BeautyDialogues

Rituals for Healthy Living

My friend Ashley Cooper, who is Easily Amazed and one of the co-founders of the Beauty Dialogues, has been working on something really interesting lately. In a true expression of "slow community" she sent out an invitation to everyone she knew, asking us to share our practices or rituals for creating balance and well-being in our lives. She got zillions of fabulous responses, and published them in a blog called Rituals for Healthy Living.

And the question is still open! What are the rituals YOU use to bring health and vitality and joy and balance to YOUR life? Send them to Ashley and she'll add them to her growing list of positive ways to support Life in and around us.

The Beauty Way

One of my greatest mentors in this field of beauty is a remarkable woman named Pele Rouge. She is one of those people who embodies life itself, exuding an innate generosity that comes from inner fullness. Being in her presence is always a gift.

Pele's husband FireHawk is another beloved mentor, and matches her in every way. A gifted image-magician, he videoed Pele in this first-of-three video series, speaking about the feminine face of the Divine. I'm thrilled to be able to share it with you here:

I promise to post the next two in the series as soon as FireHawk sends them to me. I also have a profound story to tell about my work with Pele Rouge, but that will have to wait for another time. Meanwhile, if you want to know more about either of them, stroll through their beautiful website on Resonance.to.

Slow Community

With all my musing lately on slow work, and slow blogging, I was very excited to hear about my friend Nancy White's extrapolating on this idea in what she calls slow community. In her inimitable capacity to identify patterns and make connections, she's been talking about how quickly the interconnectivity of the web has grown beyond our abilities to stay connected in meaningful ways. (This image is a "splat map" of the internet's growth since its beginnings in ARPANET (the green bit in the middle):

Variations on this theme are being discussed all over the media - two books among my own pile of bedtime reading focus on the topic in one way or another; Peter Block's new Community: The Structure of Belonging, and Dot Calm (I love that title) - but what I particularly like about the concept of slow community is that it offers us a context with which to negotiate this growing nexus of interactivity on our own terms.

On a personal level, I long for a slower more reflective life, and I crave the depth and reflectivity and true connection that is possible within communities - online and off - that share these values.

On a professional level, the idea of "slow community" gives a conceptual framework to the online communities I help facilitate, or steward, through which we can identify and "see" ourselves. It also gives us a sense of what we might be evolving towards, or the kind of depth we might WANT to nurture between ourselves.

Some have spoken about the depth and quality of our attention as a key to slow community. I strongly believe that it's possible - and as difficult - to be as deeply connected through our online communications as it is anywhere else. The online medium has its own challenges, of course, but it also has advantages, and one of them can be time. For all its limitations and lack of physical cues, writing is a slower medium than speaking. Writing gives us the time to reflect and consider those responses that can just "pop out" as unthinking reflexivity in real-time interaction and craft them into shapes that can more clearly carry the meanings we want to convey.

One might also ask whether the word community can be used to define all the ways we interact online. Is Twitter a community? Are the people who read my blog a community? I'm curious about what the boundaries are, or what the defining features of community are for different people.

For myself, I actually think this question of what community is and isn't refers back to my earlier point about quality or more accurately, intent. In this framework, the word might be applied to any communication where the intent is to "commune", be that on Twitter, or within our blogging readerships, online conversations, or physical neighborhoods for that matter.

Having the intent to commune with each other requires an altogether different relationship to time. There's something here about respecting time and entering into interactions with a "presence" that makes the most of it, that expands time so that there's enough for whatever is needed.

Someone left a comment on one of Nancy White's posts on this subject, bringing up the Quaker model where they moved VERY slowly as a community in discussing the challenges of slavery, and yet were still the first to stand up and call for abolition. This example shows us that slowness doesn't necessarily mean an inability to respond to the challenges of the day, but rather offers the capacity to respond in a more profound and ultimately even more timely way.

