LIVING BEAUTIFULLY
Living Beautifully by beautiful.business is a regular newsletter to share and inspire a different way of looking at the world. What would our world look like were we all to make it a little more beautiful?
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Always the beautiful answer
Who asks a more beautiful question
— E.E. Cummings
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01. Beautiful Conversations
Listen in to Dr Lisa Miller on the Rich Roll Podcast talking about The Neuroscience of Spirituality.
Recent research in neuroscience, genetics, and epidemiology now establish that humans are not only universally equipped with a capacity for (and inclination towards) spirituality, but that our brains, when so awakened, become more resilient and robust—and our lives more meaningful and content.
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Brian Catling RA, among other disciplines is an artist, poet and emeritus professor of fine art. He is perhaps best known as author of the groundbreaking trilogy, The Vorrh.
This interview, with my creative partner Matt Shaw, explores the fascinating origins of Brian's creativity.
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02. Beautifully Made
Robert Longo creates powerful cinematic images that are high octane, and high definition in charcoal. His exhibition “Storm of Hope” strikes a haunting note because the drawings reveal that history is as fragile as charcoal. So how do you slow down a storm of images? Longo's aim is to get his viewers to see — really see — the images that pass before their eyes every day in newspapers or on screens.
An exhibition of Longo's work has just finished, but this extensive interview with Longo accompanied by many of his images is worth a read.
How much do we really see? Is a question I feel keenly, and often reflect upon because, as Werner Herzog believed, the hardest thing to see is what is really there. What we see changes how we react to the world, and what we bring into it.
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Images: Nick Fewings; Jon Tyson
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I have been working on waste as an idea, partly because I ran a two acre garden for 30 years. I was always recycling, composting, transforming waste into something useful that would nourish my garden. In a garden you learn to think long term about growth, about systems and the cycles of life.
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Recognising that waste is central, not peripheral, to everything we design, make and do is key to transforming the future.
Waste Age, via Aeon, reminds me of the concept of The Total: what we take, what we make and what we waste.
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A bench seat made from what must have been a huge tree. Simple, muscular, brutal yet elegant. A beauty without artifice, the craftsman does not aim to create beauty, but nature assures it is done. This bench speaks of deep time, it feels inevitable where it sits waiting.
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03. Beautifully Restorative
River systems and wetlands across Finland have been extensively degraded over the years due to the combined effects of peat extraction, hydropower dams and the forestry industry. Now rewilding teams are working hard to encourage the return of wildlife.
But there is something else we must consider. Robin Wall Kimmerer believes restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land. It is a belief held my many indigenous cultures.
Selkie is from a series of beautiful films made by Pretty Good Productions, via Rewilding Europe, the Snowchange Cooperative and the Gaia Foundation.
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Animal a documentary film by Cyril Dion, screened at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.
Our younger generations want a different world from the one their elders have created - one that is regenerative.
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See our elders cynicism, as shown in this second film clip.
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There must always be a philosophy behind design, these are designs’ roots determining what we make. Biophilia was defined by the psychologist Erich Fromm in 1973, biophilia gained traction when the American biologist EO Wilson wrote extensively about the concept during the 1980s and 1990s.
Multiple scientific studies seem to confirm the hypothesis, suggesting that exposure to nature is good for human mental and physical health. There is evidence that it can speed hospital patients’ recovery, lower blood pressure, improve the immune response.
It provides us with a whole new language, infused with biology, physics, psychology, sociology, and with that language comes the capability to make the world in a different way.
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04. Beautifully Built
One of the world's most rigorously judged architectural awards, the RIBA International Prize 2021, has been won by Kashef Chowdhury’s $2m Friendship Hospital. An eighty bed community hospital in Sakthira, a remote rural water-logged area of Bangladesh.
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05. Beautiful Reads
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity – David Graeber and David Wengrow
We are, I believe, arriving at a point where we are really talking about / exploring a different way of living. Graeber and Wengrow believe, indigenous wisdom was premised upon the inheritance of a long tradition of political conflict and debate and who had thought deeply and spoke incisively on such matters as “generosity, sociability, material wealth, crime, punishment and liberty”.
If you need convincing further listen in to David Wengrow and read this review.
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Make, Think, Imagine: Engineering the Future of Civilisation – John Browne
This book has been described as a feast of stimulating ideas.
It was a wise man that said to defend a nation you need fighter planes and battleships – beautifully designed. But to defend a civilisation you need schools – also beautifully designed.
Huge public resources are required, which simply aren’t forthcoming because of short termism and misidentification of national priorities. This is why for all our wealth, our societies premised on growth for growths sake are so obscenely divided and in peril.
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Lea Ypi tells her story of what it was like to come of age in Albania during the 90's, as the last Stalinist outpost in Europe starts to fall apart.
