BeautyDialogues

Occupy Your LIfe

Slowing down and embracing the spaciousness of the un-scheduled moment has been an increasingly important and elusive goal over the last few years as I experience too-regular calendar overwhelm and a daily Sisyphean battle with my in-box.

Thomas Merton articulates the problem perfectly in a quote I've used here before and will no doubt come back to again:

"The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.

More than that, it is cooperation with violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys her own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."

To begin to redress the violence I've been doing to my soul and restore the tender roots of my own inner wisdom, I've decided to begin this new year by re-claiming something I'd almost forgotten - the weekend.

No small thing as - slowly but definitely - the weekend seems to have migrated from rest-time to work-time in the popular imagination. Turning the tide appears to require a personal declaration of some kind, a stance against the cultural pressure to over-work. Therefore, I have ordered home delivery of Sunday's New York Times and hereby publicly proclaim that I can no longer be relied upon to read email over the weekend.

Yes, you heard that correctly. I'm embarking upon a "occupy my life" campaign in 2012 that kicks off by fully occupying my weekends, so unless we have arranged otherwise, you can pretty-much figure I won't read anything work-related after 5pm Friday until Monday morning. With the accumulation that's sure to have piled up by then, you may not even get a response til Tuesday!

Even God didn't work 7 days a week.

from my home to yours...

 

May the Light and Love of this season grow in our hearts and expand out to embrace all that exists. May we walk in Beauty, all of us, as we celebrate the holidays and step into this new year.

Divorce? True Confessions

I've re-discovered WordPress and fallen in love with it.

We dated back in the mid-90s for a while when it was a sexy but high maintanence option, and I ultimately decided to go with the security and stability of TypePad, who I've been married to now for many years. We've been quite happy (Beauty Dialogues is built on the TypePad blog engine), but I have to confess that lately I've been thinking about leaving...

My newer sites are all going up in WordPress and I'm excited by the visual range and incredible functionality it offers. Even sexier after all these years, WordPress is challenging me to learn more and be a better designer and coder. If it weren't for the children - my clients - I'd probably be gone already, but TypePad makes things very easy for the casual user and I don't want anyone else to suffer for my pleasure.

The truth is I do still love TypePad. It does many things simply and easily (color and font changes, image sizing, borders, margins, etc.) that can take complicated coaxing out of WordPress. All kinds of functionality (like great SEO - search engine optimization) that require bandwidth-hogging plug-ins in WordPress is automatically built into TypePad. And it's a well-known, admitted, fact that WordPress' image-handling process sucks.

But WordPress is working on these things and it's still growing and improving daily, whereas I'm afraid TypePad doesn't really seem to care much anymore. The TypePad affiliate program has never worked for me and the joy of being a TypePad user has diminished greatly ever since Say Media bought the parent company Six Apart from founders Ben and Mena Trott a couple of years ago now.

Hey. People change. Things move on. But I'm the loyal type and have a lot invested in TypePad, including a whole lot of children to care for and consider.

Ah, but WordPress... I can't resist your lure. Maybe polyamory is a better fit for me anyway.

Nests

Every since my work as Vision Nest Studio with FireHawk Hulin, I've been paying attention to nests. I'm drawn by the powerful metaphor of incubation they suggest, serving as a container for the transformative process; a safe space for Life to emerge.

When we were planning the first Vision Nest Studio, FireHawk shared an inspiration he'd had for our name.

Synchronistically, I'd just watched a television Special on bowerbirds and their nests. The bowerbird is an artist - each bird builds its nest from what is around and each is completely unique, with its own aesthetic. So the bowerbird turned out to be an apt symbol for the group of totally unique individuals that took our class, and its nest a perfect metaphor for the space we built for their emergence as fully creative beings.

Some time later, FireHawk sent me a link he'd found about an artist in Big Sur who builds and installs gigantic human nests and I remembered having seen one of them at Esalen. Then I found (and immediately bought!) this gorgeous book at a bookshop out in Pt Reyes: Fifty Nests and the Birds that Built Them.

There seems to be a theme emerging, so I thought I'd post about it, wondering if perhaps we all need a few nests in our lives... I know I do. If this metaphor resonates with you, too, perhaps you would share something about the nests that hold your forms of emergent Life?