BeautyDialogues

Beauty

"That which causes us to rejoice we call beauty."
~Pavel Florensky

Sacred & the Mundane

I was suffering with a bad hair day-after-a-haircut when a friend took pity on me and brought me to a small salon in Mill Valley she'd just discovered, run by two beautiful women who she thought might be able to help.

Their salon was as beautiful as they were, and quirky. Named 'Sacred' it was all fresh flowers and icons and prayer cards amidst ornate French ironwork, country wood floors and comfortable chairs. There was a waiting room with a plump couch and magazines, fresh lemons in the ice water and a plate of fancy chocolates.

My mood began to improve immediately...

Standing Stones

This stone is from the inner circle of a double ring of standing stones in the Berkeley marina that my friend Christopher Castle turned me on to during a beauty walk the other day.

By the way, this photograph is one of the series of loose images I chose for my final digital photography class project, which you can see displayed on my photoblog... check out the fliptychs I made from photos of the Dresden trip!

A Petition to the Frankfurt Airport Gods

I´m in the Frankfurt airport where I have been since I missed my flight to SF (at 5pm CET yesterday).  After a virtually sleepless night it´s now almost 9am, and I´ve had a chai latte and managed to get myself on the list for a standby flight this afternoon at 2 (I implore anyone listening out there to focus prayers of mercy to the Airport Gods of Frankfurt to allow me entrance into the hallowed sanctuary of the afore-mentioned United Flight).

I´m thrilled to have found this free internet access (thanks, Samsung!) because I wanted to make a public note of appreciation for the kindness of strangers. Besides the wicked guardians of the Gate of the Missed Flight, who were bearers of unspeakable bureaucratic cruelty (I´ll spare you the gory details), there have been some amazing and unexpected gestures of generosity and compassion in my hours of need.

Ulrich Soeder

For more of my experience at the World Café Europe event in Dresden, along with two photographs by Ulrich Soeder, one of the most inspired photographic artists I've ever had the pleasure to meet, read these two posts on language and the ineffable, and the peace café in Dresden's famous frauenkirch that opened the event.

Dreaming

As one of the final questions of a day of World Café Europe sessions on Inviting Innovation, we were asked to bypass our mind for a moment and just let ourselves dream. I gratefully shut my eyes, which were very tired from residual jet-lag, chronic computer over-use, and tiredness, and a sensory dream-image came to me without words or the need for interpretation.

I was sitting in front of a computer screen whose screen was radiating waves of healing nutrients to my eyes, like balm. My feet were buried in thick grass, and when I drew this scene later, there were wildflowers woven into the soft green blades:

True, it is a conscious dream of mine to find the ways to ground our collective internet use in the earth; to integrate the natural world online through our senses and contribute to it being a ‘whole human’-friendly environment - but it was amazing to me how immediate and stimulating it was to FEEL that grass under my feet.

When you just bypass your mind for a moment and let yourself dream, what do you dream?

This Morning

I awoke this morning to the language of bird song - a new bird to me; its call rich with tonal variation, surprising and fresh against the early sounds of the city, somehow revived me more than the scant few hours of sleep I got.

Yesterday from the train window I noticed lilacs in bloom everywhere - that and oceans of brilliant yellow mustard rolling over the hills like waves.

A New Language

Right now I’m on the train to Dresden, thinking about language. I’m on my way to Dresden to experience what’s going on at the newly-formed World Café Europe’s first pan-European gathering, and I’m thinking about language because part of my role there will be to help convey this experience to others, and I am dreaming about ways to do that most effectively.