She asks the question, what does it mean to be free? It's an important question. How are we happy and how are we free? How do we perceive freedom? She writes, “My family equated socialism with the denial of who they wanted to be, I equated liberalism with broken promises, the destruction of solidarity, the right to inherit".
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Beauty Redeemed: Recycling Post-Industrial Landscapes – Ellen Braae
Written by a Danish professor of landscape architecture, this book explores some of the projects that have been created on post-industrial brownfield sites since the 1990's.
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Outlandish: Walking Europe’s Unlikely Landscapes – Nick Hunt
An account of four pre-pandemic journeys by train and on foot and bicycle to Europe’s “our lands” — environments that “seemed to belong to another part of the world or even another historical or geological era”.
I love wonderful storytelling that transports and transcends us to another time and place.
For the curious explore the Dark Mountain Project, of which Nick is a co-director.
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06. Beautiful Food
Synthesising food out of thin air sounds like science fiction. But if there’s anybody who has the brains and clout to make that a reality — and overhaul global food production in the process – its got to be Molly Jahn.
Jahn notes that the world, and America especially, is now on a “commodities treadmill” that works only “if the costs to the environment are not figured into the equation, which is like pretending that erosion, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico and antibotic resistance – among other scary things – aren’t occurring”.
See also Jahn Research Group.
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07. Beautiful Experiences
Clevedon is one of the best places in the UK to watch the sunset. During the lighter months, every evening people gather to watch the sun disappear below the horizon. No sunset ever the same. Each one unique as the next.
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PROTEST! is a major retrospective of the work of Derek Jarman (1942-1994).
The focus of this free exhibition is on the diverse strands of Jarman’s practice as a painter, film maker, writer, set-designer, gardener and political activist. This a definite Go See.
Manchester Art Gallery until Sunday, 10 April 2022. |
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08. Beautiful Insights
The ESG Mirage. Sustainable investing is mostly about sustaining corporations – via Bloomberg.
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Supercritical have developed software that helps companies measure and then reduce their carbon emissions.
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PwC Net Zero Future50 – start-ups developing breakthrough technologies to decarbonise across industry sectors in the UK.
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A must-read, if you’re interested in China.
Dan Wang’s 2021 letter from China. A characteristically fascinating and thought-provoking summary of his impressions of the most important things that happened last year.
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How do we make the move to electric cars happen? Ask Norway. Two-thirds of all new cars bought by Norwegians last year were electric. Turns out you just need a government with a clue - via The Guardian.
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“‘How can we use our science and our technology to really be for the benefit of all life?’ That’s the question we need to be asking.” – Jeremy Lent, Flourish Systems Change Podcast.
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Note: cooperation is our super power.
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How ‘super-enzymes’ that eat plastics could curb our waste problem. Via The Guardian.
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E-LIFe: Just how long we can continue to manufacture without a product’s end of life in mind?
Watch: On Waterbear.
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Imagination is far more important than most people think – via NYT.
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Neverwaste™ is the world’s first high performance panel board made entirely from the vast quantities of waste cardboard and packaging that would otherwise be burned or landfilled. It is 100% recyclable with no end of life. Welcome to the neverwaste world.
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If companies want net-zero carbon offices, they need to focus on building materials. Via The Conversation.
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Wolves make roadways safer, generating large economic returns to predator conservation. Via PNAS.
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Trees have long served as models of intellectual inquiry and as sites of religious and civic deliberation. Now, as we learn more about plant intelligence, they are inspiring deeper forms of ecological investigation. Via Places Journal.
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Nature is becoming a Person. How to make sense of the new global trend that grants legal rights to animals, plants, and rivers.
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In some native languages the term for plants is translated as “those that look after us”.
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09. Beautiful Leadership
I want to pay tribute and honour the lives of two remarkable people, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Tich Nhat Hanh, who have both recently passed away.
The backdrop to their early lives was Apartheid and the Vietnam War. At a time of great suffering they brought compassion, love, and empathy, showing there is always an alternative to violence.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, an Anglican archbishop who fought against apartheid in South Africa and led the subsequent Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was a man who was forever in service to the greater good of humanity. In this interview he is asked what creates a good leader.
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Thich Nhat Hanh, or TNH, has played an important role in my life as I turned to look inside myself. His words, his ideas enabled me to think very differently about myself and the world I live in.
Fellow monk, Haenim Sunim, said, “He was like a large pine tree, allowing many people to rest under his branches with his wonderful teaching of mindfulness and compassion”.
Read an article, via Tricycle, written by TNH – Cultivating Compassion: How to love yourself and others. |
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10. Beautiful News
A recent short film about beauty, design and making. We are creative beings. We love to make things.
Do Design. Why beauty is key to everything will inspire you to create better things for better reasons. Things that people will love – for a long time to come. Some say beauty is a luxury. But what if it is key to creating a better world for us all?
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