BeautyDialogues

Thoughtful Citizens

Pretending I was still in my 20s, I stayed up until 4am the other night putting together an e-Book called Thoughtful Citizenship: A Guidebook for Decision-Making and Participation (Download ThoughtfulCitizenship-eBook.pdf - 670k) and a website to house it & other great resources.

The guidebook is a non-partisan call to action and was written by a number of Berrett Koehler authors (including Juanita Brown and the World Café community) who contributed their thinking on ways to become more consciously involved in posing and engaging the great questions of our times.

 Marilee Adams from the Inquiry Institute, who sponsored this project, wanted to get something out before the US election but the work she's commisioned will remain a valuable resource far beyond that important event. It behoves us all to learn to become more thoughtful citizens, no matter where we are or who sits in the oval office.

Hozho

"The Navaho word hozho, translated into English as “beauty,” also means harmony, wholeness, goodness.

One story that suggests the dynamic way that beauty comes alive between us concerns a contemporary Navajo weaver. “A man ordered a rug of an especially complex pattern on two separate occasions from the same weaver. Both rugs came out perfectly and the weaver remarked to her brother that there must have been something special about the owner. It was understood that the outcome of the rugs was dependent not on the weaver’s skill and ability but upon the hozho in the owners life. The hozho of his life evoked the beauty in the rugs.

In the Navaho world view, beauty exists not simply in the object, or in the artist who made the object; it is expressed in relationships."

- J. Ruth Gendler, Notes on the Need for Beauty

Wisdom

A friend of mine sent in this link to an incredible book/film/website about Wisdom.

Using fabulous close-up photography of faces we know and admire - Desmond Tutu, Vanessa Redgrave, Nadine Gordimer, Vaclav Havel, Dame Judi Dench, etc. etc. - along with others we may never have heard of, it shows a group of elders speaking eloquently about wisdom and what it means to them.

Youth Give

My friend Matt Robertson went on a Journey to Africa this summer. He and several other high school seniors were part of a YouthGive trip to look at how microfinancing has been working in villages in South Africa and Zambia. They were all given Flip Videos as part of a Digital Storytelling "kit", and this is what he made with his:

Power of Place

A long-held fascination with the intentional creation of space (for particular purposes) is coming to the forefront for me right now in an interesting way.

Whatever the purpose for creating intentional space - whether it be to make a home, create the right atmosphere for a party, a setting for collective transformation, a temple or circle in which to do sacred work, or the intentional creation of “community” in the sense of offering people somewhere they can feel they “belong” - there are a number of elements that will go into building the architecture or structure for each. Some of the structural elements will be fundamental to creating any powerful environment, while others will be uniquely focused on individual intentions for that particular use

I’m currently engaged in a project on the Power of Place with three remarkable women - Sheryl Erickson, Karen Speerstra, and Ria Baaek. The project began as an inquiry into geographical places on the earth where people have felt a specific spiritual power associated with the landscape. There were some beautiful results from this inquiry (including a video by FireHawk Hulin on one such place in the Santa Cruz mountains), but the scope of the project soon grew to extend beyond geography and into a search for the raw components of "power in place"; the elements from which all "sacred space" is built.

We started by reading Christopher Alexander’s The Luminous Ground, where he talks about the “life” in everything and how to invite the elements of life to come forward when working with space. Now we're exploring how Alexander's work links to what Peter Block is talking about in his recent book, Community: The Structure of Belonging .

I’m bringing in the World Café principle of creating "hospitable” space, Pele Rouge's work in creating beauty for the Thought Leader Gatherings, Ashley Cooper's work with Easily Amazed, the work of David Sibbet and Michelle Paradis in Second Life, and the things I’ve learned in my own work with design, particularly online design, over the last twelve years.

So far we've been envisioning the project as two parts of a whole. The first part is a Primer on the key "Principles" or elements of creating sacred space as translated through a feminine lens to include "Practices" to ground these principles.

The second part is an experiment with the creation of "sacred place" online. We're documenting our process in a collective blog, which will be published along with an open invitation to participate in the inhabiting and co-evolution of whatever it is we come up with.

I hope some of you will want to play.

(This project is being done in collaboration with the Collective Wisdom Initiative and supported by a small grant from The Fetzer Institute)

End Times

The other day, in the midst of this period of major change and disruption in the world, I happened to be listening to a audio tape by Michael Meade. He was talking about the “end of times”, which he says we as a species have felt as imminent for two hundred years at least.

That’s not to say, he hastens to clarify, that we don’t need to do absolutely everything that we can to address the challenges of our time - both cultural and environmental - but that we also need to access “eternal time” or that still small place inside us that stays constant through upsets large and small.

