Have you used Wordle yet? Created by Johnathan Feinberg in his spare time while working for IBM Research, Wordle takes words (that you either generate specifically or draw from pages with RSS feeds), and creates these word art images.
You can customize them in all sorts of cool ways – this is my first one, taken from this blog’s front page a few weeks ago:
Go on – I know you want to! Make one yourself…
The desert is a delicate animal at this time of year. Like a snake shedding its skin it’s fragile, vulnerable, in a state of emergence.
If I were making a list of the 100 things I want to do before I die, visiting the desert in bloom would certainly be among them.
So when my friend Bridget mentioned that she goes to Anza Borrego every year around this time and suggested I might want to come with her and photograph the beauty, I jumped at the chance (Bridget is an exceptionally talented green architect and landscape designer and also a client of mine – look for an announcement of her site and blog at bridgetbrewer.com soon)!
First of all, a road trip with a girlfriend is a rare and beautiful
thing in itself, but with this particular traveling companion and this
specific destination it held the promise of being something truly
special, a gift to be embraced. Bridget not only knows the terrain and
the names of plants that live there, she loves the desert and
approaches it with the level of respect necessary to open the heart of
this potentially difficult land.
The desert is a lover that reveals herself slowly, offering her secrets only to those who will look beyond her seemingly unrewarding surface for the jewels hidden within. It’s bliss to walk out into what looks like an ocean of harsh scrub only to find a delicate bloom peeping out beneath the brush, or poking up out of a crack in the hard soil. It’s heaven to drive down a desolate-looking road only to round a corner and find a small valley of wildflowers spreading out before you like a carpet of color, all the way across to the mountains.
Camping in Bridget’s Element each night (which was surprisingly comfortable), we quickly fell into a routine of waking just before dawn when the light was just perfect for photography, and bedding down just a few hours after the sun had set. That alone had a profound effect on me, a night owl who usually can’t get to sleep before midnight and drags herself out of bed at seven so there’s time for a walk and a shower before starting work.
Not that I abandoned the night, either – the stars were so vivid I lay watching them each evening for what felt like hours, absolutely mesmerized. I haven’t seen the night through these eyes since I was a child and lived with the big sky view every day.
Spending one’s day following the quality of light in the natural cycles was utterly magical – I’ve haven’t been home 24 hours yet and already it feels like an elusive dream (there is just too much you can do at night when you have artificial light, and of course that makes it hard to wake at dawn :-). But something of the experience is still staying with me, and feels permanent – for that I am profoundly grateful.
I also learned some things when I was gone – important things. Here are a few:
❧ Getting away from your normal routine is a Good thing
❧ An open road and no agenda opens up a sense of infinite possibility; and out of this void creativity is abundant – this happens naturally, like breathing
❧ When you carry your bed with you it’s ok to get lost, even at night
❧ This world is far bigger that we are, and when we accept that reality it’s not so hard to find our place within it
There’s so much more to all this than I can write here, now – the needs of the day are calling me and I suspect the bigger adventure is to find the balance between these everyday needs and the needs of my spirit to transcend them, so that experiences like I’ve just had are integrated into my life and nestle into my very way of being. I know my health (on all levels – physical, emotional, and mental) will benefit and so will the quality of my work in the world.
I’m glad to be back and excited to see what will emerge from all this …
If you know me or have read this blog for any length of time, you know that bringing sacred space into the online sphere has been one of my strongest dreams and passions ever since I entered this field. In my work I am always seeking to create environments of peace and beauty where silence is welcome and hearts connect, where we are aware of all our relations within the natural and spirit worlds and can enter deeply into our essential nature as Humans and relate together in the sure knowledge that we are one interconnected spirit and body.
I’ve been integrating color and images and movement into user interfaces, cultivating the practice of kindness and respect in conversational forums, and generally evolving these sensory-based language(s) as my ground-of-being online. I have been blessed with many successes, large and small, in beginning to realize my dream, but the other night my ability to imagine what is truly possible took a quantum leap.
My friend and playmate in this realm FireHawk Hulin (aka DragonWolf Goheen) invited me to join him in Second Life to explore something he and the ever-amazing David Sibbet (aka Sunseed Bardeen) had been working on with the exquisite Michelle Paradis (aka SingingHeart Amat) … something truly unique in my experience, and totally magical.
We sat in circle around the fire in this beautiful clearing made
sacred by our intention and David & Michelle’s artistry and told each other
stories. We shared the stories of our dreams and visions, the stories
that had brought each of us to this place in this moment of no-time.
