BeautyDialogues

Kiva Time

I'm sitting here in my office on Solstice Day, feeling the urge to connect, to "check in" and share the energy that's moving in me.

I feel the shift inside me as the whole hemisphere is moving into "kiva time", the time of dreaming and imagining what is to come when the seeds we're planting now awake in the Spring.

It's morning, so even though it's cool here in northern California, the sun is starting to fill the room and animate the crystals I hang in the window to catch the light. My office is newly rearranged, cleaned, and cleared. With art on the walls (beautiful pieces by Christopher Castle and Fletcher Oakes - and I'm awaiting shipment of one from Lisa Lipsett) and all my books out, it feels much closer to the nurturing sanctuary I've wanted to create for myself for some time now. A perfect place to dream those seeds into being.

Some exciting projects are germinating: I've started a new venture in partnership with FireHawk Hulin and other friends at Timeless Earth Wisdom. It's called Digital + Earth Wisdom and speaks to my deepest purpose and intent for my work right now. You'll hear much more on this. The multi-generational work I've been doing with Wiser Together is moving gracefully and forcefully into form, and I'm co-designing the curriculum for a Masters Course on World Cafe and Appreciative Inquiry with Fielding Graduate University, where I've been co-presenting courses on World Cafe for the last few years.

I was born in the middle of winter, and this coming birthday is a big one, so I'm planning to take myself on an inner journey with an outer form - a nature-immersed photographic road trip to Sedona (with side trips as and when they appear on the hroizon). Road trips are among my very favorite things (guilty secret) and I am really excited about this one. I've never been to Sedona, so please share anything you think I should know about it, or anything on the way or in the area.

And I'm curious... what's seeding itself in you this winter? What seeds do you want to dream into being in the darkness of your world womb? What would you like to awaken to as the days grow longer and lighter?

Moved by Mountains

Several months ago I received review copies of Tom Reed's two exquisite photography & text books, the hardback Granite Avatars of Patagonia (2009) and recently released paperback Moved by a Mountain: Inspiration from an Alpine View in Alaska (2013).


The idea was to review them for Gatherings, the online Ecopsychology journal I co-founded and have edited for most of the last decade.

Due to travel, work deadlines, and the ordinary extraordinary catastrophes and celebrations of everyday life, it's taken me all this time to finish the reviews. But I have to say that the books are both so stunning that I only hope the reviews do enough justice to their profound beauty that there will be a rush on orders when everyone wants their own copy for Christmas (and the author will forgive my tardy delivery). 
 

Anyway, I thought I'd include some of the images and links to my reviews here in the Beauty Dialogues as well, since Reed's search for the deeper meaning and purpose of beauty resonates so deeply with me and is what this blog is all about.

Speaking of which, here's Tom Reed at TedX in Homer Alaska, speaking on "Natural Beauty and Aesthetic Arrest".

Read my full reviews (including some wonderful quotes) of these fabulous inspiring books here (or just cut to the chase and buy your copies now - I guarantee you won't be disappointed):

Moved by a Mountain: Inspiration from an Alpine View in Alaska
My Review
Buy Now

The Granite Avatars of Patagonia
My Review
Buy Now

Good Medicine

My dear friend Lightning Dove, aka Sue Blondell, is an amazing artist and gifted "seer" who creates beautiful artwork and "medicine" tools that have the power to connect us to our deepest selves. I am blessed to own many pieces of her art, including an extraordinary "essence" painting of my husband and I and a magnificent full-sized painted gourd which is one my most precious "things".

Lightning Dove is having a rare public showing of her spirit-full work, called "Hush ... be still ... Listen", from Saturday, September 7th through November 6th at Spirit House in Woodside. Dove will be there in person for the opening from 11am to 4pm on the 7th, but if you can't make it then, be sure to come by while the show is up. You won't be sorry.

If you don't live in the area or can't make it, check out the galleries of her work on LightningDove.com, where you can commission some of her special magic for yourself or a loved one.

Here are some medicine tools she made for me recently:

 

(back left to front: small tobacco gourd, gourd rattle, owl wing smudger)

 

Singing Ringing Tree

A recent day trip to the Main Headlands revealed an unexpected musical interlude when the wind whistled through the open pipes of a structure built near one of the old forts just north of the Golden Gate bridge. I Googled it when I got home, but couldn't find anything. I did however, find evidence of a Wave Organ built on a jetty east of the bridge - I'll have to check that out. I also found the Singing Ringing Tree in northern England and this video of the haunting sounds it makes.

Pothole Gardening

Check out this article about a young man from Australia who plants miniature gardens in potholes all across Europe!

 

 

Great Spirit

A beautiful video by the award-winning young Hawaiian filmaker Dominic Walczuk, about dance and Nahko's music and the great spirit that breathes us all:

 

 

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?

Church Street Mural

Walking along Church Street in San Francisco with a friend the other day, I saw this lovely, vibrant mural that covered a concrete wall framing almost an entire block...

The artwork was so lovely and fine, and I admired it so much that I tracked down the artist. Her name is Mona Caron - and I was charmed to read this on her website:

"Looking at nature closely, one may notice the intricacy and beauty of even the most "valueless" and unseeming little plants, regardless of their color or drabness, their perceived value or usefulness, or stage in life.

These heroic-scale portraits of the seldom noticed and literally downtrodden, are my tribute to the resiliance of all those renegade life forms that may or may not fit within the designs of our society, but keep growing nonetheless. They are also an homage to beauty that is free and available to all, if we can claim the time to pay attention to it."

Here's to eveyday beauty; to how lovely and extraordinary it truly is, and to those who champion it! How they enrich all whose lives they touch!

Here are more images from the mural, a project sponsored in part by a grant from San Francisco Beautiful.

Nature. Beauty. Gratitude

If you are not one of the the 63,977 people who've seen it on YouTube, or even if you are - I receommend a daily viewing of this video from Louie Schwartzberg on Nature, Beauty, and Gratitude. You'll be charmed by Schwartzberg's time-lapse photography and and inspired by the articulate, heartful narration of David Steindl-Rast. Steindl-Rast says that cultivating gratitude for each day is like "life-giving water if you will only open your heart and drink". All I can say is drink this kool-aid. It's the best!

 

Silvi Alcivar

This is a delightful video about a magical poet, Silvi Alcivar. Silvi conjures spontaneous poetry from a red Royal typewriter and her immaculate mind, for hire at $15/poem (order online from the poetry store).

You will never find a better deal.

She does events too. I've experienced her work at two of them, and she absolutely transforms the space.

a desire for words from silvi alcivar on Vimeo.