BeautyDialogues

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.