BeautyDialogues

Michael Katz

I get a LOT of e-newsletters but there are only a few I actually read. This small list includes Jeevan's BK Communique, which I wrote about the other day, but another comes from Blue Penguin Development's Michael Katz, who coincidentally helps people learn how to write these things.

Michael really understands the secret of a great e-letter, which is - in a nutshell - to claim your reader's immediate attention by focusing on what THEY want to know, rather than what you want to tell them.

Cultivating a distinctive personal style that's aligned with your purpose, as Michael does, is also important to e-marketing success. Plus he's absolutely hilarious, which never hurts.

Michael has been a guide to me for many years now, and if you're thinking of starting an e-letter of any kind (and imho keeping in regular contact with your audience is essential to any successful communications strategy), I can't recommend anyone better to study and learn from.

My Friend Fletcher

My friend Fletcher (has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?) started blogging again after several months of hiatus (or neglect, take your pick); check out the new Fletcher's Blog. Fletcher's a digital artist with a keen eye for the bizarre and the wonderful and I think you'll enjoy his work, especially if you're partial to street photography and astute political commentary.

Here's one of my favorites from his Carnaval photo shoot:

Design Deliberations

I was reading something in Chris Brogan's blog the other day on blog design, a solid informative post about basing each design decision on its congruence with your blog's intended use. At last count this piece had drawn 61(!) comments from his readers, many of them appreciative of Brogan's suggestion to use a thinner header to take full advantage of valuable page "real estate".

I  wrote a long comment myself, in part promoting the idea of a more expansive banner, because sometimes an image is as valuable (if not more so) as anything else you could say. This fact may not be immediately apparent in the largely left-brain logic of the marketplace, but it is no less true. Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind gives a wonderful exposition of why right-brain creativity is an increasingly important component in today's world.

One of the great things about a blog is how easy it is to change it, and I tend to be continually tweaking and fine-tuning my "look and feel" and sidebar content. This new banner, for example, is a radical departure from what I've done here in the past.

Even though it intuitively felt right, I must admit at first I was nervous about using black in the beauty dialogue color scheme, since I usually have a more literal focus on light. Then I saw these lines from Anam Cara, by John O'Donohue, and knew I was ok:

"We need a light that has retained its kinship with the darkness ... All creativity awakens at this pivotal threshold where light and darkness test and bless each other. You only discover balance in your life when you learn to trust the flow of this ancient rhythm."

The power of visual language is undeniable, perhaps because it speaks not only to our conscious, logical brain, but also to our unconscious, poetic intuition and imagination. Like Pink, I believe that gaining intuitive fluency is one of the most important skills you can develop, as a designer and as a human being.

But what do you think? What are some of the design decisions you have made and why did you make them? Where does your own balance lie between logic and intuition?

Visual Conversation

The one-dimensional language of text all alone on a page is a thing of the past - more and more our online communications are being enriched by images and audio, and video is everywhere.

I was taking a walk with the fabulous Howard Rheingold (what's a little name-dropping among friends? :-) last week along a wetland stream at the base of Mount Tamalpais, and as always I learned all kinds of wonderful new things from him. Here's one I can tell you about - Seesmic.

Seesmic is the ultimate Web2.0 communications vehicle. Linked into Twitter and YouTube (so far), Seesmic is a video-based conversational forum and social networking site. It was started by a charismatic Frenchman, Loic Le Meur, and people from all over the world have joined him there so the threaded video conversations are happening in several languages. It's still in alpha, but you can sign up for it and Loic will send you an invitation code.

Now that I've already dropped his name, let me talk about Howard for a moment. He is one of the coolest people I know - not just because he's famous (in my world at least) and has written lots of fabulous books, but because he is absolutely genuine, and because he's so curious that he knows an awful lot about everything and is totally willing to share what he knows. He's been doing lots of video himself lately, and recently launched his own video blog. His latest entry is a hilarious attempt to multi-task while making a video.

Slow Work

The other day a couple of friends and I were talking about the difficulties of maintaining a healthy life/work balance, which as you know dear reader has been one of my personal challenges. It was extraordinarily helpful to hear the details of other people's struggles with this increasingly prevalent  modern phenomenon, and draw on their solutions.

SlowWork, a concept with connections to the SlowFood movement, is another positive response to this cultural addiction to speed. It's not about going backwards or doing things "at a snail's pace", they say, but about changing gears and finding a way to work that's less driven and destructively focused on quanity rather than quality; giving ourselves the space to cultivate our professional relationships, the time for the rest and recuperation that's needed to support our physical and mental health so that we can do our best. In other words, bringing a different quality of presence to our work.

During my walk this morning I was listening to a podcast from Oprah's Book Club, where Eckhart Tolle was talking about opportunities to bring more mindfulness into our everyday work practices. He suggested two simple exercises. One, take something that occurs all the time; the phone rings, say, and instead of racing to pick it up, let it go for an extra ring or two. Take that time as a reminder to be present with this moment, and begin the call from that place.

Tolle's other suggestion was one of my own favorite "tricks" - keep something beautiful next to you on your desk - a flower, perhaps - and periodically look up from the computer screen to rest your gaze on it.

Another thing I do is to light a candle before phone calls with my clients. They might not even know I'm doing it, but it reminds me that the person I am speaking to is holy, a human being worthy of my utmost care and attention. For some clients, this is a ritual they partake in as well, and we start our calls with a moment's silence followed by a brief 'check-in' so that anything that would distract or effect our work together is spoken and shared openly. It also helps to create the intimacy and connection that feeds creative collaboration and produces extraordinary results.

