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Easily Amazed
On the Wings of Curiosity
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ashley
Joined: 02 Oct 2005
Posts: 402
Location: seattle, wa
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 Posted: Thu Jun 01, 2006 10:45 pm Post subject: Welcome to the Beauty Dialogues! |
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Welcome to
It was a simple twist of fate... friends on a walk listening to nature teach about the essence of Beauty. And out of that conversation was born ... The Beauty Dialogues.
The Beauty Dialogues is an inquiry into the nature of beauty. It is an opportunity for individuals who are fascinated by the texture, mystery, effects and possibilities of beauty to engage with one another, challenging our learning edges and inviting new horizons of awareness to emerge.
While some people will be participating in a teleconference series and using this forum as an online space to continue and deepen conversations, we invite anyone who is interested to join in relating around this inspiring topic here in the forum.
Our intention for these dialogues is to explore Beauty and to invite & evoke Beauty within and between us. We also wish to pay special attention to how Beauty ‘shows up’ in online environments, and how we can call it into being through this medium.
We look forward to playing with you! What is Beauty anyway?
May Beauty surround you,
Amy Lenzo & Ashley Cooper
“a simple twist of fate” ~ photography by Firehawk Hulin |
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ashley
Joined: 02 Oct 2005
Posts: 402
Location: seattle, wa
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| Posted: Sun Jun 04, 2006 6:10 pm Post subject: |
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A quote from Ria Baeck that reminded her of our invitation. She is unable to participate in the calls because she is in Belgium and the time difference is the middle of the night for her. Hopefully she'll come play with us here!!
| Quote: | Caroline Casey:
"Beauty is abundantly available to the unhurried mind." |
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kang
Joined: 10 Oct 2005
Posts: 79
Location: Southern New Jersey
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| Posted: Mon Jun 05, 2006 9:55 am Post subject: Navajo Blessing Way Pray |
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In beauty may I walk.
All day long may I walk.
Through the returning seasons may I walk.
On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.
With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk.
With dew about my feet may I walk.
With beauty may I walk.
With beauty before me, may I walk.
With beauty behind me, may I walk.
With beauty above me, may I walk.
With beauty below me, may I walk.
With beauty all around me, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty. |
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BethAlex
Joined: 06 Jun 2006
Posts: 2
Location: California, USA
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| Posted: Tue Jun 06, 2006 9:06 pm Post subject: Buckminster Fuller Quote |
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| "When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." |
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Sheri
Joined: 02 Nov 2005
Posts: 5
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| Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 11:54 am Post subject: beauty stirring passion |
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| "The Beautiful stirs passion and urgency in us and calls us forth from aloneness into the warm and wonder of some eternal embrace. It unites us again with the neglected and forgotten grandeur of life; for in some instinctive way we know that beauty is no stranger. We respond with delight to the call of beauty because in an instant it can awaken under the layers of the heart some forgotten brightness. Plato said: 'Beauty was our in all its brightness....Whole were we who celebrated that festival.'" |
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BethAlex
Joined: 06 Jun 2006
Posts: 2
Location: California, USA
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| Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 12:30 pm Post subject: Another favorite quote of mine |
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| "Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." -- John Keats |
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Sheri
Joined: 02 Nov 2005
Posts: 5
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| Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 12:46 pm Post subject: beauty's container |
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"Beauty as an explosion of energy perfectly contained." Richard Holmes on Coleridge's concept of beauty...
i loved this because of how many threads i could feel. the explosion, the power and directness, the clarity. the energy that is beauty....
questions start to unfurl...
what is the container if it is perfectly contained?
where does the energy come from?
how can i become an explosion perfectly contained?
when i stumbled across this quote riffing off coleridge, i was intrigued because i have long admired coleridge and his relationship to the imagination and poetry...his distinction between primary and secondary imagination is something i would like to revisit now because i believe that imagination is a portal or pathway to beauty and there is much unanswered in this....
love
sheri |
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Sheri
Joined: 02 Nov 2005
Posts: 5
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| Posted: Wed Jun 07, 2006 1:47 pm Post subject: rumi's love |
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Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
-- Rumi
unravelling this weaves me in so many ways that i can feel an explosion of colors and something like a tapestry showing me new patterns and new designs....what have i been missing? what are the new directions for searching and seeking and listening?
i have always loved this and i sit with it like a riddle, like a koan, coaxing me into some new place, some luscious playground where rhymes and riddles are part of the landscape.....and the paintbrushes draw words in the blue sky saying "beauty", "love", "action"....
or like one of my favorite film scenes, in a room with a view when the charming philosopher young man is perched in a tree in a glistening field of golden wheat, crying out with his voice as a beacon - truth! beauty!
and what's that last word? yes? the eternal yeah of nietzche or is it goodness, taking us to sri aurobindo?.....i need to rent that movie again.
but i stands out for me as a sublime moment of recognition. the eternal yes of existence dancing with love and beauty and sweet passion, unrelentless in its pursuit...
sheri |
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christy
Joined: 05 Oct 2005
Posts: 202
Location: seattle, wa
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| Posted: Thu Jun 08, 2006 10:58 am Post subject: |
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In Passing
How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:
as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious
~ Lisel Mueller ~
(Alive Together)
how mysterious and poignant the ephemeral nature of the world |
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kang
Joined: 10 Oct 2005
Posts: 79
Location: Southern New Jersey
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| Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2006 11:40 am Post subject: Beauty Words!!! |
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Hi All.... some quotes i love about BEAUTY:
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
~Rumi
WHAT IS THE BEAUTY THAT YOU LOVE???? IS IT REFLECTED IN
WHAT YOU DO?
