BeautyDialogues

A Path with Heart

A friend from Australia sent me the link for a delightful two and a half minute video about a man who shares my love of morning Beauty Walks, although he doesn't call them that. He's also on the front lines of the Slow Movement, and I'm sure he has no idea what that is, either.

But have a look - he's truly a kindred spirit and gentle soul.

"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.

Cultivating Happiness

My favorite of the post-election emails circulating now is the amazing Alice Walker's letter to Obama, and this is my favorite part of it:

"... you alone are not responsible for bringing the world back to balance. A primary responsibility that you do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play ... We are used to seeing men in the White House soon become juiceless and as white-haired as the building; we notice their wives and children looking strained and stressed. They soon have smiles so lacking in joy that they remind us of scissors. This is no way to lead. ... One way of thinking about all this is: It is so bad now that there is no excuse not to relax. From your happy, relaxed state, you can model real success, which is all that so many people in the world really want."

Walker ends with a reference to the Dalai Lama, who truly embodies the spirit of leadership in today's world, and Obama's incredible smile, to which she pays tribute:

"A good model of how to “work with the enemy” internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts the Chinese government that invaded Tibet. Because, finally, it is the soul that must be preserved, if one is to remain a credible leader. All else might be lost; but when the soul dies, the connection to earth, to peoples, to animals, to rivers, to mountain ranges, purple and majestic, also dies. And your smile, with which we watch you do gracious battle with unjust characterizations, distortions and lies, is that expression of healthy self-worth, spirit and soul, that, kept happy and free and relaxed, can find an answering smile in all of us, lighting our way, and brightening the world."

Mindful Wandering

One of my favorite thinkers/bloggers out there, Dave Pollard, recently shared his association between "slow blogging" as defined by Barbara Ganley and what his friend Chris Lott calls "mindful wandering". Here's an excerpt from Dave's post:

"The idea is to see blogging, which is really just a new way of recording your thoughts in a diary, as a meditative practice, taking the time to ponder the meaning of what you're reading, thinking and writing, letting your mind meander in thoughtful and creative ways to "make sense" of it."

The photo above was taken by FireHawk Hulin of his wife Pele Rouge and I, taking a break from an informal writing retreat we set up with each other to do just that.

It was exquisite, and I can't imagine anything better than to spend more time exactly like this... Walking, looking with fresh eyes at what is around me; seeing the juxtapositions of line and light and color and following them with my camera - like a dream or a story without words.

It's such a pleasure to let my thoughts wander over the things I've seen or read or heard recently and listen for the patterns I sense emerging between them; to what is becoming clearer, or where new questions are surfacing. I crave conversation about these things with other thinking, aware, sensitive people, and I love the experience, the artful practice, of composing something tangible - a blog post, a story or poem, a finished photograph, a video or slideshow - from these elements.

I recently advised one of my clients to make reflective writing part of her daily practice, even if what she writes doesn't always make it to a blog post. Simply to take an hour every morning, or every evening, and contemplate what has meaning in this moment, or reflect on what carried energy in this day.

I can't wait to see what comes of this from and for her.
Hmmmm. Maybe it's time I listened to my own advice. :-)

Digital Mindfullness

As part of my recent focus on living a more balanced life (as opposed to continuing on in the over-scheduled madness of what I will now call "my past"), I'm implementing a number of practices to sustain my good intentions.

These include giving myself more time to read, one of the elemental pleasures of my “real life” (the one I've decided to claim), and what is perhaps even more exquisite, to talk about what I’m reading with other intelligent human beings (that's you! :-).

To this end, I recently caught up with several articles I’d laid aside until there was "time" for them... and I found some interesting correspondences between them.

Reading a piece on digital identity and security in the New York Times, "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy" by Clive Thompson, the last few paragraphs piqued my interest:

“It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves.

Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site — “What are you doing?” — can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?)

Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.”

What a marvelous observation and an altogether different perspective on the opportunities opened up by web 2.0...

I've certainly found that writing regular blog posts increases the depth of my own self-knowledge and understanding; why not extend that mindfulness further and consciously apply the same self-awareness in some of my other digital communications? 

