BeautyDialogues

"Scent"sing

The first roses of the season are in full bloom... in my garden and all over the neighborhood; their scent a intoxicant I willingly abandon myself to. There is a particular blend of longing and joy that scent can evoke... without a word having been spoken, I find myself laid open by this subtle Beauty.

Diane Ackerman, in Natural History of the Senses, says that when Cleopatra first invited Antony to her bed she covered the floor in rose petals a foot and a half deep. Apparently the Romans were so enamored of the rose that they founded Rosalia, an annual holiday to sing her praises (ah! perhaps it's the Italian in me that so enjoys this luxurious flower).

Still impacted by the sweetness of an online Elemental Ceremony I co-hosted this weekend with my friends Firehawk and Pele, in honor of the element of Air, today I'm struck by the relationship between air and scent. If scent is a kind of nuanced communication delivered by air, it carries a tale we cannot close ourselves off from like we can the stories of our other senses (we can close our eyes or plug our ears indefinitely, but we cannot live without air for more than a few moments). Not that I want to - the scent of new roses in this lovely California Spring is a spirit-reviving tonic and I am most grateful for the Medicine.

 

A Blessing

photo by Digital Blasphemy

Looking for "inspiration" - a juicy tidbit to post this morning - I came across this blessing from someone who has inspired me deeply for many years, someone I (like so many others) hold dear to my heart; the late great John O'Donohue.

Here's John's blessing, taken from Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong:

May you listen to your longing to be free.

May the frames of your belonging be large enough for the dreams of your soul.

May you arise each day with a voice of blessing

whispering in your heart that something good is going to happen to you.

May you find a harmony between your soul and your life.

May the mansion of your soul never become a haunted place.

May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within.

May you never place walls between the light and yourself.

May your angel free you from the prisons of guilt, fear, disappointment, and despair.

May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world to gather you, mind you, and embrace you in belonging.

May it be so, and to John's beautiful blessing I add the collective prayer that we all "arise each day with a voice of blessing", and recognize each other and all that lives as part of our sacred circle of belonging.

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)

 

Stefanie Atkinson

I recently discovered a new photographer whose work (and attitude) I love, not least because of the way she photographs light. Here's what she says on the front page of her site (obviously she too knows about looking at life through a "beauty lens"):

"I often hear the question: "What lens were you using?" People most often refer to the camera lens – and while the camera lens is important, the real lens is what we bring to it, shaped by who we are and where we're coming from – our perceptions, our unique perspective and the context of our lives."

Here's one of her images (check out others on her website):

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:

 

 

Miracle of a Single Flower

"If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.
~ Buddha

Morning Light

This is what the morning light looks like outside my window this time of year…

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!

A Cutting Garden

I've always drempt of having a cutting garden.. and now I have one! Somewhere along the way to realizing this dream, I began collecting rose bushes. I started last year with one Gertrude Jeykell bush - an old fashioned double pink rose with a truly divine scent - and when it went crazy this Spring, all covered with blooms, I too went crazy and bought myself several more David Austin old rose varietals.

I couldn't find more Gertrude Jeykells - I would fill my entire garden with that rose if I could - but I did find "Hot Cocoa" - a gorgeous rich red-brown rose that I first saw in Sally Robertson's glorious bread and breakfast garden (even if you don't have a patch of ground, Sally can paint a garden for your walls), and Sparrieshoop (the generous climber you see in this photo - it's also a cutting rose!), Benjamin Britten, and Scarborough Fair. All of them smell wonderful and fill a vase beautifully! These roses are magic - they're casting a spell that makes me want to just hang out in the garden all the time!