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…
Last week about this time I emerged from a four-day Dreaming ceremony in the Santa Cruz mountains I have been doing every year with FireHawk and Pele of Resonance.
This time has become very important to me, as a way to re-calibrate myself with the natural rhythm of nature and the seasons and give myself a chance to re-align with my own internal pace. Entering this dance with time gives me a rare opportunity to slow down and reflect, to remember who I am beneath the busi-ness of my everyday life.
It is always suggested that we wait a while before sharing our
experiences, to let them sink in… so I’ve held back on publishing
this excerpt from my journal, written during the Dreaming, until now.
"This year’s dreaming finds me exploring something very precious and very subtle,
something that has frankly eluded me up until now; the nature of the
undulating line between being present and able to respond to what is being called forth in each moment, and being responsible for a pre-existing ‘list’ of things
I ‘should’ be doing.
This comes up for me so strongly because above all I’ve wanted to experience a sense of effortlessness and not
being "pushed" in any particular way during this ceremonial time. Completely unstructured time is a rare occurrence in my life and even though this time is not – strictly speaking – unstructured, its structure is fairly unusual in its flexibility. Our guides are exquisitely skillful in creating a container that can adapt and hold what is needed for each of us as individuals as well as for the whole. There is no doubt we are dreaming as a circle; for and with each other and all of humanity, as well as for ourselves.
Through my own internal work I have learned what it is to be immersed in the busy-ness of my life with care and attention – making mental lists
to guide my activities capably and effectively; I also know what it is
to enter an emptiness that does not concern itself with the sphere of
"doing" at all. What I am learning in this season of dreaming is about
holding both at the same time: dancing in a delicate balance of emergence and
self-responsibility. Listening to what is being asked of me without being bound by it; making conscious choices to listen for what is really mine to do and step forward to meet it with joy and freedom.
This is an ongoing exploration, and it is wonderful to have this space to stretch out into and ‘practice’ what it is like to live within this different relationship to time and expectations. But as always the challenge is in integrating what it is I am learning into my ‘regular’ life … I’ll let you know how I do. :-)"
One of the reason I choose to use TypePad is their obvious care for beauty – from the viewpoint of a designer it is very easy to make a beautiful blog with this software, and from a user’s standpoint, the interface has a refreshing clarity and ease.
Even their website was clean and beautiful – and I say was even though
it’s still far better than most, but I must admit I prefer the old
design. I loved the evocative image of an orange among apples and the featured
blog right up there on top – as a TypePad blogger, it made me feel I
could be "discovered" at any moment. Now that piece is much further down the
page, "below the fold" under some standard promotional copy that gets
VERY old when you see it every day.
But to my eye, the winner of the online design prize goes to Google.
The ultimate in elegant simplicity, what else could a weary-eyed
designer like myself, visually exhausted by the crowded excesses of the web, possibly prefer for my browser’s home page?
Even now with all the bells and whistles I’ve added to Google suite – GMail and Blogger, Google
Analytics, Google Calendars and widgets that show daylight patterns
across the world – they tuck away nicely in tabs, preserving that clean open search
page design. I love the relief of its white space and never get tired of the
classic logo, kept fresh and surprising by the variety of seasonal
decoration (although today’s depiction of Lego’s 50th anniversary makes
me suspect they’re accepting product placement payments, and that
tends to make them less attractive).
What delights your eye? Any favorite examples of online design to share?
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".
Reading Lynch’s book has been a kind of revelation for me, even though I’m a meditator and have had a spiritual practice for many years. I’m very aware of how meditation helps me manage the stress of my life and stay focused in my work, yet somehow I’d never thought of it as a way to strengthen my intuition and directly nurture my creative expression. But of course it does! How wonderful…
Adopting this perspective basically takes care of two of my new year’s resolutions this year – meditate more regularly and exercise my creative faculties more vigorously – although I don’t resonate with the idea of resolutions as much as holding intentions, chief among mine for this year being to "stay awake" and "step fully into myself".
Going back to Lynch, he says that when you dive within, or transcend (through meditation), there is a "huge unbounded ocean" of bliss where creativity can flow freely. An "ocean of creativity" that creates everything, that IS us. He says this is easy "because it’s the nature of the mind" and it just naturally wants to go there.
What’s not always so easy, but totally essential, is waking ourselves up from the illusions of this world, this life, and keeping our attention on what’s really happening, both internally and in the world around us. For me, an important part of waking up and staying awake is in sharing what I see, and that’s one of the main reasons I blog – or take photographs or write poetry, or any other form of creative expression.
William Staffford underscores this imperative beautifully in his A Ritual to Read to Each Other:
"If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star."
…
"And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep."
So the speaking, the courage it takes to step into one’s own authentic voice, is for me a key counterpart to diving deep into the nothingness, and an essential part of illuminating the beauty I seek to see in every thing, everywhere.
John O’Donohue says that "…true poetic beauty emerges when the poet is absolutely faithful to the uniqueness of her own voice . The danger of our exposure seems to call beauty (and) she responds to the cry of the original voice."
And so we individuals start a new year, another cycle deeper into ourselves and wider out into the world. It’s good to be alive and among you!
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