BeautyDialogues

Thank you!

I'm so lucky - today is my birthday and I'm being feted by friends and colleagues all over the world. Phone calls, emails, e-cards, cards in the mail, notes from my Facebook and Gaia and Plaxo communities, dinners and grand gestures and adventures of all kinds. What a blessing it is to love and be loved.

Here's a little gift in return, which I'm passing on from a gift that came to me from my beautiful co-parent Liz Lee:

Can you read it? It's a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we will find it not."

Here's to traveling with beauty!

It's a New Day!

Like about 300 million other Americans and countless others all over the world, I spent much of this historic day glued to the TV for the inauguration ritual celebrations. Like so many others I found myself choking up with tears and the courage to hope for a new day in America. I felt pride and a sense of gratitude towards my countrymen and women who helped elect this good man.

In his powerfully direct yet compassionate and inclusive inaugural speech, Obama didn't balk at the immense amount of work in front of us, nor did he give us false promises that it would be easy. But I couldn't help but feel if anyone can pull this self-obsessed nation together and inspire us to make the changes that are imperative for our survival, and the survival of others on this planet, he can.

Part of the excitement for me is how beautifully Obama's election is galvanizing the people and organizations I am part of. Basking in the glow of the new president's idealism, there seems to be an explosion of optimism and a feeling that this is "our time"... to have the conversations we've needed to have, to reach out to each other, work together, and begin to rebuild our country.

Just this evening, I received this video from the new Soul of Money website, revealing the silver lining in the current economic crisis that no one seems to be acknowledging yet.

Beauty

The Beauty Dialogues isn't about "beauty" in the sense of what we see in the mirror - in fact, one of my pet peeves is how difficult it is to find appropriate tags for a blog like this and keep myself out of the make-up and fashion listings - but I recently came across a videographer named Giovanna Chesler whose work has me questioning some of my assumptions.

Giovanna's filmography includes a short but powerful documentary series about herself, her two sisters, and their relationship to beauty.

The series starts with the first in the BeauteouS triolgy - BeauteouS: Stephanie, which tells the story of a young woman's experience with numerous surgeries for a cleft lip and palate. Next is BeauteouS: Giovanna, where the artist experiments with showing her body in a way that is beautiful but not sexualized, a task which proves difficult. The third piece, simply called BeauteaouS, is a fictionalized acount of the third sister's journey toward her own inner self.

The final film in the series (so far), named hand-some, begins with an idealized vision of a woman's love life, but soon changes into the chronicle of her unraveling relationship.

Winter Solstice

It's a little late, but I just found this poem by Rebecca Parker in my in-box (which shows how behind in my correspondence I am), and it was so lovely I wanted to share it.

WINTER SOLSTICE
by Rebecca Parker

Perhaps
for a
moment
the typewriters will
stop clicking,
the wheels stop
rolling
the computers desist
from computing,
and a hush will fall
over the city.

For an instant, in
the stillness,
the chiming of the
celestial spheres will be heard
as earth hangs
poised
in the crystalline
darkness, and then
gracefully
tilts.

Let there be a
season
when holiness is
heard, and
the splendor of
living is revealed.

Stunned to stillness
by beauty
we remember who we
are and why we are here.

There are
inexplicable mysteries.

We are not
alone.

In the universe there
moves a Wild One
whose gestures alter
earth's axis
toward
love.

In the immense
darkness
everything spins with
joy.

The cosmos enfolds
us.

We are caught in a
web of stars,
cradled in a swaying
embrace,
rocked by the holy
night,
babes of the
universe.

Let this be the
time
we wake to
life,
like spring wakes, in
the moment
of winter
solstice.

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.