Late into the night we spoke the words that brought us each into our
full being – together in a state of honor and respect.
We spoke through a long sunset, its last rays illuminating a variety
of lush flower beds that framed and colored each of the eight gates
that stood and marked each direction of our circumference. We continued
to speak as stars filled the sky above us and the sounds of soft
singing and drumming were joined by those of crickets and the night
sounds of the clearing. We were completely there, our small circle of
four; in that time and place, in body and in spirit.
I know that not everyone would be interested in exploring a virtual
world environment, even if the learning curve for navigating it was not
so steep. In the past I’ve thought of that fact as a reason not to
focus my creative energy there, but the other night a different
realization appeared to me. If the people who do play in Second Life –
the ‘geeks’ and futurists and early-adaptor trend-setters – are able to
experience something so truly transformational there as I experienced
the other night, then perhaps some of that peace and beauty will be
reflected, even in some small way, in what they create and write and
say and do in their own First Lives, or the ‘real’ world where the rest
of humanity lives.
This realization of larger purpose and
intent would make any time I spent in Second Life completely
justifiable, but on a more personal level it was enormously joyful and
generative to just let my imagination run free and experience the pure
pleasure of unbridled creativity… tasting that bliss is worth a lot
to me and I can’t wait to see what we’ll imagine next!
In my small group ‘wisdom circle’ at yesterday’s Thought Leader Gathering, the question before us was "What gifts do you have hidden in your attic?", meaning, ‘What personal dreams, thoughts, actions, etc. do you withhold from the world?’.
Most of those in our small group were pretty ‘out there’ types, used to expressing ourselves freely, but even so each of us could identify a level at which we still keep ourselves hidden, afraid our true selves would be ‘too much’ or somehow ‘inappropriate’ if spoken out loud.
When pressed for details, a well-known creativity coach in our group described his hidden gift as the urge to "sing instead of speaking; write fiction instead of essays", and paint his dreams. Another, a high-level corporate firebrand, admitted that she really doesn’t work very hard… that she spends quite a bit of work time in silent contemplation on the deck, looking out over the ocean. The big ideas come to her once or twice a week; she doesn’t need to slave under a clock 8-10 hours a day, and if she did they probably wouldn’t come at all. But she doesn’t tell anyone this simple truth for fear they’d judge her for knowing that life doesn’t have to be so hard.
For all of us there was an inhibition, a subtle (& sometimes not so subtle) bridling that keeps us from being fully ourselves.
Now there is no doubt that there are merits to bridling some impulses –
no one is suggesting we hurt or defame one another – but what if this
inhibition we all seem to feel is a mass hypnotic trance, an illusion of ‘normalcy’ that denies us our true emotional range as human beings? What is so terrible in this day and age about being different, standing out, or being ‘inappropriate’? Who IS this Arbitrar of the Appropriate, anyway?! Thank Goddess we no longer burn witches in America, and still have the Constitutional right of free speech, though many appear afraid to use it these days.
The truth is I feel liberated when someone next to me is ‘outrageous’ – I feel my spirit lighten and begin to rise a little, and I gain courage for going beyond fear and my own limits of the verbotten.
We moved seats and did another round, this time the question on how our withheld gift has already started showing up in the world…
For me part of the answer to this question has been taking a stand in my approach to online communications. As a intuitively-motivated woman in a largely male-dominated technical field, I can’t help but ‘stand out’ a little, not always comfortably. While my entire industry seems to be moving towards slick templates & complex functionality within an impersonal wrapper that somehow feels
both over-crowded and sterile, I’ve consciously kept my aesthetic
warm, simple and personal, designed for ease and the way a person might actually use
it.
I’m not afraid to use color and engage the senses. I like being a woman, and honor the natural sensitivity and sensibility I was born with. Still, it’s been a process for me to come to self-acceptance and an open acknowledgment of my values.
A big step in my public emergence from the closet was starting this blog. It wasn’t easy. I was afraid writing about beauty would make me appear too ‘soft’; that undertaking this passion of my heart wasn’t ‘professional’ enough; that exposing my aesthetic & spiritual underpinnings might make me appear naive or irrelevant in this fast-moving world I work in.
But at the end of the day (as they say in England) that’s what’s in my heart. This is my true authentic self showing up in the world. What’s most exciting to me about all this is realizing that my small courage can catalyze courage in others. How the permission I give myself is like a key that unlocks permission in others and magically allows more of us to be exactly as we are. It’s like a courage contagion! 🙂
So here’s to each of us unbridling our inner outrageousness and releasing it to run free, like a courage meme rippling its way out into the world…
weDialogue
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