BeautyDialogues

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.

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

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 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!

The Smell of Books

I love the smell of books, and was charmed and educated by this little video I heard about through the BK Communiqué, a wonderfully entertaining and informative monthly newsletter published by Jeevan Sivasubramaniam and his team at Berrett Koehler Publishers (who are celebrating their 20th anniversary this week).

Super Moon

Where were you during the fabulous "super moon" display last month?

I was with my love-money Steve and pest-son Lee down by the bay photographing it, of course! (Lee is a logophile like his father and I - and his "other mother" Liz - and he chose this cheeky anagrammatical name for our relationship many years ago)

This first shot was taken after the moon was already high in the sky and it was beginning to get dark out, so there's greater contrast than in most of the earlier shots you can see in the gallery sequence below.

 

"Developing" the shoot at home the next day, I was struck by this photo of Lee photgraphing an earlier view of the moon through his iPhone... in particular I was intrigued by the way the light of his screen seemed to mirror the luminescence of the moon. It was almost like he had a little moon in his hands!

I learned something new from him about iPhone photography that night when he turned me on to an app called Photosynth, which lets you take seamless panoramic shots on your iPhone in one go. I'm more and more intrigued by the possibilties offered by this easy-to-access medium since reading Al Smith's eyePhone in David du Chemin's excellent Craft & Vision e-book series.

Nests

Every since my work as Vision Nest Studio with FireHawk Hulin, I've been paying attention to nests. I'm drawn by the powerful metaphor of incubation they suggest, serving as a container for the transformative process; a safe space for Life to emerge.

When we were planning the first Vision Nest Studio, FireHawk shared an inspiration he'd had for our name.

Synchronistically, I'd just watched a television Special on bowerbirds and their nests. The bowerbird is an artist - each bird builds its nest from what is around and each is completely unique, with its own aesthetic. So the bowerbird turned out to be an apt symbol for the group of totally unique individuals that took our class, and its nest a perfect metaphor for the space we built for their emergence as fully creative beings.

Some time later, FireHawk sent me a link he'd found about an artist in Big Sur who builds and installs gigantic human nests and I remembered having seen one of them at Esalen. Then I found (and immediately bought!) this gorgeous book at a bookshop out in Pt Reyes: Fifty Nests and the Birds that Built Them.

There seems to be a theme emerging, so I thought I'd post about it, wondering if perhaps we all need a few nests in our lives... I know I do. If this metaphor resonates with you, too, perhaps you would share something about the nests that hold your forms of emergent Life?

Congratulations! The Art of Convening is Born!

My old and dear friends Craig and Patricia Neal of Heartland Circle have just announced the birth of their first book, with Cynthia Wold. It's called The Art of Convening: Authentic Engagement in Meetings, Gatherings, and Conversations.

This book is going to be very important and of great benefit to everyone, especially those of us working with groups. The Art of Convening is available for pre-order at Amazon, and I invite you to join me in welcoming this wonderful new book - pre-order copies now for yourself and your friends and colleagues, and become a fan on their FaceBook page.

The Trap of Collective Folly

My dear friend and colleague Alan Briskin was the conversation starter at Heartland's Thought Leader Gathering in the bay area earlier this month, talking about his recent book, The Power of Collective Wisdom and the Trap of Collective Folly.

This is not one of those books you skim through and set aside - you could profitably keep it on your nightstand and read it over and over, always finding something new and valuable. In fact, one of the basic lessons of the book stood out for me in Alan's talk as if I were hearing it for the first time: there is a point in many collective interactions where we have a choice to either ascend to a "higher place" together or fall into "folly". That point, Alan says, is characterized by disagreement or conflict. It's in negotiating problems where we are in danger of collapsing into either polarization (disassociating ourselves completely from the others' point of view) or false agreement, which is equally pernicious.

If in that critical moment of conflict, however, we are able to really listen to each other and find a way to accept our differences and continue to treat each other with respect, we truly have the capacity for reaching collective wisdom. I've been at this critical point several times since the TLG and remembering Alan's words - to listen more deeply, ask questions and make an honest attempt to understand another view - has made all the difference.

Now we just have to get the book into the US Senate reading list...