I was today at a Social Media Marketing conference in Zurich. Marketeers and web-consultants spoke about using social trends for your website with different tools, platforms and strategies, for increasing one’s presence in the communities. While most speakers gave very interesting presentations, others weren’t much relevant for me or seemed to give an exposure of the portfolio of their agency, spicing it with slogans. As usual you had to filter yourself to get the nuggets out of the sand.

I was much interested in the way the dialogue between business and users is being orchestrated and in understanding better the strategies and technologies. It was fascinating to see how the mechanics of human curiosity and gossiping are being used in this. Most relevant is to understand the users and what they want. This is often not so clear, and easily the gap causes miscommunication.

As expected at such a conference, people were busily twittering the whole time. There was a feeling in the room of keeping oneself in a state of excitement and continuous communication. The last speaker even highlighted this as a kind of telepathic inter-relationship between all participants. I thought I don’t want this kind of permanent interconnectedness. Inter-relationship is not just in talking, but, more so, in silence and in subtle linking through meditative work – this not particularly being the sphere of social media marketing.

So I didn’t join the conference with twittering or linking in, trying to keep the everyday information overkill with some inner filters at a distance. I had some talks and took some good inspirations back home. I now ask myself if I shall nevertheless do a step into the twitter-world after some steps into Face-Booking. I saw interesting vistas, but time is scarce…

One’s own website is just the top of an iceberg where the sphere of social media networks like facebook, twitter, flickr and the like offer fields for extension of the scope of influence.

Last Friday and Saturday we were in Einsiedeln for a meeting of the Executive Board of WTT-Global. It was a very constructive meeting, where we worked out a re-distribution of responsibilities. Great care was taken of the condition and sensitivities of each individual, which is very important for a good development of such a process.

For me it was an inspiring experience to see how this group now can function, after having gone through different clarification processes in the past. It was not a top-down process, but everyone involved expressed his or her views about who is doing best a certain task and where new assignments could bring relief. Then the persons involved declared which tasks they could take over. So we slowly approached a new structure of responsibilities and cooperation, which for the moment is being finalised. Everybody felt well with the procedures we decided upon and could agree with the results.

Here are some shots of Saturday morning sunrise seen from the balcony and the flat of a group member.

Last Tuesday I participated in our department management retreat, where we worked out the principles guiding our work. The meeting was in the Study Centre Gerzensee of the Swiss National Bank. It is located partially in a Château surrounded by a beautiful park overlooking a lake, with a fantastic view of the Alps in the background. I took some shots of the springtime ambiance in the park.

The idyllic impression got a dissonance, when a biting smell came from a terrace below the front, where a gardener  in a  protective suit covering the whole body and a big gas mask was spraying poison over the rose trees – calling me brutally back into the present day environmental pollution.

A horse statue galloping through the garden. The horse is a symbol of the vital power of the fiery signs of the zodiac, where the head represents Aries, the body Leo and the tail Sagittarius.

The satyr Pan playing his flute in the garden and evoking the flowers from out of the earth

Enjoying the horn of plenty

An Easter egg on the top of a fountain

The fountain of fresh energy

A fountain in front of the Château in the sunlight

A mighty tree in the garden

Spring ambiance under a tree

Alley leading to the lake

The garden of the little Château, the seminar centre

An old cannon in front of the entrance, with a spiral inside

Magnolia bud

Fishes enjoying playing with water, with the Alps in the background

A friend sent me a powerpoint with the following story I extracted from it:

Charles Plumb was a US Navy jet pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent 6 years in a communist Vietnamese prison.

He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience. One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table came up and said, “You’re Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. You were shot down!” “How in the world did you know that?” asked Plumb. “I packed your parachute,” the man replied. Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude.

The man pumped his hand and said, “I guess it worked!” Plumb assured him, “It surely did. If your chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.”

Plumb couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about that man. Plumb says, “I kept wondering what he had looked like in a Navy uniform: a white hat; a bib in the back; and bell-bottom trousers. I wonder how many times I might have seen him and not even said ‘Good morning, how are you?’ or anything because, you see, I was a fighter pilot and he was just a sailor.”

Plumb thought of the many hours the sailor had spent at a long wooden table in the bowels of the ship, carefully weaving the shrouds and folding the silks of each chute, holding in his hands each time the fate of someone he didn’t know.

