BeautyDialogues

Welcome to the Beauty Dialogues!

This is a space to celebrate beauty - not just the beauty of form, but also those patterns of essential wholeness that go beyond the visible.

Wholeness dissolves the illusion that life and work are separate. So, while this is a "professional" blog in that I design online communications for a living and often write about design, communications & technology, it's also a "personal" blog about everything I see looking through a beauty-lens. Welcome!

The Religion of Love

My annual Solstice Ceremony with good friends in the Santa Cruz mountains was deeply fabulous.

It has become a crucial yearly ritual for me in which I take the time to BE in community, within nature; a kind of gyroscope through which I re-calibrate to my own internal clock and reconnect to my inner nature.

This year's gourd, above, painted by Sue Blondell (aka Lightning Dove) and this poem, below, recited by Paul Strickland (aka Woolly Mammoth) speak for me of the essential magic of this powerful event.

The Love Religion
by Ibn Arabi

The inner space inside
that we call the heart
has become many different
living scenes and stories.

A pasture for sleek gazelles,
a monastery for Christian monks,
a temple with Shiva dancing,
a kabba for pilgrimage,
a Medicine Wheel for the People. (ok, he added that line himself)

The tablets of Moses are there,
The Qur'an, the Vedas,
The sutras, the gospels,
And the teachings of the Old Ones. (this one too)

Love is the religion in me.
And whichever way love's camel goes,
that way becomes my faith,
the source of beauty and a light
of sacredness over all things.

My Brilliant God-daughter

My brilliant god-daughter Matilda made this video of herself and her mates on a cell phone!

Europe's Resourceful Orientation

Having been in Europe (Dresden and Brighton) for the last two weeks, I notice everyone here is a lot more resource-conscious than we generally are in America. Every home I’ve visited has a half-flush toilet, and in both downtown Dresden and Heathrow airport they’ve installed absolutely beautiful (and energy-saving) fountains – public art that uses mere spurts of water shot up at different heights at regular intervals; all of the drama and beauty of a public fountain at only a fraction the cost in water.

It’s not that we don’t have resource-saving programs in America, but in Europe they seem to be so much more widely accessible and adopted by the average person, something we really need to see happen here too. For example, while it's becoming a popular practice in America too, almost everyone in Europe brings their own shopping basket to the market and in England you even have to pay for bags as an incentive not to forget. You also bag your own groceries, which saves the cost of a bagger.

It's not about deprivation, either. As a Northern California “Foodie”, I always assume we have some of the best food in the world but Waitrose, one of the regular high street stores in England - a country that has in the past been thought a bit of a slouch in things culinary - is as good as most anything we have. I couldn’t help popping in to pick up some of my favorite foods that are hard to find at home – individual portions of gooseberry fool, strawberry trifle and tarte tatin, shrimp in marie rose sauce, taramasalata, Prince Charles’ stem ginger cookies and clotted cream. Oh yes.

In Dresden, Seeped in Beauty

I'm in Dresden with World Café friends, helping to design a very unusual event that will be held later this year here in Europe. I'll write more about this as it evolves but right now I just wanted to share some of the beauty that my host and friend here in Dresden has created. Sabine Soeder is not only ravishingly lovely but everything that comes from her is Beauty. She and the extremely talented and SMART Chris Chopyak are visually recording our conversations as we/they speak and it is absolutely catalytic having these images to reflect our collective meaning-making AS IT IS HAPPENING.

Sabine's husband Ulrich led us in an exercise this morning where we went inside and listened for the form that could represent what we were feeling emerging in ourselves. When we'd translated that form into a physical gesture/movement, someone suggested we then make an image of what we were noticing to show to each other. The tree above was Sabine's.

Reaching for the New

One of the most prevalent concerns I come across with new blogging clients, especially those who are starting to blog as part of a business strategy, is anxiety about their writing "voice".

Many feel a strong taboo - for whatever reason - against revealing too much of themselves, they aren't sure about sharing their most closely held dreams and hopes for themselves, their work, and the world. Instead, they imagine they need a standard "professional" tone to give them a voice they can feel comfortable with and others will recognize. In other words, at that moment of truth they look to the conventional rather than braving the step out of the box to find their own voice. Unfortunately, nothing could be more misguided.

Now I'm not saying there aren't occasions in which that standard professional persona might be exactly what is called for, but one of the great opportunities opened up by this era of social media and blogging is transparency; we get to see each other as we are - I begin to learn what it's really like to be you, and glimpse what you see and what you dream of. Not to mention the slightly unintuitive marketing truth that the more specific and unique your "brand", the easier YOUR people can find you.

My whole blogging experience is an example of going out on that particular limb. When I first started writing about my ideas for a more "human", nature-connected and sensory-based online experience, I felt pretty out there. I wasn't sure anyone would understand or take me seriously, and in the beginning I wasn't even sure what I meant by it myself, but it was a road I just had to follow. Now I have at least two paid projects going that are expanding my ability to develop exactly that niche, clients who wouldn't have known about my particular passion if I hadn't "put it out there".

So I keep telling my fledgling bloggers to brave their dreams and dare to be exactly who they are. If enough of us do so it just might change not only our own work, but what it means to be a professional.