BeautyDialogues

Yellow

The blaze of yellow
Vincent
mistook for God
reveals again
its sacred name.

~ David Whyte, from "The Painter's Hand"

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?

Be the Change

I get occasional mail from KarmaTube sharing inspirational videos, and this one was so good I wanted to share it with you here on the Beauty Dialogues. It's 2 minutes of pure 'Yes We Can", set in a traffic jam in India.

Be the Change! Do that seemingly small thing, and see what happens...

Co-Creation

The always delightful Barbara Marx Hubbard has an intriguing theory about why we sometimes "click" with each other in such profoundly generative ways ...

I've often experienced the thrill of creative communion she talks about, and I love the provocative twinkle in her eyes when she names it as she sees it. Of course we'd all be feeling pretty good too, if we'd stimulated as much vocational arousal in the world as she has. :-) What a Beauty!

Doing "Nothing"

Out and about on this morning's beauty walk, I happened to ask a neighbor about his holidays, which he said he'd spent pretty much "doing nothing". That sounded like absolute bliss to me.

I've been reading David Lynch's Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, and in it he says it takes up to 4 hours of uninterrupted time, most of it quite literally doing nothing, to produce just one hour's worth of creative output.  His book is a poetic and scientific inquiry into that "nothing" - specifically training ourselves through meditation to "dive deep" for the big ideas that fuel a creative life. He describes the bliss on the other side of meditation as a "thick beauty".

Vanessa

Remember Vanessa German, the amazing woman I met at the StoryField conference? Well, I'm not the only person who thinks she's amazing... She was invited to present at this year's PopTech conference, and here is a video capture of her performing the magnificent "If My Hands Were Anything Other Than Hands".

Ode to Light

If you were reading the Beauty Dialogues last year, you might remember I have a ‘thing’ for the lights of this season, and as the cycle returns I find the love affair has lost one of its brilliance.

Every night I turn on the LED lights that frame my front window and sit happily looking at my twinkling, forest-smelling tree. I faithfully lit the Hanukkah candles each night for the ritual 8 nights even though my mother isn’t Jewish and I don’t know the music or words for the proper prayers.

As deeply as I enjoy these personal pleasures of lucidity, something new dawned on me the other day during walk at dusk. I was looking at all the glittering trees and strings of light in my neighbors’ windows and suddenly it stuck me as very profound that we decorate the OUTSIDES of our houses, and place our trees in the window so that others can enjoy them.

On one level, I thought, perhaps these lights are a way to signal and inspire each other with our knowing that the light will return, a collective celebration of gratitude for the beauty and power of light.

Why Beauty? Morning Thoughts ...

Beauty is the essence of Life - it is the center of everything, the very core of existence.

In a time where facing the enormous horror of what we as humanity have perpetrated in our world can be soul-deadening and overwhelmingly bleak, seeing and being beauty has never been more important.

Beauty is the candle we hold up in darkness. Beauty is the gaze we turn on that which we love, the way we see that can transform our vision. What do you love? What do you find beautiful? That's the key to knowing where to focus your attention.

Beauty, like Love, has the power to hold all that is not itself without being changed. Today, when many of us feel so disconnected - from each other, from nature, from a life where what is really important has priority - Beauty is a way back to center.

May you Walk in Beauty - now and always.

(this glorious image is from an online contest for the 'most beautiful' photo :-)

37 Days

Another gem sent from beauty-sister Nancy White (who launched her new blog site yesterday!) - this one a joyously inspiring blog by writer Patti Digh. Her blog is called 37 Days, and it's about what we would be doing today if we only had 37 days to live; in other words, what's really important in life.