Now, Plumb asks his audience, “Who’s packing your parachute?” Everyone has someone who provides what they need to make it through the day. He also points out that he needed many kinds of parachutes when his plane was shot down over enemy territory-he needed his physical parachute, his mental parachute, his emotional parachute, and his spiritual parachute. He called on all these supports before reaching safety.

Sometimes in the daily challenges that life gives us, we miss what is really important. We may fail to say hello, please, or thank you, congratulate someone on something wonderful that has happened to them, give a compliment, or just do something nice for no reason. As you go through this week, this month, this year, recognize people who pack your parachutes.

Flying over the Alps

A friend sent me the link to the fascinating Flame Generator, where you can create your flame artwork. It is the result of an experimental project of Peter Blaškovič, a 3D animator and designer. He writes about his generator:

“I think with tools which inspire you, everyone can be an artist. You can try it here, change different brush settings and paint your own flame paintings. … It’s not easy to explain all brush parameters, so I leave this for your experimentation.”

Enjoy doing your own flame experiments.

A little game of flames generated with “Flame”.

A friend today sent me the following “ALZHEIMER’S EYE TEST” – interesting result:

Count every ” F ” in the following text by reading it in one stroke:

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTI
FIC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS…

HOW MANY ?

There are 6 — no joke. Read it again! Go back and try to find the 6 F’s before you scroll down.

The brain cannot process “OF”. Incredible or what? Go back and look again!! Anyone who counts all 6 “F’s” on the first go is a genius. Three is normal, four is quite rare….”

This test reminds me of our selective perception of reality – we have “black holes” and often don’t realise what is right before our eyes. What we don’t want to see we simply ignore. This is especially the case with the dark sides of our personality. Or with the good sides of a person we don’t like. – We need to purify our awareness and cultivate loving attention.

Mandalas are very old geometric structures illustrating rhythmic principles of universal order. A friend sent me the link to a website with an extremely beautiful mandala animation and exquisite music. You can create changing mandalas by moving the mouse or playing with the keyboard. The first music playing is a sublime intonation of the age-old Gayatri mantram. The site is called “Light-Weaver.com” and inspired by the teachings of the Tibetan Master / Alice A. Bailey. It has the motto: “To the Glory of the One”. The site also offers a calendar of the Full Moon and New Moon dates and times, similar to the calendar of the month of the World Teacher Trust.

On the site you also find very beautiful free mandalas

A free mandala from the website light-weaver.com (c)

The website of my office is now 8 years old. We came to the conclusion that it needs a brush-up, a fundamental renovation, because it has immensely grown and it is not always easy for surfers to find what they are looking for. Furthermore the ways people surf have changed and thus the demands of usability have changed, too. My web-team is setting up the technical infrastructure on a new system, now we want to do a re-engineering of the content structure, the design and the prioritisation of the contents: Not everything which is easily visible is also of the same relevance… We have studied the statistics, observed how the major flows of surfers behave, made quite some reflections, set up a team of specialists from the different departments…

Last Wednesday I had the first meeting, together with a colleague from marketing, with a specialist from a web agency accompanying us with the renovation of the website. He is a consultant and designer.  We were discussing the perspectives the surfers seeking information might have. The designer proposed to use personas, fictional characters created to represent the different user types that might use our site. I found it fascinating, but in view of the complexity of the site there will probably be too many options. We were discussion re-grouping the existing contents. I realised how much I’m stuck with the structures I’m used to see – an outsider comes with totally different perspectives. The process brought me into some kind of a creative confusion, losing the sight of the greater vision in view of so many details to be considered. It reminded me of situations of transformation on the spiritual path. You sometimes go through times of confusion, where the path no longer is clear before your eyes and where things which for a long time were obvious no longer seem to be so. You are looking for new order systems which are more fitting for the demands of the time.

Thursday afternoon I had a meeting with the redactor of the communication section. She also has quite some web experiences, having worked in this area in the States for a while. I described her the situation and my process of confusion. She said, “Why don’t we group all the different fields in a matrix-like way according to what the people want to do: Just to get information, to  get help from one of our offers, to support the work either by donations or by help – volunteer work, blood donation and the like.” It sounded very convincing. We re-grouped the major areas of the site, saw that it makes sense, but also, that new questions popped up. Will our system be so flexible to deal with such a re-mix of contents and demands?