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson ~
WHAT DO YOU CARRY WITH YOU? IF WE WERE TO MEET WOULD I
RECOGNIZE IT? HOW DOES A BEAUTIFUL SOUL SHOW ITSELF
TO YOU?
A soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.
~Johann von Goeth ~
DO YOU EVER FEEL ISOLATED AND ALONE.... LIKE YOU DO NOT FIT
WHERE EVER YOU MAY BE?? I CERTAINLY DO....
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
~Albert Einstein ~
HOW DO YOU SEE INTO THE MYSTERIOUS? WHAT MIGHT CAUSE
YOU TO PAUSE?
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.
~John Muir~
BE WELL ALL... Mike
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Sheri
Joined: 02 Nov 2005
Posts: 5
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| Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 2:36 pm Post subject: beauty and the flowering of human consciousness |
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"Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of their own innermost being, their true nature. The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness. The feelings of joy and love are intrinsically connected to that recognition. Without our fully realizing it, flowers would become for us an expression in form of that which is most high, most sacred, and ultimately formless within ourselves. Flowers, more fleeting, more ethereal, and more delicate than the plants out of which they emerged, would become like messengers from another realm, like a bridge between the world of physical forms and the formless."
Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose;
chapter - "The Flowering of Human Consciousness" |
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fiz
Joined: 13 Dec 2005
Posts: 230
Location: Seattle
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| Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2006 10:14 pm Post subject: |
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| Lisel Muller wrote: | as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious |
| Eckhart Tolle wrote: | | Without our fully realizing it, flowers would become for us an expression in form of that which is most high, most sacred, and ultimately formless within ourselves. Flowers, more fleeting, more ethereal, and more delicate than the plants out of which they emerged, would become like messengers from another realm, like a bridge between the world of physical forms and the formless. |
Death is the Mother of Beauty.
--Wallace Stevens
Taken together, Muller, Tolle and Stevens offer images and suggestions of that fathomless profundity from which beauty is born: fleeting impermanence, and flowering death. Only tonight, it seems, do I have the distinct pleasure to experience this recognition in this particular light. Ordinarily, the word "beauty," like the word "love," fails to say much anymore for me -- even though I continue to use both these words habitually. Tonight however, after playing my guitar down by the creek in the evening-lit ravine of Cowen Park, the word "beauty" opens anew, like a strange flower, to the unseen.
To register the unseen absence that informs the play of fleeting appearances directly is to gasp before the Living Unknown that I, and we, ultimately are as well. That ravishing edge of the profound and bottomless depth of Being ignites my wonder and imagination more than anything else. What also becomes clear tonight is just how essentially positive this recognition of beauty's living opening to death can be: it need not be morbid. Perhaps morbidity is a one-sided attachment to death, without experiencing the perpetually living exchange that death's intrinsic beauty always reveals.
Having experienced a personal loss recently...one that continues to wash through me daily and inform my deepest being...I have discovered that, in addition to being a difficulty, this loss is also a kind of ecstacy.
Specifically, I have discovered that in loss, I am taken outside of my habitual life and placed immediately before the overwhelming feeling of reality, in this case, the reality of losing. To my surprise, I ahve found that beauty is felt profoundly in this difficult ecstacy; in this sudden flavor and wholly embodied sensation of reality.
Indeed, perhaps beauty always seems felt to me most profoundly in the experience of loss. Isn't that the focus of any profound spirituality -- just how rare and precious this moment we have together always is, and how there is never a guarantee of it being here tomorrow? I gasp daily as I stand in the flower of my own death and breathe into the passing world.
In this sense, beauty also seems to be present in an essentially "negative" sense. Whether it is found in a positive or negative light, perhaps the key is that beauty reflects an experience of essence: the essence of death, of loss, of birth, of rebirth, of renewal, of emergence -- that nexus and unity and dynamism of essential lifestuff flowing in its countless forms.
That wonderful HBO series "Six Feet Under" comes to mind here, strangely, or maybe not so strangely at all. Easily my favorite TV series ever, I recognize against the light of this sobering, yet flowering, consideration, how beautifully made the series was. How convincingly real, in other words, it felt. For once, a TV drama instructed me in connecting my daily life with the reality of death in a way that helped me sense the beauty underlying the ordinary round of living we all keep.
Just about done here....so many cascading thoughts after a good guitar session!
(slow, quieting breath...)
To name the beautiful in my and our experience seems just as essential as the felt recognition of beauty itself. Maybe part of the world's great loss at this time is not in beauty's absence, but in our having lost the words to name it. After all, if beauty is more deeply an aspect of essence than of merely beautiful arrangements and appearances, then might it be possible to find beauty present in the contemporary reality of the world exactly as it appears before us? (And what a challenge that would be....) This is one kind of possibility, certainly, that a dialogue on beauty might help resuscitate: our capacity to speak of beauty's presence in a world that has seemed to grow unreal with our collective poverty of words.
Against the words of the poets above, such beautiful speech before our crashed flatland would seem to require incorporating death back into our everyday language. Who would be so daring?
Thank you, everyone, for providing this resonating space in which our voices may draw forth these words, and to encourage each other to speak them out loud in this most beautiful way together.
Love, Chris |
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fiz
Joined: 13 Dec 2005
Posts: 230
Location: Seattle
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| Posted: Thu Dec 07, 2006 11:13 pm Post subject: |
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In such ugly times, the only true protest is beauty.
--Phil Ochs
(The quote is from a friend's email signature.....sounds like Phil had a hard time along the way, and a beautiful soul.) |
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