BeautyDialogues

Blessings

For those who know and love John O'Donohue, a blessing has arrived to help ease the shock and grief of his recent loss. His posthumous To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings has been released.

It is a slim volume of his graceful voice offering its blessing upon the world and all things within it. Birthdays, death, marriage, exile, addiction - nothing is too joyous or too sad to receive a blessing from O'Donohue, patron saint of beauty and kindness.

Here is his blessing for the Artist at the Start of Day (and here's one from me):

May morning be astir with the harvest of night;
Your mind quickening to the eros of a new question,
Your eyes seduced by some unintended glimpse
That cut right through the surface to a source.

May this be a morning of innocent beginning,
When the gift within you slips clear
Of the sticky web of the personal
With its hurts and its hauntings,
And fixed fortress corners.

A  morning when you become a pure vessel
For what wants to ascend from silence,

May your imagination know
The grace of perfect danger,

To reach beyond imitation,
And the wheel of repetition,

Deep into the call of all
The unfinished and unsolved

Until the veil of the unknown yields
And something original begins
To stir toward your senses
And grow stronger in your heart

In order to come to birth
In a clean line of form,
That claims from time
A rhythm not yet heard,
That calls space to
A different shape.

May it be its own force field
And dwell uniquely
Between the heart and the light

To surprise the hungry eye
By how deftly it fits
About its secret loss.

Oprah in the Morning

Admittedly I'm a little behind the curve here, but this morning i took my iPod out for a walk (this is a new-to-me technique I'm experimenting with to motivate myself to walk more regularly) loaded with the first session of a free 10 week class that Oprah Winfrey and Eckhart Tolle are presenting online. The class is based on a conversation between the two of them about the ideas in his book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose.

Co-sponsored and (at least partly) powered by Skype, the ground-breaking capacity to broadcast this series to half a million people around the globe alone would be enough to turn on the light in my geeky little heart, but the content too (at least what I've heard of it in the first 45 minutes) is spectacular.

There were several highlights (not least of which flipped the idea of finding what you want to do in this life ala JFK, by suggesting you will only ever find out by asking Life what it wants of You) but my favorite part was Tolle talking about flowers as "representatives of the spiritual". Flowers are more delicate than the plants that hold them, he says, their matter less dense, more etherial. So by being still with a flower, being present with it, you are face to face with a direct source to the divine.

I knew it! :-) Of course, as he goes on to say, being Present is itself a direct source to the divine, but it is easier to access your own sense of Presence in nature, and particularly around flowers. This makes perfect sense to me and I love how we can all know something - what is more captivating to a human (not to mention a bee) than a flower? - and then discover layers of 'fact' that tell us why it's true.

I'd heard about this series before - it started 4 weeks ago on March 3rd - but for some reason it took a while to grab me (you can still download the audio files from earlier classes and join for future broadcasts). I'd heard Oprah talked too much, and of course the first week was a bit of a disaster, but as my friend and colleague Steve Borsch wrote in his blog Connecting the Dots, they came out of the technical screw-up with colors flying. And as for Oprah talking too much - she may be a public presenter down to her core, but like a female Bill Moyers she obviously believes in what she's promoting here and her excitement about this topic and this medium is infectious.

She says this is the most exciting thing she's ever done, and you can hear it in her voice. Not only is she understandably excited about the possibilities of our ability to reach millions of human hearts around the globe - she, like several other influential people I can name, is truly experiencing a spiritual awakening during this crucial time. And not a minute too soon, I say. Not only that, she has the resources and is so media-savvy that she actually has the potential to share her personal experience in a way that may help catalyze the large-scale awakening the world needs right now.

Go, girl!

Link to Flickr

Ok! I finally got my desert photos up online! Here's a taster, but check out the rest on Flickr:

www.flickr.com

Desert Beauty

The desert is a delicate animal at this time of year. Like a snake shedding its skin it’s fragile, vulnerable, in a state of emergence.

If I were making a list of the 100 things I want to do before I die, visiting the desert in bloom would certainly be among them. 

So when my friend Bridget mentioned that she goes to Anza Borrego every year around this time and suggested I might want to come with her and photograph the beauty, I jumped at the chance (Bridget is an exceptionally talented green architect and landscape designer and also a client of mine – look for an announcement of her site and blog at bridgetbrewer.com soon)!

World Café in Second Life

As promised - here's a link to my story of the Second Life World Café I hosted with Michelle Paradis, David Sibbet of Grove International, Nancy White, and Sherry Reson of the Rockridge Institute.