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Archive for Beauty – Page 22

Color

This color combination really inspired me…

This color combination really inspired me:

Color_Beauty

Blessings

This is a very cool thing: a woman named Kate Nowak hatched a plan to offer a blessing a day for 100 straight days. The project succeeded beyond her wildest dreams, with over a million people having seen her fabulous little movie: Heartfelt Blessings

Here’s one of the 100 blessings she sent out that particularly caught my eye. I was intrigued first by the way her quote interprets the ‘grist for the mill’ concept that has always been at the center of my creative impulse – the  idea that everything that happens to you is valuable, and can be profitably used, and then by the way she equates the tension involved in the process with beauty…

"Things don’t go wrong and break your heart so you can
become bitter and give up. They happen to break you down and build you
up so you can be all that you were intended to be."

~ Charles Jones

Even a lump of clay thrown on the potters’ wheel undergoes pressure.
It is the pressure of the potter’s hand that coaxes the beauty out.

Transformative Fiction

What I’m beginning to see with more clarity is the awakening of a new medium… as I go deeper into this new erotic electronic world which gives me my work, I am seeing new horizons. The realization begins to emerge that all things are possible …

Standing on the edge of the hill, looking out over the city across the bay; more and more lights coming on as the sun sets, the light in the sky darkens and the colors deepen…

Tam

There s a screech owl in a branch immediately above my head, calling to
a mate in a nearby tree. A sudden flurry of sinew and air as he flies
across my path to her. In this moment, all my senses are alive with the magic of the place and time. I don’t want to move, though it’s cold and getting colder.

Stay with me in this place, and hear my words.

I’ve been thinking about something lately… cooking it like a long simmering stew. The meat isn’t falling tenderly off the bones yet, but the flavor is distinct enough to share a taste & the fragrance is intoxicating. It has something to do with a new kind of creative expression, a new genre. Something I’ve been imagining for many years is beginning to take form in me, although the form it’s taking is nothing like I imagined when I first heard the call as a child, knowing I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.

For a while now I’ve identified this new genre I want to produce as ‘transformative fiction’. In a way that term doesn’t work to describe something ‘new’, since fiction has been working its transformative magic on readers since the earliest alchemical touch between marker and mark … but now the possibilities of form have expanded and the transformation we can envision has itself been transformed. Nothing less than a collective leap in consciousness is required; a practical grasp of the unity that underlies all things; a way to reach the world’s heart and open our minds to the gift of humanity and the natural world, to the light that suffuses all life.

What I’m beginning to see with more clarity is the awakening of a new medium. I’ve been honing words, visualizing images… Previously I imagined I would write and paint this vision of mine, but as I go deeper into this new erotic electronic world which gives me my livelihood, I am seeing new horizons. The realization begins to emerge that all things are possible within a creative medium that lends itself to the total recreation of reality and allows multiple senses to enter into a narrative chorus of sight, sound and story.

In Second Life, they talk about the social & pscyhological implications of creating the “world we dream of” before it manifests in the “real” world. The ‘transformative fiction’ I’m envisioning works with this same set of ideas and creative principles… I’m looking at the possibility of linking the mind and the body in new ways, of opening new views in our collective neurostructure … making space for transformation – the "great turning" or paradigm shift that many people feel is crucial for humanity’s continued survival.

Preparing the Soil

Michael Jones‘ new book on Awakening the Commons of the Imagination has a chapter on beauty, where he talks about Robert Frost’s relationship with soil  …

Jones shares Frost’s explorations of the connection between a farmer cultivating his fields slowly, over time, to produce the best
possible crop from them, and an artist giving their own creative soil time to
develop, to become enriched by the seasons of life, ‘plowing under’ our
thoughts and ideas until such time as they have ripened and refined into their own perfect form.

This makes sense to me. I’ve often thought about my life so far as the gestation period for my art. To some it may seem that I’ve wasted a lot of time not doing much of anything, :-), but from another point of view perhaps I’ve been slowly honing the rough carbon of my life’s experience on the whetstone of contemplation and imagination, until the day it emerges in its full brilliance as pure diamond.

I must admit I like this idea quite a bit. 🙂