BeautyDialogues

Invitation to Wonder

I'm reading the coolest book right now; it's called Invitation to Wonder: A Journey Through the Seasons, by Elizabeth Ayers.

Invitation to Wonder is a delightful meander on nature, cycles, metaphor and physicality, and touches on so many subjects you might not have otherwise connected. I'm just starting to read, but already finding it full of wonder and insight.

Talking about the mystery of birdsong, which apparently only male birds do (and only in the spring to attract a mate), Ayers says that because young birds learn their songs from their fathers, variations build up over the years to create disctinctive regional "dialects".

She says that bird-song is probably more individual artistic creation than species-specific expression, and goes on to report a fascinating biological fact:

"Experiments with zebra finches prove that birds actually rehearse their songs in sleep, using their dream time to hone a whole range of improvzations they'll implement come dawn."

Perhaps I find this fascinating partly because of how I too experience creativity in that liminal dream state. I often wake up with particularly pleasing phrasing for something I'm trying to write about, and Ayer's words make me wonder if I've been "rehearsing" the sounds and word patterns for the prose in my sleep. I know I also sometimes work out a design problem or find a particular shade of color I need for a painting when I'm dreaming, waking up with the answer as I surface into the new day... Isn't it interesting that we share this phenomenon with our bird relatives, too?

But what about you? I'm curious... do you ever work things out your dreams?

The Earth is Our Mother

This note was sent out by my old friend Crow (aka Bruce Taub) to honor Mother's Day earlier this year, but it is just as relevant today.

"All the stones around here, each has a language of its own ... and our Earth has a song."
~ Wallace Black Elk

I believe we are children of explored stars ... children of the great first mother.  I believe every tree, plant, insect, and animal is a child of the stars. I believe every tree, plant, insect, and animal "talks."  I believe rocks talk ... and oceans and rivers talk. When I am alone in nature and listen I hear voices - my own, birds', trees', rocks'.  The energy each of us emits in life is simply a manifestation of our being alive ... and is received by all we touch.  It cannot be otherwise.  So too, the energy emitted by other beings, even rocks, is received by us, and manifests the consciousness and wisdom of that other being in us.  Each and every entity on Earth has wisdom to share and a tale to tell. 

The Earth is our Mother.  Let us honor her, as we honor all our ancestors, and the stars from which we've emerged, and the heavenly material from those now dead stars which constitutes us ... stone and bee, whale and bird ... sisters and brothers all, the very same heavenly material in each and every one of us.  Then let us bow, every rock and every leaf our teachers.

With gratitude to the indigenous people, without whom i might not have known these truths, to my friends who are teachers, and to the reminder of these truths provided by Martha Fast Horse. Happy Mother's Day each and all.

 

"Stream near Love's Falls", photo by Amy Lenzo

 

Wallpaper

To help motivate my morning walks I sometimes take my iPod and listen to one of the many podcasts I subscribe to but don't otherwise have time to hear. The other day I loaded up one of my favorites by the erudite British actor and thespian Stephen Fry.

Fry is always intelligent and insightful, and the topic he brought his formidable talents to in this case was one of his own favorite subjects, Oscar Wilde. In particular, he was talking about a promotional tour that Wilde had made to the United States in the late 1800s, just as his popularity was beginning to take off in the UK.

The US was in a particularly violent period at that point, having recently emerged from an extremely bloody civil war. We were engaged in a Western expansion charaterised by genocide and gunslingers and being plagued by eruptions of gang warfare in New York and Chicago. One of the many questions presented to the visiting Wilde, whose wit and ready answers were already becoming quite quotable, was why he thought American was so violent.

"That's easy", he reportedly quipped, "it's because the wallpaper here is so ugly".

Wilde's comment was generally considered to be a humorous and somewhat shallow response to the question, but Fry's deconstruction of it reveals something deeper. Fry's analysis has, I think, even more relevance as a response to the violence of today's world than it did in the 1900s.

As a philisophical Aesthetic, Fry explained, Wilde would have believed that beauty "acts" upon us, that the beauty of nature and art has a powerful positive effect on the human psyche. Thus, the opposite would also have been true - that a culture which had evolved with such a profound insensitivity to their environment (as to accept the hideous wallpaper referenced earlier, presumably :-) would obviously be effected negaively. That, surrounded by ugliness, one would be moved to ugly and violent acts.

I think Oscar Wilde had a pretty good point... but what do you think? Does beauty "act" upon you? And if so, how? What about ugliness?

The Shape of Design

I get a lot of email communications, and most of them are fairly easy to delete, but one I almost always pay attention to is Very Short List, because it's full of really cool things and it's delivered in a concise and nicely laid out format.

The lastest issue of vsl featured this beautiful book by Frank Chimero. I'm probably the ideal target audience for an hook like this and I followed the link to find an elegant little website dedicated to the book, with a wonderful design sensibility, fancifully illustrated chapter headings, and a great story at its core.

Chimero raised the money to write the book through a campaign on Kickstarter. The disarmingly simple video he created to sell his idea to potential funders (who gave him a total of $112,159 towards the project) talks about the book being not only for designers, but for everyone who makes things. He says that's all of us, and that "The Future is Something You Make".

There's a video of him presenting at the 2011 Build Conference in Belfast, which is not short but what I watched of it was compelling and if the topic thrills you like it does me, it's probably well worth watching.

Of course I ordered the book (which is offered in both print and digital format), so I'll let you know if it's as great as his promotions for it are. I know I'm excited to find out!