BeautyDialogues

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.

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 Sabbath Manifesto

I came across the coolest thing the other day - an idea so simple and old and yet so profound and so needed in this hectic modern age. It's called the Sabbath Manifesto. The founders offer ten principles to help us slow down and reclaim the power and grace of observing the Sabbath - one day among seven dedicated to rest and reflection.

The conversational debate about their first principle, "Avoid Technology" is absolutely fascinating and I love their little Cell Phone Sleeping Bag to deal with the distraction of all those blinking lights.

Beauty and the Bento Box

photo by Haruo Iida on Flickr

A NY Times Opinion post called Beauty and the Bento Box touches on two of my favorite subjects - beauty and food. I loved the format, which was to make a simple point - in this case the aesthetics and care taken in creating these lovely Japanese bento boxes - and then link to four people with different perspectives on the subject. Their responses cover a delightful range across form and function and show how aesthetics feed us on a number of levels.

Morning Light

The morning light on my long-overdue beauty walk today was exquisite.
I took this photo, feeling blessed and grateful.

A Path with Heart

A friend from Australia sent me the link for a delightful two and a half minute video about a man who shares my love of morning Beauty Walks, although he doesn't call them that. He's also on the front lines of the Slow Movement, and I'm sure he has no idea what that is, either.

But have a look - he's truly a kindred spirit and gentle soul.

"If I ran the Internet"

In one of the superb series of TED videos sponsored by BMW, performance poet Rives shares this yummy juicy poem - "If I ran the Internet":

TED is currently sponsoring a number of videos on the subject of happiness, and what makes us happy, no doubt inspired by the ground-breaking "Happiness and Its Causes" FREE conference coming up this week in San Fransisco (don't miss it!). One of the TED Happiness videos is of journalist Carl Honoré, talking about the slow movement, and slowness as a key to happiness.

Cultivating Happiness

My favorite of the post-election emails circulating now is the amazing Alice Walker's letter to Obama, and this is my favorite part of it:

"... you alone are not responsible for bringing the world back to balance. A primary responsibility that you do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play ... We are used to seeing men in the White House soon become juiceless and as white-haired as the building; we notice their wives and children looking strained and stressed. They soon have smiles so lacking in joy that they remind us of scissors. This is no way to lead. ... One way of thinking about all this is: It is so bad now that there is no excuse not to relax. From your happy, relaxed state, you can model real success, which is all that so many people in the world really want."

Walker ends with a reference to the Dalai Lama, who truly embodies the spirit of leadership in today's world, and Obama's incredible smile, to which she pays tribute:

"A good model of how to “work with the enemy” internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts the Chinese government that invaded Tibet. Because, finally, it is the soul that must be preserved, if one is to remain a credible leader. All else might be lost; but when the soul dies, the connection to earth, to peoples, to animals, to rivers, to mountain ranges, purple and majestic, also dies. And your smile, with which we watch you do gracious battle with unjust characterizations, distortions and lies, is that expression of healthy self-worth, spirit and soul, that, kept happy and free and relaxed, can find an answering smile in all of us, lighting our way, and brightening the world."

Mindful Wandering

One of my favorite thinkers/bloggers out there, Dave Pollard, recently shared his association between "slow blogging" as defined by Barbara Ganley and what his friend Chris Lott calls "mindful wandering". Here's an excerpt from Dave's post:

"The idea is to see blogging, which is really just a new way of recording your thoughts in a diary, as a meditative practice, taking the time to ponder the meaning of what you're reading, thinking and writing, letting your mind meander in thoughtful and creative ways to "make sense" of it."

The photo above was taken by FireHawk Hulin of his wife Pele Rouge and I, taking a break from an informal writing retreat we set up with each other to do just that.

It was exquisite, and I can't imagine anything better than to spend more time exactly like this... Walking, looking with fresh eyes at what is around me; seeing the juxtapositions of line and light and color and following them with my camera - like a dream or a story without words.

It's such a pleasure to let my thoughts wander over the things I've seen or read or heard recently and listen for the patterns I sense emerging between them; to what is becoming clearer, or where new questions are surfacing. I crave conversation about these things with other thinking, aware, sensitive people, and I love the experience, the artful practice, of composing something tangible - a blog post, a story or poem, a finished photograph, a video or slideshow - from these elements.

I recently advised one of my clients to make reflective writing part of her daily practice, even if what she writes doesn't always make it to a blog post. Simply to take an hour every morning, or every evening, and contemplate what has meaning in this moment, or reflect on what carried energy in this day.

I can't wait to see what comes of this from and for her.
Hmmmm. Maybe it's time I listened to my own advice. :-)

Digital Mindfullness

As part of my recent focus on living a more balanced life (as opposed to continuing on in the over-scheduled madness of what I will now call "my past"), I'm implementing a number of practices to sustain my good intentions.

These include giving myself more time to read, one of the elemental pleasures of my “real life” (the one I've decided to claim), and what is perhaps even more exquisite, to talk about what I’m reading with other intelligent human beings (that's you! :-).

To this end, I recently caught up with several articles I’d laid aside until there was "time" for them... and I found some interesting correspondences between them.

Reading a piece on digital identity and security in the New York Times, "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy" by Clive Thompson, the last few paragraphs piqued my interest:

“It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves.

Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site — “What are you doing?” — can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?)

Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.”

What a marvelous observation and an altogether different perspective on the opportunities opened up by web 2.0...

I've certainly found that writing regular blog posts increases the depth of my own self-knowledge and understanding; why not extend that mindfulness further and consciously apply the same self-awareness in some of my other digital communications? 

Then, in the latest Shambhala Sun, an article from Pema Chodron, called “Waking up to Your World”:

“One of the most effective means for working with that moment when we see the gathering storm of our habitual tendencies is the practice of pausing, or creating a gap. We can stop and take three conscious breaths, and the world has a chance to open up to us in that gap. We can allow space into our state of mind.”

This strikes me as a distinct window for opening the opportunity inherent in Twitter's question "What am I doing?" as the ultimate mindfulness exercise.

I've mentioned my "slow work" group; one of the members has been using the practice Pema suggests throughout his day as a way to stay awake to the habitual patterns of his normal workday, and interestingly he is also just discovering the world of social media and beginning to Twitter. The other day he told me about a group of people on Ning who are using Twitter to aid them in a similar mindfulness practice, as a way to check in and support each other throughout the day. They're called Twit2Fit.

There are of course all kinds of purposes to which one can put social media, but using Twitter to develop self- awareness brings a whole new dimension to the digital evolution.