BeautyDialogues

Death Cafes

I've been hearing about Death Cafés for a while. People gathering for conversations about death in each other's homes, or literally in cafes, starting out as strangers in many cases but quickly finding intimacy in the all-too-human stories that emerge from engaging this powerful subject.

Knowing of my interest, my love monkey Steve just sent me a link to a story about them in one of his favorite blogs, The Dish by Andrew Sullivan, but I cut through to the original story Sullivan was blogging about, a story about a Death Cafe at the top of Beachy Head, a famous suicide cliff in Sussex's South Downs where I used to live. It's a fabulous story, so I'll share the link here... it's by Claire Davies, published in Aeon Magazine.

I'd love to hear if anyone has experienced a Death Cafe...

 

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

 

Baby Bath

Check out this mesmerising video of a baby having its first bath that I found in Elephant Journal. Nothing really happens and it goes on for 5 minutes, but something about it was so peaceful and soothing that it put me in a state of bliss. Bliss is good, so I'm sharing it here in case it will work for you, too.

Occupy Your LIfe

Slowing down and embracing the spaciousness of the un-scheduled moment has been an increasingly important and elusive goal over the last few years as I experience too-regular calendar overwhelm and a daily Sisyphean battle with my in-box.

Thomas Merton articulates the problem perfectly in a quote I've used here before and will no doubt come back to again:

"The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.

More than that, it is cooperation with violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys her own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."

To begin to redress the violence I've been doing to my soul and restore the tender roots of my own inner wisdom, I've decided to begin this new year by re-claiming something I'd almost forgotten - the weekend.

No small thing as - slowly but definitely - the weekend seems to have migrated from rest-time to work-time in the popular imagination. Turning the tide appears to require a personal declaration of some kind, a stance against the cultural pressure to over-work. Therefore, I have ordered home delivery of Sunday's New York Times and hereby publicly proclaim that I can no longer be relied upon to read email over the weekend.

Yes, you heard that correctly. I'm embarking upon a "occupy my life" campaign in 2012 that kicks off by fully occupying my weekends, so unless we have arranged otherwise, you can pretty-much figure I won't read anything work-related after 5pm Friday until Monday morning. With the accumulation that's sure to have piled up by then, you may not even get a response til Tuesday!

Even God didn't work 7 days a week.

Solstice: Two

Another reason the Solstice celebration was special for me this year was because this is the year my friend Gisela Wendling, who lives in Australia, brought the painting she has been working on for me since we launched her blog/site Liminal Songlines just before the last Solstice.

The name of this painting is "Businesswomen Doing Women's Business", and it reflects our collaborative efforts to support each other's work in the world. I had asked Gisela for something that would inspire me on a deep level, and to do that she drew on her experiences in ceremony with indigenous women in the deserts of Australia, powerful spiritual practice specifically described as "women's work".

While Gisela makes it clear that what she does is NOT Aboriginal painting, she uses some of the same iconography, which in Aborginal art is very literal, figurative and descriptive rather than abstract patterns as they may appear to a Western eye.

The two figures in middle of the central circle of my painting are Gisela and I, and we are surrounded by other circles of women sitting in ceremony. The circle in the top right is of men, also sitting in ceremony, and the circle in the lower right without people is what's "on the edge", or horizon. The flowing colored lines that frame the top and bottom are reminiscent of the snake that plays such a central role in Aboriginal creation stories, while the flowing lines in the background are the shifting sands of life at this time on earth as we come together in a sacred way while everything in our external world is changing.

Gisela and I were able to sit together for a few hours after the Solstice, reflecting on this beautiful painting and how it came into being. She was asking how what we did by supporting each other - me by helping her articulate her work through a web presence and her by creating a place of inspiration for me - reflects a way of being together as women that could inspire similar forms of relationship and mutual generosity in others. Unwilling to separate the sacred and the secular, together we recognized and affirmed that our work is sacred and that's the place we want to stand in the world.

Remarking on the central figures in the painting, Gisela said "In a way it's about us, but even more it's about what we are sitting for."

I am blessed to wake up to this vibrant call to life every morning. Thank you, dear Gisela.

Kay

My friend Kay died last night at 7:02pm.

Regular readers may recall that I've written about Kay before in these pages - five years ago when she was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and just last year when she married Jeff in one of the most beautiful and heartful weddings ever.

I've been part of Kay's live-in caretaking circle for the best part of the last two weeks, my life simplified down to the minutia and routine of end-of-life care. Pancreatic cancer is one of the most painful forms of the disease and much of our time was spent trying to keep her comfortable. Thank goodness we were mostly successful.

Now that I'm back home I feel as if I've been floating in a state of grace. There was a one-pointedness to our days, a unified clarity and focus that brought us intact through some pretty difficult hours. Now that it's all over, I'm a bit disoriented and not sure how to shift back to the very different demands of "real life". But perhaps most of all I'm left with the sense of having been blessed - it was an honor to have been able to be there and to have shared an experience so profound and so intimate. It is such a gift (thank you to my patient husband and flexible clients too), to be able to respond when it really matters.

And Kay really mattered. To me, and to a lot of people. She perfected the art of deep friendship and had so many friends, so many people who loved her. A shining example of what a human being can be, when faced with a diagnosis that would knock most people to the ground, she responded with elegance and grace, compassion, strength and fortitude. She was grateful for every single day she was given. She lived a beautiful life and died an extraordinary death, surrounded by love and the tender devotion of family and friends.

May that be so for each of us.

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.

Being Alone

The always relevant Tim Merry shared a link on the Art of Hosting list-serve to a delightful insightful music video on the joys of being alone. It was written and performed by poet/singer/songwriter Tanya Davis and filmed by Andrea Dorfman. For those of you not on that list, it's too good to miss (check out the clever digital imaging by Sam MacDonald):

Wise Words from Thomas Merton on a Monday morning....

"The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.

More than that, it is cooperation with violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys her own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."

~ Thomas Merton

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...