BeautyDialogues

My Brilliant God-daughter

My brilliant god-daughter Matilda made this video of herself and her mates on a cell phone!

True Beauty

"Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways."
~ Neal Stephenson, Anathem

This randomly chosen signature on an early email seemed particularly apt this morning in light of a gift sent by my friend (and co-founder of the Beauty Dialogues) Ashley Cooper.

See if you agree - check out this video (one in a series of SoulBiographies) by filmmaker Nic Askew. It's about the beauty of taking a "second glance" at that beauty right in front of you:

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.

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.

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".

It's a New Day!

Like about 300 million other Americans and countless others all over the world, I spent much of this historic day glued to the TV for the inauguration ritual celebrations. Like so many others I found myself choking up with tears and the courage to hope for a new day in America. I felt pride and a sense of gratitude towards my countrymen and women who helped elect this good man.

In his powerfully direct yet compassionate and inclusive inaugural speech, Obama didn't balk at the immense amount of work in front of us, nor did he give us false promises that it would be easy. But I couldn't help but feel if anyone can pull this self-obsessed nation together and inspire us to make the changes that are imperative for our survival, and the survival of others on this planet, he can.

Part of the excitement for me is how beautifully Obama's election is galvanizing the people and organizations I am part of. Basking in the glow of the new president's idealism, there seems to be an explosion of optimism and a feeling that this is "our time"... to have the conversations we've needed to have, to reach out to each other, work together, and begin to rebuild our country.

Just this evening, I received this video from the new Soul of Money website, revealing the silver lining in the current economic crisis that no one seems to be acknowledging yet.

Beauty

The Beauty Dialogues isn't about "beauty" in the sense of what we see in the mirror - in fact, one of my pet peeves is how difficult it is to find appropriate tags for a blog like this and keep myself out of the make-up and fashion listings - but I recently came across a videographer named Giovanna Chesler whose work has me questioning some of my assumptions.

Giovanna's filmography includes a short but powerful documentary series about herself, her two sisters, and their relationship to beauty.

The series starts with the first in the BeauteouS triolgy - BeauteouS: Stephanie, which tells the story of a young woman's experience with numerous surgeries for a cleft lip and palate. Next is BeauteouS: Giovanna, where the artist experiments with showing her body in a way that is beautiful but not sexualized, a task which proves difficult. The third piece, simply called BeauteaouS, is a fictionalized acount of the third sister's journey toward her own inner self.

The final film in the series (so far), named hand-some, begins with an idealized vision of a woman's love life, but soon changes into the chronicle of her unraveling relationship.

"Most Beautiful" in 2008

The end of another year... 2008 slides back into history and we march forward into 2009. But before she disappears from view, I want to stop and contemplate the abundance of beauty I experienced in 2008.

Here are just a few of the those moments that provoked the "beauty response" in me this year:

~ Learning that Oprah Winfrey had produced a 10 part series on Ekhart Tolle's A New Earth and was offering it free online to the public

~ Watching the grace and power of all those synchronized bodies in the opening ceremonies for the Chinese Olympics; experiencing the pride they felt as hosts and the warmth of the hospitality they extended to the world

~ Sharing in the wave of relief and joy that spread throughout the world when Barak Obama won the election for US Presidency

~ And most recently, waking up to a Winter Wonderland in Eugene

We are so blessed! To be surrounded by all this beauty!

How about you? What was the Beauty that stood out for you this year?

My Kind of Leader

I've been engaged in a seven-month leadership journey process called the "Heart of Leadership", offered by my friends FireHawk Hulin and Pele Rouge Chadima of Resonance, in partnership with Heartland.

One of our first assignments was to write a letter from the vantage point of having finished the course and achieved all our goals, and this is a 3.5 minute video I made from that letter. It tells not only what kind of a leader I want to be, but why.

"If I ran the Internet"

In one of the superb series of TED videos sponsored by BMW, performance poet Rives shares this yummy juicy poem - "If I ran the Internet":

TED is currently sponsoring a number of videos on the subject of happiness, and what makes us happy, no doubt inspired by the ground-breaking "Happiness and Its Causes" FREE conference coming up this week in San Fransisco (don't miss it!). One of the TED Happiness videos is of journalist Carl Honoré, talking about the slow movement, and slowness as a key to happiness.