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.

 

Elemental Ceremonies Online

Many of you know my passion for a different, more heart-full and earth-connected way to be together online, and I am thrilled to be partnering in this endeavor with some of the most heartful and earth-connected people I know [a special shout-out to FireHawk Hulin, my fellow photographer - he took the photos that grace this post- and dear companion in the art of sacred technology].

Based on the premise that the digital realm, like all of life, is sacred, we've started something called Earth +Digital Wisdom to explore what this means in practice (check out the 2 min video that FireHawk and I made to describe what we are up to).

As part of this Grand Adventure, we have designed a simple series of four free online Elemental Ceremonies as our gift to Life. 

The next two are scheduled for Saturday August 2nd (Air) and Saturday August 23rd (Earth); from 10am - noon Pacific Time so our friends across all US and European time zones can be there. You are formally invited, and most welcome; I think you will really be touched and surprised to find an experience of true ceremonial space online.

Here's an invitation with more details, or you can register now for: AIR (August 2) | EARTH (August 23).

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

Full Circle

Full Circle is a super-short video about the elements - earth, air, fire and water - and our relationship with them. It was created by the very cool Global Oneness Project and I got it through KarmaTube, brainchild of the fabulously selfless Niphun Mehta. Niphun is the man who started ServiceSpace, one of those great ideas that makes one proud to be a human being.

A film by Global Oneness Project.

Video from KarmaTube

 

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

 

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.

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!

Spring 2012

The weather has been so erratic lately that Spring has come as a surprise to me this year. An almost impossibly beautiful shade of green - a hue both shy & vibrant - has returned to my garden like the unexpected delivery of something I'd almost forgotten I'd ordered.

Perhaps most amazing to me is seeing the lilac bush I bought last year emerge anew. All winter it's been a lonely little twig that I've sadly thought I should be digging up to put out of its misery. But now it's back - full of those vibrant-hued leaves, along with a similarly resurrected dwarf red maple, two (no, four!) fat lily buds floating on the pond, and an exploding flurry of water iris buds.

It may be just that I am a new gardener, unused to seasonal display, but to me these miracles are proof that things aren't always what they seem, and just because something appears to be dead doesn't mean it is. What a glorious gift, like the proverbial rainbow; nature's cyclical pledge of renewal.

The Beauty That is Right in Front of You

This quote by Neal Stephenson comes to me sometimes when the evening news is too full of murder and greed, or my heart stumbles too close to the edge of despair:

"Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways."

As if in response to the need Stephenson identified, Christóbal Vila's 3.75 minutes of healing beauty balm, reminding us that indeed beauty is all around us if only we have eyes to see it: