Creativity at Work Newsletter, September 2007
Sep 30th, 2007 by Linda Naiman
Today like every other day
we wake up empty and frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down
a musical instrument. Let the beauty you love
be what you do. There are a thousand ways
to kneel down and kiss the ground.
– Rumi
Pure Poetry
It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon in Vancouver and I am listening to a CBC radio musical tribute to Mevlana Jelalludin Rumi who was born today, September 30, 800 years ago. Rumi was a 13th century poet, mystic, and scholar. He was born in Afghanistan, but he lived much of his life in Turkey, and he wrote in Persian. Sufism is a form of Islamic mysticism that emphasises personal, ecstatic worship and union with Allah, God.
Rumi is the most popular poet in America today, in part thanks to the creative translations of Coleman Barks, and because Rumi?s poems about love, ecstasy and mysticism fill a void in the American psyche.
“It’s a matter of our enormous spiritual hunger matched by our natural anticlericism gone ballistic,” says Phyllis Tickle, contributing editor in religion to Publisher’s Weekly. “It’s also just beautiful poetry.” For seven centuries, Rumi’s poetry has been sung in the Islamic world from India to Iran, Turkey to Afghanistan.
He’s considered an ecstatic, a romantic, obsessed with God, exalting the divine universality of the heart in everything and everyone. “He celebrates the Presence, he calls it the Friend or the Beloved, that we sense in the beauty outside of us on a rainy day, or in a group of friends fixing food, a horse being saddled, or a child sleeping,” says translator Barks.
“All of these things that are obviously beautiful outside of us also touch the beauty inside of us - that jewel-like inner presence that he activates in his poetry.” (From Persian Poet Top Seller In America By Alexandra Marks Christian Science Monitor )
Rumi has been called the poet laureate of the planet Earth and UNESCO has named 2007 - The International Year of Rumi
Listen to an interview with Coleman Barks and Andrew Harvey, two of the world’s best-known interpreters of Rumi’s works. The University of Tehran awarded Coleman Barks an honorary doctorate last year for his translations.
Poetry of Design
IDEO explores works from the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum collection. To represent design thinking, IDEO chose objects that demonstrate innovative problem solving over the past five centuries. IDEO uses three lenses-Inspiration, Empathy, and Intuition-to explore these objects and the very human impulses that motivate designers and the contexts in which objects are created and used.
Poetry of art in business
An invitation to the arts-in-business community who have bought Orchestrating Collaboration at Work (or not) to create a dialogue about using arts-based activities in training, coaching and consulting. I would love know which activities are your favourites and how you are using them. What works for you and what doesn?t? You are also welcome to post announcements for conferences relating to the arts in business.
Please drop by
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Orchestrating Collaboration at Work is now available in paperback at Amazon.com.
If you want to buy more than one book, please contact me for a discount.
Check out reviews, etc here
Fine Art Prints
The art I created this summer are now available as fine art prints:
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Poetry in Numbers
Facts and Figures from Futurist Watts Wacker:
Watts Wacker and Ryan Mathews are co-authors of The Deviant’s Advantage: How Fringe Ideas Create Mass Markets
* In 2002-05 on average, 1,213 patents were given out for every 1 million people in Japan making that country the grantor of more patents than any other: though this number is because each part of a new product requires a separate patent application. Crumbling Cuba grants more patents than fast-growing India or China, though both countries are better known for their ability to copy, rather than create intellectual property.
* More than 1/4 of Americans (27%) didn’t read a single book in 2006. The typical book reader goes through seven books per year, but the mean number of books read is 20. That mean that a large portion of readers go through more than the average, including 8% who read more than 50 books per year.
* The Arctic ice cap has collapsed at an unprecedented rate this summer and levels of sea ice in the region now stand at record lows, scientists have announced. Experts say they are “stunned” by the loss of ice, with an area almost twice as big as the UK disappearing in the last week alone
* Brian May, 60, who abandoned his studies more than 30 years ago to found the rock group Queen, has returned to his first love, astrophysics. His doctoral thesis, “Radical Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud:” has been submitted to the Imperial College London.
Source: First Matter Sept 07 newsletter
And to close I have a question for you:
In 50 words or less, what do you yourself see as the central question/issue concerning creativity? Click here for my answer and to weigh in.
Happy Creating,
Linda Naiman
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The Creativity at Work Newsletter provides overviews of new research in creativity and innovation, ‘best practices’ of leading organizations, links to new or relevant websites and an array ideas and techniques from innovation experts. Subscribe today
You can read archives prior to May 2007 on the Creativity at Work website.
