CONTACT ME &
SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS
BEAUTY ONLINE:
My best "Girl Geek" Posts
& Online Design Resources
| www.flickr.com |
This is a space to celebrate beauty - not just the beauty of form, but also those patterns of essential wholeness that go beyond the visible.
Wholeness dissolves the illusion that life and work are separate. So, while this is a "professional" blog in that I design online communications for a living and often write about design, communications & technology, it's also about everything else I see (in the world and in myself) when looking through a beauty-lens.
I've received some great responses on Seesmic from my question about what's possible now that wasn't possible before as a result of this new communications technology, and I thought I'd share a few of them with you. They're all short - most of them around a minute - so enjoy!
The first is from Julie Gieseke from Map The Mind, who brings up several things that have been important to me about using this technology - the power of deepening connections, and the freedom it gives us introverts to be deliberate and thoughtful about our communications:
Next, Otir from New York talks about the way her own access to knowledge has been exponentially increased by the advances in these tools over the last ten years:
These next two are from software developer Clarence Westberg. In the 1st he talks about the incredible expansion of community this new technology brings, and in the 2nd he amends that statement by pointing out who is excluded from this brave new world:
Finally, media inspiration and video adventurer Howard Rheingold talks about the challenges and opportunities he sees opening before us now in using these tools:
I was playing with Seesmic this morning, and realized I could make a little video for you there. So I used it to ask a question ...
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.
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!
As promised - here's a link to my story of the Second Life World Café I hosted with Michelle Paradis, David Sibbet of Grove International, Nancy White, and Sherry Reson of the Rockridge Institute.
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)
Inspired by our work at the Systems Thinking conference in Seattle earlier this month, popular blogger Dave Pollard posted a thoughtful piece on Love, Conversation and Community in his How to Save the World blog this week. In it, he talks about feminine and masculine world views and corresponding models of conversation:
"When there is love, conversation has purpose, context, engagement, trust (while, without love, conversation is sterile and selfish). The best conversations are in fact a form of play ... a form of 'making love' -- empathetic, collaborative, even erotic. One could even argue that sex is a form of wordless conversation.
The best conversations are also polyamorous (all participants love and trust each other) -- this provides safety from hurt and cruelty, and this safety encourages openness, honesty, courage, and true innovation."
Click here to read his whole article.
My friend Kay was visiting last weekend. It's always amazing to be around her, but ever since she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, her velocity as a light in the world has been accelerating. For someone who knows that death may be coming soon the beauty of life is even more poignant, and being with Kay is to savor each moment we have.
I’ve spent this last week at the Pegasus 2007 Systems Thinking conference in Seattle with the World Café. It has been a pretty phenomenal experience on a number of levels.
If you want a full report, I harvested the whole conference in detail on the new World Café Community blog, but I thought I'd share a few of my own personal highlights here.
Recent Comments