BeautyDialogues

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:

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".

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.

The Road

I just finished reading The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Wow.

Set in a world as spare and grey as imagination can bear, McCarthy somehow manages to illuminate the ashes of that post-apocalyptic ruin with the beleaguered flickering of his characters' still-human hearts.

This story, written by my British college Literature professors' favorite American author, reveals the beauty that can dwell within even the most horrible ugliness. It's one of those books you sit with for a long time afterwords, and I'm still sitting.

Have any of you read it? What did you think?

Harvesting Lightning

This image came at the end of one of those "state of the world" PowerPoint slide-shows that are being emailed around. The material was fairly predictable until this last slide, which I found myself totally enchanted by - an image of ma and pa - two regular folks - harvesting lightning.

I don't know where it came from, so I don't know how to credit it, but there's something so cheerful and matter of fact about this image of harvesting lightning, light-filled bolts of inspiration that are emerging from the cloud-saturated skies of these dark days. Regular people watching for the ideas and dreams that are appearing now, and harvesting them like canned peaches for the winter when they will be most sorely needed; a time that is coming fast upon us now.

Meet you in the root cellar!

The Rhythm of Change

This is my other favorite video from the 2008 election campaign. Written by poet Aaron Jafferis and performed by him and his friends (here are the full lyrics) with music by KronZilla, it has the strong stamp of one of the clearest blessings emerging from this campaign - the young men and women of this generation stepping up to make their voices heard.

Hozho

"The Navaho word hozho, translated into English as “beauty,” also means harmony, wholeness, goodness.

One story that suggests the dynamic way that beauty comes alive between us concerns a contemporary Navajo weaver. “A man ordered a rug of an especially complex pattern on two separate occasions from the same weaver. Both rugs came out perfectly and the weaver remarked to her brother that there must have been something special about the owner. It was understood that the outcome of the rugs was dependent not on the weaver’s skill and ability but upon the hozho in the owners life. The hozho of his life evoked the beauty in the rugs.

In the Navaho world view, beauty exists not simply in the object, or in the artist who made the object; it is expressed in relationships."

- J. Ruth Gendler, Notes on the Need for Beauty

Youth Give

My friend Matt Robertson went on a Journey to Africa this summer. He and several other high school seniors were part of a YouthGive trip to look at how microfinancing has been working in villages in South Africa and Zambia. They were all given Flip Videos as part of a Digital Storytelling "kit", and this is what he made with his:

Images begat Text begat Images

I'm home from vacation full of more image poems (my whole trip was a juicy photographic orgy, if the truth be known) and in catching up with my reading today I was excited to read a post by Barbara Ganley talking about the inter-play between her blogging and her photography... how one will spring naturally from the other, and how the two enrich each other and together create something new.

So here are my two image poems, my "something new" flowing from holiday reveries - immersed in the beauty of nature with my Canon 40D eyes on...

Held within the stone, radiating light & absorbing heat ... flesh against flesh, carved in situ, like a Michelangelo.

A merman emerging, dreaming this moment into being.

Totally absorbed in the sparkling element ... through this baptism flesh leaves its solid form and enters the life of the spirit - just for that one perfect moment - awash between spheres and blessed by leaves - he floats in the liquid now.

Social Networks

E-Learning guru Jay Cross has written a fascinating post about an Aboriginal painting (note: not the one above) that he saw during a recent trip to Australia, and his reading of the imagery - comparing it with social networks and the politics of change.

But the fun doesn't stop there! Jay's readers continued to analyze the image in their comments and some valuable insights emerged. The whole post was an excellent example of both the power of art to convey meaning and the way we evolve meaning through the power of networks.