Fierce design

A lovely day of design with friends in Lindon Utah.  In most Art of Hosting type events, the substantive design work happens in the days just before the event, when the hosting team can finally be physically together, when we can read over the “getting to know you” answers from participants and when we can sink into a deeper space of good working relationship and creative planning.  We work until we get to a design that is good enough to hold the bones of what we are trying to do, and then we rest and let it sink in so that we can refine it further the next day.  Beautiful designs emerge this way, especially when we have deep practitioners on the team who understand the DNA of the process.  Often we are joined by friends and colleagues in the work who push us and inquire and help create from their perspectives.  Today was no different, and in the process Erin Gilmore, one of our design team colleagues referred to a Neruda poem today which captures for me the spirit of the design processes that often produce really sweet results.

POETRY

And it was at that age…Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

— Pablo Neruda