BeautyDialogues

Images begat Text begat Images

I'm home from vacation full of more image poems (my whole trip was a juicy photographic orgy, if the truth be known) and in catching up with my reading today I was excited to read a post by Barbara Ganley talking about the inter-play between her blogging and her photography... how one will spring naturally from the other, and how the two enrich each other and together create something new.

So here are my two image poems, my "something new" flowing from holiday reveries - immersed in the beauty of nature with my Canon 40D eyes on...

Held within the stone, radiating light & absorbing heat ... flesh against flesh, carved in situ, like a Michelangelo.

A merman emerging, dreaming this moment into being.

Totally absorbed in the sparkling element ... through this baptism flesh leaves its solid form and enters the life of the spirit - just for that one perfect moment - awash between spheres and blessed by leaves - he floats in the liquid now.

Married to Amazement

"When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."
~ Mary Oliver

Invited by Beauty

"There's a place inside your body that knows the answer. Just go inside and see what you can find."
~ Violet Oaklander

Delighted by Beauty

I SO love having a camera as part of my eye ...

"There is a crack,
There is a crack
in everything.
That is where
the light gets in."
~ Leonard Cohen

Image Poetry

A shocking thing is about to occur - I'm going on vacation. A lay around, dip your toes in a river kind of vacation - for a whole week!

I had the idea of sharing some (more) of my recent photography with you while I'm gone, so I hope you enjoy these short verses of "image poetry" and the words I've chosen to accompany them.

Here's the first one:

Enlightenment, for a wave in the ocean, is the moment the wave realizes it is water.
~ Thich Nhat Hanh

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Maturana, Love & Language

My friend (and co-founder of the World Cafe) Juanita Brown has long espoused the extraordinary wisdom of Chilean biologist/philosopher Humberto Maturana. She recently attended one of his symposiums, and wrote up her notes in Conversation as a Co-Evolutionary Force.

I was very struck by her post; these excerpts in particular - about what it is to be human and what the capacity to language makes possible - feel full of power & potential:

"As humans we are born in the trust of loving and in being loved–within an ecology of the natural world and within the larger living cosmos." Love is the legitimate co-arising of the other in the relational space between us.  What we understand as humanness are relations conserved on and in love over many generations of our co-existence."

"We live in the braiding of emotions and languaging in our manner of living together.  In this coordination through language, certain consensus or agreements appear as"reality" and the objects we understand as "real" appear.

 Words are not trivial - words are the nodes or elements of networks of conversation. Language is the coordination of doings, not a symbolic act  as we commonly understand it. With one word I can follow one path and with another a different path.  Our languaging distinguishes a way of inhabiting a human community and culture."

"A person who reflects creates new worlds. All distinctions are made by an observer. Our capacity for reflection in language is one essence of our humanness.  We are human beings that emerged with the capacity to reflect in language and conversations and in that we generate worlds."

Food

Walking across the parking lot at Andronico's last week, on a shopping expedition for a dinner party, I could smell the ripe cantaloupe piled in boxes outside the supermarket entrance. Such a heady smell, ripe fruit! At dinner we talked about food - many of us remembering how as children we'd be called into kitchen duty, sitting with the older women and listening to them talk while we helped freeze or can  fruits and vegetables in season - berries, peaches, applesauce, tomatoes; pickles and jams and relishes of all kinds.

It's a different world now, but the smell of ripe cantaloupe can still enchant, and food is still unbelievably good, especially if you grow it yourself and/or pay attention to what you're buying. It seems like such a simple thing, but food is an essential ingredient of life - food, air, water - and the capacity to notice and appreciate its beauty offers one of the most delicious opportunities for happiness we have available to us.

Social Networks

E-Learning guru Jay Cross has written a fascinating post about an Aboriginal painting (note: not the one above) that he saw during a recent trip to Australia, and his reading of the imagery - comparing it with social networks and the politics of change.

But the fun doesn't stop there! Jay's readers continued to analyze the image in their comments and some valuable insights emerged. The whole post was an excellent example of both the power of art to convey meaning and the way we evolve meaning through the power of networks.

BlogHer 08 - Day One: Keynote

The first day of BlogHer 08 ended with a keynote from a select series of 20 bloggers, reading from their blogs - mommy bloggers, political bloggers, techie bloggers. They read clever posts, astute posts, heart-wrenching posts in trembly voices, irreverent posts, more. There was even a man, a "laid off daddy" blogger reading a post about his son. He was followed by a lesbian dad reading tender prose, and several body bloggers sharing visceral moments in the mirror.

This democratic forum gave me some of the most simple enjoyment I've had at BlogHer so far. I know there is the "business" of blogging, key words and clicks and making a name, but as far as I am concerned this is the real pleasure of blogging. Opening to, and being let in to another's inner truth, sharing hearts and vital information, exploring ideas and exposing fears, making each other gasp with laughter. Recognizing each other through our words - as human, members of the same flawed feeble magnificent and impossibly goofy species.

It was beautiful.

BlogHer - Day One: Open Source

The Open Source participation session was brilliant.

The panel of three began by identifying open source as a values-based system. Open source, they went on to say, is an self-organizing developmental process for building software, with participation open to anyone brave enough to wade in, and prestige and authority given based on meritocracy or what one can contribute to a project.

One of the fundamental tenets within the open source community is that the code, which has been collaboratively produced, is free to anyone to use in whatever way they would like.

You may be surprised to learn how much of what we all use regularly is open source - Mozilla & the browser FireFox, the Linux operating system (which is the platform Google is built on), the blogging platform WordPress are all open source, as well as the more commonly-known open source CMS (content management system) platforms like Drupal & Joomla. Php as a code is open source (although it isn't always used in open source systems), as is javacript.

They also talked about how "open source" has become a meme or paradigm that can be seen in many other realms. This was particularly interesting to me because open source is a great metaphor for the way the World Café works and I'm using this analogy in my session at the BK Marketing Conference next week.

It's not just the World Café, either; the concepts behind open source are the key themes in the "gift economy" or what others have called the "culture of generosity". This is the philosophy behind a whole movement that I and many others are part of in discovering a different way of living and working.

The image I'm using in this post is a fabulous example of the open source culture of generosity. It's from a a UK Flickr user, Lynette, who created a set of images illustrating Web2.0 concepts for anyone to use. The photo-sharing site Flickr is itself another example, with thousands of photographers contributing their photographs for free use under a creative commons license.

Something else I was particularly interested in was something the presenters said about how unusual it is to see designers in the open source community. This is a terrible shame, given the state of the user interface in many open source projects, and I think it reflects something fundamental that needs to be transformed, not just in the open source community, but in the culture more broadly. But that's the subject for a whole other post! :-)