Then, in the latest Shambhala Sun, an article from Pema Chodron, called “Waking up to Your World”:

“One of the most effective means for working with that moment when we see the gathering storm of our habitual tendencies is the practice of pausing, or creating a gap. We can stop and take three conscious breaths, and the world has a chance to open up to us in that gap. We can allow space into our state of mind.”

This strikes me as a distinct window for opening the opportunity inherent in Twitter's question "What am I doing?" as the ultimate mindfulness exercise.

I've mentioned my "slow work" group; one of the members has been using the practice Pema suggests throughout his day as a way to stay awake to the habitual patterns of his normal workday, and interestingly he is also just discovering the world of social media and beginning to Twitter. The other day he told me about a group of people on Ning who are using Twitter to aid them in a similar mindfulness practice, as a way to check in and support each other throughout the day. They're called Twit2Fit.

There are of course all kinds of purposes to which one can put social media, but using Twitter to develop self- awareness brings a whole new dimension to the digital evolution.

Rituals for Healthy Living

My friend Ashley Cooper, who is Easily Amazed and one of the co-founders of the Beauty Dialogues, has been working on something really interesting lately. In a true expression of "slow community" she sent out an invitation to everyone she knew, asking us to share our practices or rituals for creating balance and well-being in our lives. She got zillions of fabulous responses, and published them in a blog called Rituals for Healthy Living.

And the question is still open! What are the rituals YOU use to bring health and vitality and joy and balance to YOUR life? Send them to Ashley and she'll add them to her growing list of positive ways to support Life in and around us.

Slow Community

With all my musing lately on slow work, and slow blogging, I was very excited to hear about my friend Nancy White's extrapolating on this idea in what she calls slow community. In her inimitable capacity to identify patterns and make connections, she's been talking about how quickly the interconnectivity of the web has grown beyond our abilities to stay connected in meaningful ways. (This image is a "splat map" of the internet's growth since its beginnings in ARPANET (the green bit in the middle):

Variations on this theme are being discussed all over the media - two books among my own pile of bedtime reading focus on the topic in one way or another; Peter Block's new Community: The Structure of Belonging, and Dot Calm (I love that title) - but what I particularly like about the concept of slow community is that it offers us a context with which to negotiate this growing nexus of interactivity on our own terms.

On a personal level, I long for a slower more reflective life, and I crave the depth and reflectivity and true connection that is possible within communities - online and off - that share these values.

On a professional level, the idea of "slow community" gives a conceptual framework to the online communities I help facilitate, or steward, through which we can identify and "see" ourselves. It also gives us a sense of what we might be evolving towards, or the kind of depth we might WANT to nurture between ourselves.

Some have spoken about the depth and quality of our attention as a key to slow community. I strongly believe that it's possible - and as difficult - to be as deeply connected through our online communications as it is anywhere else. The online medium has its own challenges, of course, but it also has advantages, and one of them can be time. For all its limitations and lack of physical cues, writing is a slower medium than speaking. Writing gives us the time to reflect and consider those responses that can just "pop out" as unthinking reflexivity in real-time interaction and craft them into shapes that can more clearly carry the meanings we want to convey.

One might also ask whether the word community can be used to define all the ways we interact online. Is Twitter a community? Are the people who read my blog a community? I'm curious about what the boundaries are, or what the defining features of community are for different people.

For myself, I actually think this question of what community is and isn't refers back to my earlier point about quality or more accurately, intent. In this framework, the word might be applied to any communication where the intent is to "commune", be that on Twitter, or within our blogging readerships, online conversations, or physical neighborhoods for that matter.

Having the intent to commune with each other requires an altogether different relationship to time. There's something here about respecting time and entering into interactions with a "presence" that makes the most of it, that expands time so that there's enough for whatever is needed.

Someone left a comment on one of Nancy White's posts on this subject, bringing up the Quaker model where they moved VERY slowly as a community in discussing the challenges of slavery, and yet were still the first to stand up and call for abolition. This example shows us that slowness doesn't necessarily mean an inability to respond to the challenges of the day, but rather offers the capacity to respond in a more profound and ultimately even more timely way.

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Here's a video from a presentation on the subject that Nancy did at Zaadz (now the Gaia Community), which has some terrible sound production, but asks some great questions:

She's also created a page on her online facilitation wiki devoted to slow community, which in turn has links to other helpful resources.