Do you have practices to help you stay centered as you go about your work? What are they?

Mary Oliver's Poetry

Las night I went to hear the legendary poet Mary Oliver read. It warmed my heart to see the hall packed for this white-haired woman whose philosophy after all is so simple - kindness and attention to beauty are its main principles.

When asked about her daily practice, Oliver said she wakes every morning to witness (my word) the dawn and give thanks for another day, then she eats breakfast, takes a walk with her dog Percy, and works for 3-4 hours, at which point she is tired. Hers sounds pretty much like a perfect life to me.

Mary Oliver is one of those old-fashioned wordsmiths who doesn't use a computer - she writes her drafts and revises them on a notepad before transcribing the finished work on a series of old typewriters (if they stop working she lets them rest under her chair for a few weeks, when, she says, they are almost always miraculously healed and ready to go again).

From her latest volume, Red Bird, "Invitation":

Oh do you have time
to linger
for just a little while
out of your busy

and very important day
for the goldfinches
that have gathered
in a field of thistles

for a musical battle,
to see who can sing
the highest note,
or the lowest,

or the most expressive of mirth,
or the most tender?
Their strong blunt beaks
drink the air

as they strive
melodiously
not for your sake
and not for mine

and not for the sake of winning
but for sheer delight and gratitude–
believe us, they say,
it is a serious thing

just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in this broken world.
I beg of you,

do not walk by
without pausing
to attend to this
rather ridiculous performance.

It could mean something.
It could mean everything.
It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote:
You must change your life.

The red bird motif runs through this sweet book of love like a red thread of inspiration, ending finally with the poem Red Bird Explains Himself.

Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is not something most people know much about, and that's not good, because in this case what you don't know CAN hurt you.

This video, although a little long at 10 minutes, gives a great overview of the issue. If you don't have the bandwidth and want something a little shorter and punchier (3.5 minutes), check out this one. But please do inform yourself about what net neutrality means, because it's an issue that effects us all and right now we still have a choice in the matter.

Lily

Most commonly an image is used to illustrate text, but in this case I think the image is the main event, and anything I could write would be secondary (click on it to see a larger version).

Is it speaking to you too? What do you hear?

Oprah in the Morning

Admittedly I'm a little behind the curve here, but this morning i took my iPod out for a walk (this is a new-to-me technique I'm experimenting with to motivate myself to walk more regularly) loaded with the first session of a free 10 week class that Oprah Winfrey and Eckhart Tolle are presenting online. The class is based on a conversation between the two of them about the ideas in his book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose.

Co-sponsored and (at least partly) powered by Skype, the ground-breaking capacity to broadcast this series to half a million people around the globe alone would be enough to turn on the light in my geeky little heart, but the content too (at least what I've heard of it in the first 45 minutes) is spectacular.

There were several highlights (not least of which flipped the idea of finding what you want to do in this life ala JFK, by suggesting you will only ever find out by asking Life what it wants of You) but my favorite part was Tolle talking about flowers as "representatives of the spiritual". Flowers are more delicate than the plants that hold them, he says, their matter less dense, more etherial. So by being still with a flower, being present with it, you are face to face with a direct source to the divine.

I knew it! :-) Of course, as he goes on to say, being Present is itself a direct source to the divine, but it is easier to access your own sense of Presence in nature, and particularly around flowers. This makes perfect sense to me and I love how we can all know something - what is more captivating to a human (not to mention a bee) than a flower? - and then discover layers of 'fact' that tell us why it's true.

I'd heard about this series before - it started 4 weeks ago on March 3rd - but for some reason it took a while to grab me (you can still download the audio files from earlier classes and join for future broadcasts). I'd heard Oprah talked too much, and of course the first week was a bit of a disaster, but as my friend and colleague Steve Borsch wrote in his blog Connecting the Dots, they came out of the technical screw-up with colors flying. And as for Oprah talking too much - she may be a public presenter down to her core, but like a female Bill Moyers she obviously believes in what she's promoting here and her excitement about this topic and this medium is infectious.

She says this is the most exciting thing she's ever done, and you can hear it in her voice. Not only is she understandably excited about the possibilities of our ability to reach millions of human hearts around the globe - she, like several other influential people I can name, is truly experiencing a spiritual awakening during this crucial time. And not a minute too soon, I say. Not only that, she has the resources and is so media-savvy that she actually has the potential to share her personal experience in a way that may help catalyze the large-scale awakening the world needs right now.

Go, girl!

Second Life and the Imaginal Realm

David Sibbet's intriguing Second Life Retrospective catalyzed a response that I posted as a comment on his blog, but the ideas were so engaging to me that I thought I'd write a bit here as well.

One part of David's retrospective that particularly interested me was his exploration of how what I understand as the Jungian idea of active imagination might effect psychological healing and spiritual development within Second Life ...

I've heard that experiencing something in one's imagination is neurologically almost identical to having experienced it in reality. If this is true, it has huge implications for consciously using Second Life to work with all sorts of issues - emotional, psychological, spiritual, social, philosophical and environmental. Second Life could be (and already is) a playground to test and seed all kinds of positive change.*

Lastly, another area I found fascinating was David's recounting of his experiences with Light in Second Life. You have to read his paper to get the fullness of his thinking on this subject, but I wanted to give you all some idea. So this is my SL avatar, Pipi Tinlegs, standing near the rays of the healing light table in David's inworld Story Studio:

* (speaking of seeding positive change, I recently hosted a World Café in Second Life for the Rockridge Institute with the fabulous SingingHeart Amat, aka in 'real' life as Michelle Paradis. I'll write up a proper report on it soon and link to it from this blog)