Friday I submitted the ideas to the colleague from marketing and she was quite fascinated by the outcome. For next week we reserved a whole afternoon to work out the rearrangements of the whole site. I prepared cards for every page so that we can freely shift and re-group the contents. I though, sometimes in life it would be good to do such re-grouping and rearranging. It’s the Uranian energy which does this with us if we don’t do it ourselves. It fits very well into the present moment of the start of the new annual cycle with Aries, the fresh energy of beginning.

“Stairway to the sun”, in the park next to my office. Only one week ago we had icy weather with snow.

I’m often astonished about synchronicities in events. Since one week I could not publish any news on the entrance page of the intranet of my office. We tried to find out the cause, but neither the technicians nor the web-team could get it run again. One technician of the agency who had set up the system was in hospital, another was away with other duties. Speaking with the responsible person I told him that we have come to the conclusion that there must be some gremlins in the system who come out during the night doing mischief… We have to wait until next week if they find out another cause

At home I then encountered problems this week sending mails and operating the group coordination mailing list. Mails did not get out, were stuck on the server. I yesterday had long telephone calls with the provider, it first seemed that we go the problem, but I later realised that not yet. He is working on it…

Furthermore the mails of the hotmail subscribers of the blog were returned – Microsoft found another “interesting” way of spam protection, thus blocking legally subscribed mails. In the return-mails they give a link to their “live”-postmaster page, where you get into a labyrinth of questions and answers – however, it seemed that my case is not described there and the “link” to the troubleshooting contact in case none of the answers helps was dead (at least in the German version of the page I could see). Moreover, they offer for commercial mailers a “Sender Score Certified-Programme” for quite some bucks – and there is no category for anything like free spiritual newsletters and blogs – a dead end with the Microsofties. I did not find a solution with them nor did I find a contact address… At least I now changed the mode of sending mails from the blog, hoping that now these mails get through.

An American friend and astrologer wrote to me this morning: “You will have to call a conference with Mercury, Mars and St. Isidore, patron saint of the internet, computers, technology and of farmers…” And yesterday she told me: “As Mars now moves forward (from its retrograde), things will begin to even out. Mars (activity, intentions, etc.) is still slowly trying to catch up with its retrograde degree… also, Mercury just left Pisces… as it’s now in Aries, that will help.” May the planetary energies be favourable!

Another, less troublesome synchronicity was the topic of serpent power – also the one of our planet. The last weeks I had been encountering in several instances the “serpent” or kundalini power – in images of imagination, talks with friends, symbolism. Last week I even painted a picture (which I don’t want to publish yet) about a “serpent flower”. And 3 days ago I got a letter from a German artist who had just come across the Good-Will website writing (in German):

“As a gardner I culture the joy with the nature and in it to have a dialog with the earth. A dialog which sometimes gets me take fire with the earth fire (earth kundalini, I call it earth serpent). It is a meditation lasting since years, about the root ways of the plants, which according to my experience aways grow very purposefully into the heart of the earth. Having a dialog with this mystical space, the heart of the earth, is very dear to my heart.”

Aslepios, the great healer, with the “earth serpent power” in Epidaurus, 2005.

Yesterday evening when going home from the office I made a stop at the hairdresser’s shop to fix an appointment for a haircut. The young lady at the reception said if I had time and no preferences to who cuts my heair I could immediately get it done. I said, fine, and she started cutting.

At the end she asked me if everything was fine, and I remarked that the hair in front of my left ear was still a bit longer than on the right side. She hold her fingers on both sides, looked and said: “No, it’s o.k., with some the ears are not at the same height.” I looked a bit incredulously, smiled, paid and went home.

Looking into the mirror I saw that on the left side the hair was about 1.5 cm longer than on the right side. I thought, “Oh, now also my eyes start shifting, my whole head is getting into a transmutation.” I took the razor blade, cut away the hair on the left side and thus did a “surgery” to bring back the proportions of my poor head.

The story reminded me of my parents who used to tell me that when I was a little boy and had to clear up the toys spread on the floor, “Oh, I can’t do it, my arms are too short.”

Also in spirituality you come often across what we call “spiritual excuses”: You can’t do this or that because, and then comes an explanation in which you try to believe yourself: “It is my Aries moon which makes me so aggressive”. “The sun in Gemini gives me difficulties concentrating…”

My wife and I like playing with it, looking if the other is witty enough to look through the disguise of the excuse…

Man is very creative in inventing all kinds of excuses… (Drawing by Leonardo da Vinci)