BeautyDialogues

The Religion of Love

My annual Solstice Ceremony with good friends in the Santa Cruz mountains was deeply fabulous.

It has become a crucial yearly ritual for me in which I take the time to BE in community, within nature; a kind of gyroscope through which I re-calibrate to my own internal clock and reconnect to my inner nature.

This year's gourd, above, painted by Sue Blondell (aka Lightning Dove) and this poem, below, recited by Paul Strickland (aka Woolly Mammoth) speak for me of the essential magic of this powerful event.

The Love Religion
by Ibn Arabi

The inner space inside
that we call the heart
has become many different
living scenes and stories.

A pasture for sleek gazelles,
a monastery for Christian monks,
a temple with Shiva dancing,
a kabba for pilgrimage,
a Medicine Wheel for the People. (ok, he added that line himself)

The tablets of Moses are there,
The Qur'an, the Vedas,
The sutras, the gospels,
And the teachings of the Old Ones. (this one too)

Love is the religion in me.
And whichever way love's camel goes,
that way becomes my faith,
the source of beauty and a light
of sacredness over all things.

In Dresden, Seeped in Beauty

I'm in Dresden with World Café friends, helping to design a very unusual event that will be held later this year here in Europe. I'll write more about this as it evolves but right now I just wanted to share some of the beauty that my host and friend here in Dresden has created. Sabine Soeder is not only ravishingly lovely but everything that comes from her is Beauty. She and the extremely talented and SMART Chris Chopyak are visually recording our conversations as we/they speak and it is absolutely catalytic having these images to reflect our collective meaning-making AS IT IS HAPPENING.

Sabine's husband Ulrich led us in an exercise this morning where we went inside and listened for the form that could represent what we were feeling emerging in ourselves. When we'd translated that form into a physical gesture/movement, someone suggested we then make an image of what we were noticing to show to each other. The tree above was Sabine's.

Dreams of Mount Tamalpais

Last week I set off on a jaunt on my favorite mountain with Howard Rheingold and friends, participating in the ritual he calls "Church of Mount Tam". Totally embarrassingly, I only stayed with the group for the first 200 yards, which were directly D O W N the side of the mountain, when my elderly left knee decided to drop out and take communion on flat or uphill ground until the rest of the congregation returned.

I had a rare and delightful time wandering completely alone, and took a few photos, including the one above. I needn't have bothered since this turned out to be an amazingly well-documented walk, including a whole Flickr stream by Fabrice Florin and a lyrical video by Freddy Hahne (his sound track is brilliant!).

This little congregation isn't alone in loving Mount Tam, either. Tomorrow night I'm going to hear Tom Killion and Gary Snyder present their new book on this beautiful mountain, Tamalpais Walking, at Book Passage in Corte Madera and I just know the place will be packed with Believers.

Jahan Khalighi

One of the most talented bright young lights I've seen in years is performance poet Jahan Khalighi.

For all his creative power, Jahan is a shy soul and puts his promotional energy into the community arts he loves. So if you haven't been lucky enough to see him perform live, there has been no way to connect with his work. This is until now - I'm excited to learn that he's recently created Poetry n Process, a website where his soul-restoring poetry is archived for all to see. Occasionally erratic spelling choices aside, it's well worth reading.

Impossible in Real Life

Even some of my most techno-freak friends have been unable to "grock" my fascination with Second Life, and I usually find myself avoiding the topic since I seem to be unable to convey why I find it not only mesmerizing, but also somehow really important. I know the idea of a "virtual world" pushes up against many closely held assumptions but I hope this post begins to open a different window.

The other morning after my woman's group in Second Life (which meets in a five-chambered cave carved into the side of a beautiful mountain on Sunseed Bardeen's Third Life), I found myself in a spontaneous conversation with some people from another Second Life group I'm part of -  Bettina Tizzy's Impossible IRL (Impossible in Real Life). The creative collaborations that Bettina has attracted and the art she showcases and promotes on her island are examples of some of what's most exciting to me about Second Life - visit her place in Chakryn and you'll see what I mean.

In this instance, she was sharing a video she'd found and posted on her wonderful blog:

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

My New Avatar

I've been working with Kara Brown on an avatar for my social networking sites, and am pleased to show you the jewel she came up with...  and share what a wonderful experience it's been working with her on this project.

First she looked at my other avatars, which were mostly photographic, and then we talked about who I am and what I want to say about myself in this medium. She was totally open to my thoughts and feedback, and really heard the essence of my message.

I love what she did with the background, indicating a magical web of connection and inspiration, a green web that connects us to each other and to the natural world.

If you'd like your own, completely customized avatar, or have other illustration needs that could use her playful impressionistic style, give Tara a call! She's talented, intuitive, reasonably priced and I can't recommend her enough.

The Land of the Quantum

My friend and colleague, the incredibly talented Nancy Margulies, has just made this wonderful video from Dr. Seuss-inspired images and a poem she created about "the Land of the Quantum, where everything's soup and consciousness folds on itself in a loop".

Art Feeds Us

 My friend (and co-founder of the original Beauty Dialogues) Ashley Cooper is visiting for a day and a half and as always her special brand of vibrancy is stimulating all my art/play centers. You can't be around her without wanting to sing or dance or bring out the finger paints... You might understand why when I tell you how she got the name for her website and blog a few years ago when one of the 5 year old munchkins she works with said "Gee Miss Ashley, you sure are easily amazed! :-)

So tonight, after struggling unsuccessfully to import an existing site into her new iWeb 09, we were ready for some easy amazement and went to see the inventive & "deliciously creepy" Coraline in 3D. I haven't seen anything 3D in years and boy! they have made some impressive leaps in the medium. It was visually quite wonderful, and besides, half way through the movie we couldn't help noticing how mega cool we looked in our fancy plastic (no paper for us!) 3D glasses.

Ashley's friend Kara is another creative soul who, in addition to her other illustration and painting commissions (like this piece, above) makes incredible "avatars" - an image that stands in for you (could be a photograph but Kara's work is so much more exciting) on FaceBook or Twitter or any of the other social networking sites. If you want to see the perfect representation she made of Ashley check out this post - I'm going to ask her to make me one too!

Beth's Beauty

My talented friend and colleague Beth Alexander (who also designs and makes exquisite jewelry) made this lovely mandala to help celebrate the season... Beautiful, isn't it!?

The Road

I just finished reading The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Wow.

Set in a world as spare and grey as imagination can bear, McCarthy somehow manages to illuminate the ashes of that post-apocalyptic ruin with the beleaguered flickering of his characters' still-human hearts.

This story, written by my British college Literature professors' favorite American author, reveals the beauty that can dwell within even the most horrible ugliness. It's one of those books you sit with for a long time afterwords, and I'm still sitting.

Have any of you read it? What did you think?