge. You give me room to breath, know and belong.
To the launching Lightyear faculty, Nancy Sheridan Perry of Houston TX, Jacki Carr of Evergreen CO, and Rebecca Bligh of Vancouver BC - lets go the distance and deliver.
Finally to Dorothy Wood Espiau for making me draw with colored pencils when she saw that I was too “neck up” and for helping me to learn the sacred art of integration and more. I am grateful to all the beings of this Earth and beyond that gather to support humans on this great journey of rapid and radical transformation. May we become the gift and the giver, the blessed and the blessing for all time, all realities, all dimensions. TGBTGFA.
With love,
Susanne