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.

Death and Dappled Things

A month or so ago Deborah Goldblatt and I hosted a World Café out at Commonweal in Bolinas for a group of end-of-life practitioners. Leading up to that event everything I saw or heard seemed to relate to our subject in some way - perhaps unsurprisingly given my sister Karen's death at the beginning of this year and my friend Kay's passing in June.

To prepare, Deborah and I went to see Anna Deavere Smith's phenomenal Let Me Down Easy at the Berkeley Rep, which was obstensibly about the body and resiliance - and it was - but it was also about death and disease and how poverty (and wealth) effects people's access to health care. If that wasn't enough, the circle I meet with every week in Second Life began a 16 week journey exploring the subject of Death and Dying through the 8 directions of the Medicine Wheel.

Somehow the essence of my whole matrix of experience during this time is rendered immaculately by this poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. We heard David Whyte recite it on one of his many CDs, this one about "apprenticing one's self to one's own disappearance" as we drove over the sacred mountain Tamalpais on our way to Commonweal.

It's called Pied Beauty:

Glory be to God for dappled things –
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
      And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                Praise him.

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.

 

The Times We Are Preparing For

I think I've mentioned that I have a fabulous women's group that meets in a sheltering cave in a mountain in Second Life. Every Thursday morning the five of us sit in circle and share the deeper levels of what's up for us.

In my case last week it was the final stretch of a long preparation period for the first event in the "Conversation for the 21st Century" series. This (material taken from our transcripts) is what I found myself musing upon:

These last few weeks have been so crazy that I am being forced to face how dysfunctional it is being this stressed. I am behaving in ways that do not serve me or anyone, even if I am getting a lot done. My impatience can be terrible. I'm not nice. ... well, not as nice as I can be anyway :-)

And it's ironic, because truly I think that's one of the most important things I could ever do; just be kind. Listen. To what people have to say, yes certainly, but perhaps more importantly to the stillness that is behind the words.

I have been realizing and valuing how important it is to be calm and clear and strong and unstressed, especially in these times when life seems to be moving faster and faster for all of us…

(William Yeats expressed the phenomenon so beautifully in his poem about modernism, Second Coming:
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold ..."

Those of us who can be the strong "anchor" or center points that CAN hold during these times are increasingly valuable. Sometimes I wonder if there is a role we're preparing for that none of us may even see clearly yet, but will turn out to be of far more importance than anything we could ever "do".

As of right now, there are over 500 people registered for the event I'm hosting tomorrow!! To me, that represents a responsibility as well as an opportunity...

To prepare for it - in the day I have between now and then - I'm looking for ways to create a sense of spaciousness for myself so that the experience of awareness and presence can enter my voice tomorrow and call it from others throughout the room.

As it turned out, it's a good thing I did...

The event was just wonderful - we had the most amazing conversation starters who conveyed real depth and wisdom about the subject (community), and the 200+ people who showed up to engage each other in conversation lept to it immediately as a shoal of flashing fish to water. Everything in the first hour and a half was all I could have hoped for ... and then... we had a massive breakdown in technology.

I've been using this software since November of 2009 and never seen anything like this happen before, but Tom Foolery was up to his April Fool's Day tricks during the last round of conversation when the 60-some small group conversations began to bleed into each other, causing people to hear others who were not in the room with them. Imagine how confusing that would be if your only sense perception was auditory!

It was definitely a test of equilibrium for me and my co-host Ben Roberts, as we managed to bring the situation back to center by muting everyone and trying to explain what was happening when we had no idea ourselves.

Luckilly they had been able to talk for 15 of the 20 minutes in that final round, but it was disconcerting nonetheless, and I really needed all my patience and presence of mind to keep the container of wonderful energy we had built up until then intact.

One of the things I drew heavily upon to do that was the positive intent in the room. Everyone there wanted to keep the energy alive and moving, too, so together we weathered the bumpy patch and moved into a wonderful harvest with full participation, and the rest of the event went smoothly.

These are the times we are preparing for.
May we all live into them fully, and be kind to ourselves and each other as we weather the bumpy patches.

Begin Again

Da Capo
by Jane Hirshfield

Take the used-up heart like a pebble
and throw it far out.

Soon there is nothing left.
Soon the last ripple exhausts itself
in the weeds.

Returning home, slice onions, carrots, celery.
Glaze them in oil before adding
the lentils, water, and herbs.

Then the roasted chestnuts, a little pepper, the salt.
Finish with goat cheese and parsley. Eat.
You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted.
Begin again the story of your life.

