One of our members has recently submitted a list to us, so check out these delicious words.
Apericolea:
From the Greek, referring to 'a lack of experience of things beautiful'. (That's our culture today*). Beauty challenges us. We experience joy, rapture, hope. We may weep, but we are called forcibly into our lives and to that inner work compelled by the experience of beauty.
Fastasia:
Italian for 'imagination', or better still 'imaginative insight', what Vico described as an authentic species of knowing equivalent to the uniquely intimate knowing of an inventor or creator, more immediate and personal than knowing mediated via the strategems of logic.
Consilience:
Literally a 'jumping together' of knowledge across disciplines, consilience is all about 'connectivity' and the weaving together of ideas from different domains of knowledge to reveal deeper, common groundworks of explanation.
Coeur:
The French word for 'heart' from which we also derive the word 'courage'. The heart: or body's gateway to another order of knowing. "The heart has reasons, which reason does not comprehend."
So there we go, four concept words whose essences weave through and underlie our groups creative and consulting practices.
* John Cimno was watching public TV late one night and heard Bill Myers in conversation with renowned historian and scholar, Joseph Campbell. They were talking about contemporary attitudes towards beauty. Far too many of our youth, our leaders and our communities suffer from apericolea, Campbell said. Beauty isn't cool, commercial or controversial ... or so some would have us believe ... it's because for the masses it is too unattainable, although still aspirational ... but it is not shockable, to be shockable is easy.
Part of our group's vision is to stand against that darkness, and remedy apericolea wherever it might be found. We favour beauty! We are challenged, shaken, transformed; we are never passive in the presence of beauty, whether that is the leaping of a gazelle, the sweep of a symphony or captured in an equation, or painted across the sky at dusk.