Meade's long-term perspective served to jolt me out of my overwhelm for a minute - and his call to center ourselves in what's permanent and unchanging is certainly an apt reminder in these times that threaten to drown us in the sheer chaos of change and uncertainty. The poet William Yeats described this moment, which has obviously come before, in the lines of his famous The Second Coming:

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

In the wake of massive challenges in our economic, political and environmental spheres, there are many life-style choices that need to be made right now - crucial choices about consumption and political representation and the fundamental will to care for ourselves and others - that will determine the ways we impact each other, create our futures and decide the fate of our species (among others).

Many of those choices, however, are not only important responses to the pressing issues of our time but choices that define what it means for each of us to be human and live a conscious life - a life of sanity and humanity. These are crucial decisions to make no matter what condition the external world is in.

Finding that “timeless” center of “right relationship” for myself, & making the daily choices that align me with it is what helps me avoid the panic & despair that the daily news would otherwise trigger in my fearful psyche.

One last thing - as Maturana and others have said so well, language - what we speak into the world with our words, our images, our voices and our movement - is of seminal importance. When we are awake and consciously languaging the lives and futures we want to bring forward into the world, for ourselves and for all beings, that is what manifests between us.

So I write this to bring an awareness of that unchanging moment and suggest that we collectively use this knowledge as our True North, our guiding star as we go forward in these days of light and shadow. That we look to what is possible and to what is being born; that we keep our eyes on "that rough beast" (or to use today's metaphor, the imaginal cells that are at this very moment forming into a butterfly) as it emerges in our midst, rather than lose ourselves in the eddies of despair and lament over what is sick and dying.

We choose our future; we speak it and imagine it in each moment of our everyday lives. Together we can make it whole and beautiful. May it be so.

Vote for Hope

I got turned on to this great Flash video in David Sibbet's blog this morning... It's another great example of new media and creativity in the service of something that matters. And this is something that matters a lot right now, even if the recent debates have been less than electric.

Barack Obama's passionate speech in this video reminds me why I want him to be our next president.

Obama '08 - Vote For Hope from MC Yogi on Vimeo.

Wordle Art

Have you used Wordle yet? Created by Johnathan Feinberg in his spare time while working for IBM Research, Wordle takes words (that you either generate specifically or draw from pages with RSS feeds), and creates these word art images.

You can customize them in all sorts of cool ways - this is my first one, taken from this blog's front page a few weeks ago:

Go on - I know you want to! Make one yourself...

Don't Vote, Unless...

Here's a great video that's going around in my circles lately, in case you haven't seen it. It shows the kind of positive impact media figures can have when they lend their voice and creativity to things that really matter.

Big Sky

I've just returned from Santa Fe, where the big sky filled me with inspiration. New Mexico is one of those places where land magic is most palpable, and in this occasion it was accompanied by some powerful people magic as well.

I was at a retreat for Berrett Koehler authors (you've heard me rant about their newsletter), put on by the BK Author's Co-op. Their theme for this year's (their 8th) retreat was "creating community".  I find this theme/meme particularly compelling right now.

In all the uncertainty of our current economic and political climate, one thing that remains crystal clear is the need for community. It's never been more important to come together, collectively and collaboratively, to face the challenges and opportunities of our time.

The BK community is a particular species of human being. Each one is an author of a book that is collaboratively chosen by a team consisting of BK's exemplary President Steve Piersanti, Senior Editor Johanna Vondeling and many other members of the BK staff and community. The authors each have something really valuable to share about a subject in alignment with BK's mission: "a community dedicated to creating a world that works for all".  That means the BK community is made of intelligent, thinking people who care deeply about the world and have demonstrated the willingness to share the wisdom they've gleaned.

I'm blessed to work with many of these luminaries and call them friends; David Isaacs and Juanita Brown of the World Café, the extraordinary Alan Briskin, and new friend and colleague Marilee Adams of the Inquiry Institute. At least two more of my dearest friends, Craig Neal of Heartland Circle and David Sibbet, are soon to be BK authors and I too will be a contributing author to an upcoming 2nd edition of the World Café book, writing a chapter on how the internet and online communications have helped us to develop the World Café community and support conversations that matter all over the world.

The BK community of authors is not only writing books about what matters most in today's world, essential and important as that role is; they are also taking collective action in a number of ways.

One of the independent projects that came out of this year's retreat was an initiative that draws authors together - whether or not they are published through BK - to support Barack Obama in the upcoming election. If you're interested in adding your name or passing it on to others who might be interested in doing so, please have a look at authors4obama.com.

It's a big sky out there, and BK luminaries are helping to light it up.