 

Wise words from one of my favorite poets, Jane Hirshfield.

 

to be an artist...

Recently I had the pleasure of attending a workshop with the Center for Digital Storytelling. These guys are fabulous - very caring and knowledgeable individuals that in this case managed to draw out beautiful, personal, moving stories from each of the dozen attendees. Even more impressive, they shepherded us into making them finished videos in only 3 days.

It was a crazy adventure for me because I was trying to subvert the system and do something that could be useful for the intensive Digital Arts & Community course I'm teaching next month with FireHawk for Hartnell College, down in Salinas Valley. I didn't think the "personal story" form that Center for Digital Storytelling is geared towards was going to work for that purpose, but as it turned out doing anything less would not have been taking advantage of their wisdom and skill. It also probably wouldn't have been as good as what I ended up with, either. Have a look - it's only 2 1/2 minutes - but be sure to stay through the end, where there's a little surprise:

Poetry of Kay's Wedding

My friend Kay married her devoted love Jeff this weekend. A gentle afternoon sun came out to bless what turned out to be a perfect wedding - charming, intimate, and profound. Profound for many reasons, not least of which being that Kay has pancreatic cancer and now in her fourth post-diagnosis year has decided to stop chemo and radiation and live the rest of her life without them, and with Jeff, who has pursued her with convincing clarity for several years now. So her radiance and beauty and very aliveness, standing there smiling next to her equally radiant Prince Charming in front of family and friends - that alone was deeply profound.

There was charm in the lovely garden site with a close-in view of the bay; in the hand-made truffles Sue stayed up all night dusting with luster powder and filling with chai; in the tendrils of green ribbon flying in the breeze and in the bride's laughter and spontaneous wit. Intimacy in the heart-felt vows, the daughters that stood proud and beautiful in their formal roles; in the generosity and community of family and friends that came from near and far to cook and offer their homes and decorate and celebrate and clean up afterward, going home together to put their feet up and talk about how wonderful it was.

And no small dose of the charm and intimacy came from a thoughtful gift given by friends Michael and Karen, who hired Silvi Alcivar to grace us with her red typewriter and poetry on demand. If you don't yet know about Silvi and her magical art, I'm so glad to be the one to tell you...

Silence as the fount of Action & Joy

I found this quote the other day while changing the signature on my emails...

"There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy.  It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility."

~ Thomas Merton, from "Hagia Sophia"

That's my wish for myself, and for all of us in this new year... a deeper connection with silence as a fount of action and joy.

The Religion of Love

My annual Solstice Ceremony with good friends in the Santa Cruz mountains was deeply fabulous.

It has become a crucial yearly ritual for me in which I take the time to BE in community, within nature; a kind of gyroscope through which I re-calibrate to my own internal clock and reconnect to my inner nature.

This year's gourd, above, painted by Sue Blondell (aka Lightning Dove) and this poem, below, recited by Paul Strickland (aka Woolly Mammoth) speak for me of the essential magic of this powerful event.

The Love Religion
by Ibn Arabi

The inner space inside
that we call the heart
has become many different
living scenes and stories.

A pasture for sleek gazelles,
a monastery for Christian monks,
a temple with Shiva dancing,
a kabba for pilgrimage,
a Medicine Wheel for the People. (ok, he added that line himself)

The tablets of Moses are there,
The Qur'an, the Vedas,
The sutras, the gospels,
And the teachings of the Old Ones. (this one too)

Love is the religion in me.
And whichever way love's camel goes,
that way becomes my faith,
the source of beauty and a light
of sacredness over all things.

Dreams of Mount Tamalpais

Last week I set off on a jaunt on my favorite mountain with Howard Rheingold and friends, participating in the ritual he calls "Church of Mount Tam". Totally embarrassingly, I only stayed with the group for the first 200 yards, which were directly D O W N the side of the mountain, when my elderly left knee decided to drop out and take communion on flat or uphill ground until the rest of the congregation returned.

I had a rare and delightful time wandering completely alone, and took a few photos, including the one above. I needn't have bothered since this turned out to be an amazingly well-documented walk, including a whole Flickr stream by Fabrice Florin and a lyrical video by Freddy Hahne (his sound track is brilliant!).

This little congregation isn't alone in loving Mount Tam, either. Tomorrow night I'm going to hear Tom Killion and Gary Snyder present their new book on this beautiful mountain, Tamalpais Walking, at Book Passage in Corte Madera and I just know the place will be packed with Believers.