This is a delightful video about a magical poet, Silvi Alcivar. Silvi conjures spontaneous poetry from a red Royal typewriter and her immaculate mind, for hire at $15/poem (order online from the poetry store).
You will never find a better deal.
She does events too. I've experienced her work at two of them, and she absolutely transforms the space.
a desire for words from silvi alcivar on Vimeo.
Recently I had the pleasure of attending a workshop with the Center for Digital Storytelling. These guys are fabulous – very caring and knowledgeable individuals that in this case managed to draw out beautiful, personal, moving stories from each of the dozen attendees. Even more impressive, they shepherded us into making them finished videos in only 3 days.
It was a crazy adventure for me because I was trying to subvert the system and do something that could be useful for the intensive Digital Arts & Community course I'm teaching next month with FireHawk for Hartnell College, down in Salinas Valley. I didn't think the "personal story" form that Center for Digital Storytelling is geared towards was going to work for that purpose, but as it turned out doing anything less would not have been taking advantage of their wisdom and skill. It also probably wouldn't have been as good as what I ended up with, either. Have a look – it's only 2 1/2 minutes – but be sure to stay through the end, where there's a little surprise:
Just 10 days or so ago I was in Reichenau an der Rax in Austria (an hour or so outside of Vienna) for a European Salon put on by World Cafe colleagues.
Stunned by the beauty of this lovely country, I was once again moved by the beauty of the human heart as we naturally and collectively answered the gravitational pull towards deep connection and the spontaneous expression of community.
The latter (community) was my particular passion and interest for this salon, which was focused on the themes of dialogue, leadership and community. Several of us spent some time exploring a definition of community that could address the range of new community forms being created by the reality of geographic dispersal.
I was fascinated to find a direct connection, in practice, between the depth of community that was formed and the other two themes of the event – leadership and dialogue. It was through our experiment in shared leadership – a truly collaborative expression – that our powerful sense of community was forged.
I am continually amazed by this human need and drive to find depth and connection through dialogue – we hosted an online World Cafe on the subject of community – "What is your most powerful experience of community and what were the elements that made it so?" – using my new favorite "tech tool", the extremely simple to use MaestroConference. Once again, I was absolutely stunned at both the depth of our inquiry – from the roots of community to the historical and contemporary rituals that bring us into or out of it – and the feeling of true connection it engendered among a group of virtual strangers, or at least we were when we began.
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!
weDialogue
Welcome!