BeautyDialogues

Being Alone

The always relevant Tim Merry shared a link on the Art of Hosting list-serve to a delightful insightful music video on the joys of being alone. It was written and performed by poet/singer/songwriter Tanya Davis and filmed by Andrea Dorfman. For those of you not on that list, it's too good to miss (check out the clever digital imaging by Sam MacDonald):

Wise Words from Thomas Merton on a Monday morning....

"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."

~ Thomas Merton

What Motivates Us?

On the off-chance that you haven't yet seen this intelligent video illustrating the ideas in Daniel Pink's latest book Drive, about what really motivates us, here it is (it's longish at almost 11 minutes, but sooooo worth it):

Heros

Along the Great Wall about an hour from Beijing we saw this poem about heroes in red calligraphy on a marble tablet. According to our guide the poem says that anyone who makes it there is a hero, so I took this picture of Peter in front of it because he's definitely a hero. He was either incredibly courageous or totally crazy to have taken this step into the unknown with me, and I love love love him for it, whichever he is.

Poetry of Kay's Wedding

My friend Kay married her devoted love Jeff this weekend. A gentle afternoon sun came out to bless what turned out to be a perfect wedding - charming, intimate, and profound. Profound for many reasons, not least of which being that Kay has pancreatic cancer and now in her fourth post-diagnosis year has decided to stop chemo and radiation and live the rest of her life without them, and with Jeff, who has pursued her with convincing clarity for several years now. So her radiance and beauty and very aliveness, standing there smiling next to her equally radiant Prince Charming in front of family and friends - that alone was deeply profound.

There was charm in the lovely garden site with a close-in view of the bay; in the hand-made truffles Sue stayed up all night dusting with luster powder and filling with chai; in the tendrils of green ribbon flying in the breeze and in the bride's laughter and spontaneous wit. Intimacy in the heart-felt vows, the daughters that stood proud and beautiful in their formal roles; in the generosity and community of family and friends that came from near and far to cook and offer their homes and decorate and celebrate and clean up afterward, going home together to put their feet up and talk about how wonderful it was.

And no small dose of the charm and intimacy came from a thoughtful gift given by friends Michael and Karen, who hired Silvi Alcivar to grace us with her red typewriter and poetry on demand. If you don't yet know about Silvi and her magical art, I'm so glad to be the one to tell you...

China

 

Even today, weeks after returning from my voyage, China is still on my mind... with newly awakened eyes I see her face everywhere - in the daily news; in historical narrative; on the cultural calendar; as design inspiration; in my Friend's lists and in my in-box. What was to me an abstract giant lumbering to its feet on the other side of the world is now a teeming collage of landscape, people, tastes, scents and smells, sound and silence; this mighty country with its profound history and vital present is now a living being to me. I know people there and I have seen into their lives, different from mine in so many ways and yet ... our hearts - like human hearts everywhere - are alike.

I suspect the only way I can share the riches of this trip with you is through snippets of insight and experience, so here is an attempt to bring you with me viscerally on this journey...

Happy Valentines Day

I took this photo a while ago but I've been saving it for today, St Valentine's Day.

If you chose, you can look into the heart of this little flower and see All Love reflected back at you...

Happy Valentine's Day!

Powers of Place

woodcut by Tom Killion

I've been building the web presence for the Fetzer-funded project, the Powers of Place Initiative, for almost a year now and we are finally ready to launch! Check it out: www.powersofplace.com

This project is dear to my heart, given how profoundly my life has been effected by the sense of place - coming up through young adulthood by the love of the NorthEast Kingdom in Vermont, calmed and grounded by the expanse of Balboa Park in San Diego, in love with the contours of the green and pleasant land of England's south coast, and now blessed by the sacred Mt Tamalpais here in the San Francisco bay area.

How have the powers of place effected you and/or your work? If this is a subject that interests you, you might want to join this group in doing serious research and dedicated inquiry into the phenomena.

Dreaming

My annual Dreaming Ceremony was a little different this year, due to the series of storms that hit the California coast in the last few weeks. The winding mountain road I took to get there was a 2 hour obstacle course of rock-slides, flooded low spots and downed power lines, so it was no surprise to find there was no electricity when I arrived.

We gathered that first night in a large room in the Santa Cruz mountains, lit by a roaring fire in the fireplace and the glittering lights of this year's altar (created by Lightning Dove, aka Sue Blondell). The heat in the building was electrically generated so it was cold and we were all wrapped in medicine blankets and woolly socks - some of us wearing scarves and hats, and even gloves.

It was magic...

One of the main motivations that takes me to the Dreaming Ceremony - and the Summer Solstice Ceremony that bookends my year - is the wish to realign my system to the rhythms of the natural world. The conditions could not have been better for that purpose, or for the collective Dreaming we all came to do together...

Later that night I took a flashlight back to my little cabin in the woods and lit a bunch of votives to do some journaling before snuggling into bed and watching tree shadows moving outside my windows. I left my porch light on so I could tell if the electricity returned and when it came on in the middle of the night I was kind of disappointed.

But that wasn't the end of our adventures with the weather- the electricity was on and off throughout the four days of ceremony and the darkness in the Kiva was especially deep when there was no electric current to distract us from the Void. My body actually began to remember what it was like to live without it and the re-calibration of my internal compass was well and truly set by the end of our time together; I figure it's good for another six months at least!

We Are All Connected

My magical friend & mentor FireHawk Hulin passed along this fabulous video from the Symphony of Science, which samples media snippets from the brightest scientific heart/minds of our time. The message is simple: "we are all connected", but there couldn't be more crucial knowledge for us humans to carry as we go into our next decade.

The power of this symphony's lyrics is literally stunning, and I find myself fascinated by the last line of one stanza - "we are a way for the cosmos to know itself" whose implications are still reverberating ...

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it
But the way those atoms are put together
The cosmos is also within us
We're made of star stuff
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.