* * * * * *

Here's a video from a presentation on the subject that Nancy did at Zaadz (now the Gaia Community), which has some terrible sound production, but asks some great questions:

She's also created a page on her online facilitation wiki devoted to slow community, which in turn has links to other helpful resources.

Blink

I came across this image and quote when I was searching Flickr for suitable presentation illustrations. It's by someone from Italy, called Mlle Mathilde, and reminded me why I love Flickr:

"In every minute there are nearly 60 blinks. So if I could never close my eyes I would have a lot of seconds more to see the beauty."

BlogHer - Day Three: Slow Blogging

It will come as no surprise to anyone who reads my blog regularly that I chose "slow blogging" for my first OpenSpace session. I hadn't heard of the word used specifically before this, but I am much taken with the whole "slow" movement in general, and the Beauty Dialogues couldn't get any slower.

The conversation among our small group was intimate and pleasurable and full of good ideas for slowing down and deepening our own reflection, plus it brought out what may be one of the most intriguing connections I've made at this conference full of intriguing new connections.

One of the women at the table, Leslie Madsen-Brooks, who is a Contributing Editor at BlogHer and trains teachers at UC Davis, told me about another academic - Lecturer in Writing at Middlebury and Director of the Project for Integrated Expression, Barbara Ganley, who coined the term "slow blogging". Just reading one or two posts from her vital and highly visual blog I can tell she's of the master-kindred race & I'm so looking forward to hearing & seeing more of her.

BlogHer - Day Three: OpenSpace

Kaliya Hamlin, aka Identity Women, has made a name for herself in convening OpenSpace for barcamps, unconferences and other tech events, and she's our host for today, the last meeting of BlogHer08. The OpenSpace format is very effective for facilitating group interaction, and it's a great way to bring together all the great variety of people, skills and interests present at this conference.

This is obviously a group familiar with OpenSpace, because the line starts immediately with people announcing suggested topics. There are a lot of them too: "sex", "writing for an organization & voice",  "starting a blog", "organizing your blog", "virtual reality & second life", "slow blogging", "'how to' tech workshop", "using twitter and other social media", "beyond writing", "video blogging", just to start. The agenda is open & will be "live" all day, so the list will no doubt grow!

Now all I have to do is figure out which one to go to ...

BlogHer 08 - Day Two: Keynote

The last session of day two was a keynote in the main room, featuring published authors Heather Armstrong and Stephanie Klein talking about what it's like living your life in a fishbowl. It was called "Living the Truman Show" in reference to the 1998 movie starring Jim Carey, who discovers his life is a reality show that everyone else is watching.

They talked about how blogging is like any other art form, where we are using the stuff of our life as material for our work, and they both pointed out how this can cause strain in their relationships. Interestingly, it's not so much concern from friends and family about having their personal lives exposed online as it is their irritation about NOT being included in the blog, as well as the more sober concern of some close friends not feeling like they are particularly "special" to someone who's so seemingly intimate with the entire world.

The women were entertaining and "real", which is a great recipe for success as a writer, and the interviewer Elisa Camahort was excellent. Their conversation offered insight into where success as a blogger might lead & explored various tensions within the cultural dynamic of celebrity, including two vaguely unsettling exchanges between Heather and fans in the audience.

Apparently being famous can be quite complicated.

BlogHer08 - Day Two: ShutterSisters

It turns out that some of the coolest people I've met here at BlogHer are part of a collective of women photographers called Shutter Sisters, so when I saw they were hosting a photo shoot in the streets of San Francisco, I decided to drop the other session options and go for the fresh air.

It was great to be outside, even though the skies are uncommonly grey right now, and fun to explore the city from another's point of view (our group had a local tour guide who took us on a quick loop through Chinatown). Here's some of what I saw out there:

BlogHer - Day Two: Photography

[Sitting in the room waiting for the photography session to begin, the conversations I'm having with the other early arrivals are making me realize that beautiful bloggers are everywhere!]

