BeautyDialogues

Commitment

The essence of my Summer Solstice celebration, as I have come to know it, is to take a few days every year at this time to be immersed in nature – both inner and outer, to acknowledge the gifts I've received in the last cycle of the sun, and to contemplate what's mine to give back as I go forward into the next cycle.

I do this in community, within a circle held by the good folks at Resonance, supported by those at Pathfinders & Heartland.  A circle with beauty at the center, always - this one an evolving work of art created by the translucent Sue Blondell:

At its core my Summer Solstice ritual is a commitment ceremony, and I want to share these words from Ken Carey's Return of the Bird Tribes that convey the strength a clear commitment can give:

"Creation does not take place
where there is a scattering and dissipation of energies.
Creation requires a gathering together and focusing
of your power within a circle of commitment —
like a seed, an egg, a womb or a marriage.

Consider wisely the ways in which you would
use your power and then around those ways
draw the sacred circle of commitment.

In the warm atmosphere of that circle, the power
of love builds like a storm above the wet summer
prairie until suddenly the circle can hold no more
and explodes in the conception of the new.

This fire is more powerful than any one of you."

And so I speak my commitment for this next year into the circle of this larger community, that holds me too:

In this next cycle of the sun I commit to hold myself lightly and speak my truth with confidence; to joyfully take leaps of faith when they are called for; and to continue to hone and refine the craft that carries our voices out into the world and nurtures connection and love between us.

If you too held the time of Summer Solstice in such a way, what would be your commitment for this next cycle of the sun?

Happy Solstice!

It's Summer Solstice in the northern hemisphere today, the sun comes full circle and begins its cycle anew. I'm off celebrating among redwoods in the Santa Cruz mountains, enjoying my yearly ritual with friends old and new.

I'll no doubt have lots of stories to share when I return, but I wanted to have something here to greet you on this day. So I found this great photo on Flickr (God, I love Flickr!), taken by "Simon & Vicki": Greeting the dawn at last year's Solstice celebration in the great circles of Stonehenge.

Lovely, isn't it?

Food

On my morning walks lately I've noticed more and more vegetables showing up amongst the flowers in my neighbors' gardens.

One neighbor, Grover, has been a leader in this movement for many many years with a whole front garden full of peas, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, carrots, beans, squash, onions, potatoes, kale and chard in constant rotation throughout the year. But now his influence appears to be spreading.

Right across the street from him, folks have built raised beds in the narrow strip of ground between sidewalk and street and planted corn and tomatoes in them. And they're just one example of the front-yard vegetable gardens popping up all over the area.

Whether it's an instinctive response to the rising gas prices or the beginning of a zeitgeist shift back to basics, it feels real good to have food in the neighborhood.

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.

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!

Desert Beauty

The desert is a delicate animal at this time of year. Like a snake shedding its skin it’s fragile, vulnerable, in a state of emergence.

If I were making a list of the 100 things I want to do before I die, visiting the desert in bloom would certainly be among them. 

So when my friend Bridget mentioned that she goes to Anza Borrego every year around this time and suggested I might want to come with her and photograph the beauty, I jumped at the chance (Bridget is an exceptionally talented green architect and landscape designer and also a client of mine – look for an announcement of her site and blog at bridgetbrewer.com soon)!

First Sweet Peas

This morning's beauty walk revealed a sweet pea vine filled with a zillion little fragrant blossoms - they're some of my favorite flowers, and these are the first I've seen this year.

I can't render the nectar of their scent in this medium, tant pis, but here is a scan of one little cluster of blooms...

It's a poor substitute for the real thing, I know, but I hope it triggers a memory (especially of this divine smell) or gives you reason to smile.

Dreaming

Last week about this time I emerged from a four-day Dreaming ceremony in the Santa Cruz mountains I have been doing every year with FireHawk and Pele of Resonance.

This time has become very important to me, as a way to re-calibrate myself with the natural rhythm of nature and the seasons and give myself a chance to re-align with my own internal pace. Entering this dance with time gives me a rare opportunity to slow down and reflect, to remember who I am beneath the busi-ness of my everyday life.

Swedenborgian Haven

This months’ Thought Leader Gathering was held at the Swedenborgian church in San Francisco.

No, I'm not referring to a congregation of Swedish ex pats, but a branch of Christianity based on the teachings of Emmanuel Swedenborg, co-founded in the 1800s by a group of English nature-lovers including the mystic William Blake and his wife Catherine (I was delighted to find this little factoid surface from the depths of my English Lit-trained memory).

The 100-year old chapel of this national historic landmark is particularly lovely, with its nave’s bow of madrone arching overhead and bits of branch and stone decoration lit by what seemed like a thousand candles along the walls (weddings here must be beautiful).

The little churchyard surrounding the chapel is graced by what is probably one of the very few mature yew trees in the region - powerful earth magic indeed. I’d never even heard of it, and it warmed my heart to know something like this could exist right in the heart of a city.