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...

 

The Shape of Design

I get a lot of email communications, and most of them are fairly easy to delete, but one I almost always pay attention to is Very Short List, because it's full of really cool things and it's delivered in a concise and nicely laid out format.

The lastest issue of vsl featured this beautiful book by Frank Chimero. I'm probably the ideal target audience for an hook like this and I followed the link to find an elegant little website dedicated to the book, with a wonderful design sensibility, fancifully illustrated chapter headings, and a great story at its core.

Chimero raised the money to write the book through a campaign on Kickstarter. The disarmingly simple video he created to sell his idea to potential funders (who gave him a total of $112,159 towards the project) talks about the book being not only for designers, but for everyone who makes things. He says that's all of us, and that "The Future is Something You Make".

There's a video of him presenting at the 2011 Build Conference in Belfast, which is not short but what I watched of it was compelling and if the topic thrills you like it does me, it's probably well worth watching.

Of course I ordered the book (which is offered in both print and digital format), so I'll let you know if it's as great as his promotions for it are. I know I'm excited to find out!

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.

Merry Christmas

Even though my natural affinity for Winter Solstice is strong and I love lighting the Menorah each night of Hannukah, I am an equally unabashed Christmas lover. You won't be surprised to hear that, given my almost obsessive engagement with online media, this Digital Nativity Story (sent by my friend and colleague Adriano Pianesi) really tickled me. If you haven't seen it I hope you too will find it amusing.

My favorite part is the three Kings "following" the Star of Bethlehem on Twitter...

Vision Nest Studio

The final Summer Intensive Worldshop videos are all up now, in the new Vision Nest Studio website!

While you're there, check out "What is Vision?", the little introductory video I created to start us off this summer, and one of my all-time favorites "What's Your Vision?" - with a surprise ending and an animated version of our logo.

Vision, Storytelling and Digital Media

I've been falling in love with Salinas, a sleepy fertile town that has been growing on me ever since I moved here at the beginning of the month to join FireHawk in teaching a summer intensive course in Vision, Storytelling, and Digital Media at Hartnell College. I was head over heels in love with my class from the first day...

I've always dreamed of having a room-full of bright young minds to explore with, and the reality has been all I could have ever wished for. My kids (I say kids but they range in age from one impossibly capable 15 year old to a deeply thoughtful and ex-homeless man in his 40s, with most of them bright sparks between 19 and 23) are incredible - sensitive, intelligent, curious and creative.

The course we've designed for them is a bit unusual; it's a multi-dimensional fabric of social, spiritual, technological and vocational threads -  but they have taken everything we've given them and made full use of it. Let me take you back to the first week, for example, where we asked each of them to begin thinking about what having a vision might mean for them...

For many it was the first time they'd been asked this question, and we spent the time it took to uncover a vision for each student - first for their lives and then their community, before beginning to create digital art from what they found. Each student, whatever their background, level of education, or expressive style, threw their heart and soul into communicating their visions through video. With their permission, I'm proud to share the results of their work on the Vision Nest Studio video channel we created.

And that was only the first week! Stay tuned for more about Vision Nest Studio Productions (the "brand" that has come from this adventure for FireHawk and I), and to see the class' final video project - done in teams each focusing on a vision for (one of) the Agriculture, Health, and Construction industries in the Salinas valley in 2020.

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:

Powers of Place

woodcut by Tom Killion

I've been building the web presence for the Fetzer-funded project, the Powers of Place Initiative, for almost a year now and we are finally ready to launch! Check it out: www.powersofplace.com

This project is dear to my heart, given how profoundly my life has been effected by the sense of place - coming up through young adulthood by the love of the NorthEast Kingdom in Vermont, calmed and grounded by the expanse of Balboa Park in San Diego, in love with the contours of the green and pleasant land of England's south coast, and now blessed by the sacred Mt Tamalpais here in the San Francisco bay area.

How have the powers of place effected you and/or your work? If this is a subject that interests you, you might want to join this group in doing serious research and dedicated inquiry into the phenomena.

The Power of Collective Wisdom

I've just finished building the website for a wonderful new book called The Power of Collective Wisdom and the Trap of Collective Folly. It's just been released and I have a feeling this book is going to be important. It has a very down-to-earth yet critically timed message, grounded in clear examples of how we as human beings behave in groups - for good and for ill.

This beautifully crafted book shows us how we can learn from our past follies - a recent post the authors wrote for the BK Communique gives five ways we fall into collective folly - and it gives us inspiration and stories that remind us we can also work together consciously and powerfully to do great good that would be impossible alone.

It's been enormous fun to work on this project, and I'm pleased with the result. We (I worked closely on the website with one of the four co-authors, Alan Briskin) had the best feedback I could ever have wished for from one of the other authors, who has an exacting eye and doesn't waste time on false praise (which makes her words all the sweeter): "... it is a well crafted carrier of very good energy ... (my) gratitude for bringing your aesthetic eyes and careful design to this part of the work."

Seeking Beauty

Photo by Vagabond Shutterbug on Flickr

Robin Morris, a Beauty Dialogues reader who’s become a friend over the years, has paid me the highest compliment a writer could wish for. Here’s a letter I received from her a little over a week ago:

“I had a thought this morning that I wanted to share with you in relation to your connection with "beauty".  It was one of those moments this morning when it felt like a light was turned on in a very dark corner. Recently I've been struggling with the transition and loss around my divorce, and I had the realization that I need to shift my focus from dwelling on "why?", or "what did I do/what could I have done?", to "what do I need to heal?" or something close to that.

At first I assumed this looked like a gratitude journal or focusing on positive outcomes of the change in my life, but what I realized as I walked with my sweet puppy this morning, is that what I need is to be able to see the beauty in my life.