The photography session is led by Me Ra Koh of Refuse to Say Cheese, who uses photography as a medium for storytelling. She offers photography workshops and is willing to start at the very beginning - scripting a DVD series for women that tells how to use a camera, tell stories with your photos, and start a photo portrait business.

Me Ra is self-taught, and in the 6 years since she started her business has traveled a success trajectory that would be the envy of any professional. She sees herself as a storyteller as much as a photographer, and focuses her creative attention on the story in front of her camera - what it is, who it's about and how best to frame it.

Here are her top 10 tips for doing just that:

1) Define the emotion, and dump anything in your image that doesn't support it.

2) Fill the frame. (She brings in the rule of thirds for nuance on how to do that beautifully)

3) Less is more.

4) How blurry do you want your background? And here she goes into aperture/f stops, and how the lens that came with your camera is probably worthless because it can't go down to a low enough f-stop. You need to go down to at least 2.8, she says, to get the clear foreground and blurry background that can often tell the story best.

5) How low can you go with your ISO? (that rhymes!) The best color saturation is at the low end of the ISO range, so she's recommending 100 as the optimum ISO for Canon, but warns when the light is low you'll need a tripod.

6) AI Servo. This is a secret that a lot of pros use. It's an auto focus mode that will lock on motion coming towards you or away from you. It's perfect for brides walking down the aisle, or kids running towards you or swinging. Side to side motion doesn't work.

7) External Flash. You want your shots to look like they were taken without a flash, in natural light with no shadows. The trick to doing this is in how you aim your flash. Some people like an oblique angle, so it looks like natural light coming in from a window, but another great solution is to throw the light behind you as a photographer - there's no flash in the eyes, and you have an even natural light with no shadows on the face.

8) Shutter Speed. If the available light isn't working for you, you can use your shutter speed to increase the light, but don't forget that the slower your shutter speed (longer exposure, more light, higher number) the grainier the result.

9) Three things to do in post-process - 1) add contrast  2) decide if the image will work better in color or in b&w & 3) add a vignette.

10) Pick one thing to work on at a time. Don't try to do everything at once. Choose one area you want to learn or improve and play with it. Explore & enjoy it.

Day Two: Beautiful Blogging

I missed the morning keynote, due to an overwhelming urge for an almond croissant and chai latte on my way in this morning, and have come directly to the first session, which is called "Beautiful Blogging & Positive Posting".

This session turns me on right away because the host, Kyran Pittman, who blogs Notes to Self, points to an alternative economy at work in the blogging world, one that is less concerned with clicks and making money and more to do with writing and sharing and influencing others for the good, making personal connections and positive statements, not as an either/or but a both/and.

The other panelists are amazing, too - Krystyn Heide whose blog hoperevo.com creates a Hope Revolution, one note at a time; innovative social change blogger Jen Braxton at one plus two, Alysa Royse who writes justcauseit.com so her daughter knows there can be solutions as well as problems; and Lucrecer Braxton who started ArtSlam, a shout out to the poetry slam community that uses the power of art to connect people.

The bottom line here is the decision to choose another way of being - online and off. The willingness to make conscious choices - to be present in the moment, honest and positive even about things that are painful, to turn away from the "snarkiness" that can be so prevalent in the blogosphere and refuse to play that way. To take responsibility for what we put out into cyberspace.

One very cool metaphor that Kyran put forward is that we're all becoming aware of the emotional "carbon footprint" we're unleashing in the world.

The audience, too, is full of beautiful bloggers - Karen Walrond with her exquisite photoblog chookooloonks; the beautiful woman sitting next to me, Staci Boden, who writes Practical Spirituality, and so very many more - the name Jen Lemen came up more than once even though she wasn't there. 

Clearly, I've found my blog tribe!

It's not surprising that several of us are either designers or photographers, or both. Part of the "give aways" in this session, beyond the generous invitations & community offered from people throughout the room, was a print that Krystyn Heid brought of the words "images & text made with love" color printed on fine rag.

Images and text made with love: that's the way I see my work, too.