finding your many voices

attaining emotional competence

finding your inner harmony

celebrating the many-sided person

beauty which makes you feel good

making sense of a complicated world

The Renaissance idea is as much a real power today as it ever was in its legendary history:

• empowerment: when we create the right conditions, virtually everyone can be to do virtually everything
• music, language, dance, theatre, art - all are integrated as one concern, the art of communication, used with understanding and insight, they still produce harmonic well-being and fulfillment, within the individual, and between people
• theory and practice illuminate one another - you need to know a bit about what you're doing to be able to do it with understanding; and to test the validity of what you know, you need to apply it in practice
• historical awareness: to understand how things are they way they are, you need to know how they came to be like that: and while rejoicing in the enhancements of life-quality which modern technology brings us, and the freedom from the repressive social systems of earlier times, we still have lots to gain by learning the skills, crafts and insights of earlier times and of distant cultures

The whole-person ideas which produce a Leonardo have become eclipsed by the needs of reductionist science and technology, by the 19thC. cult of 'the genius', by the market-system's division between 'producer' and 'consumer'; but those ideas are still available to us today, and are the tools we need in producing positive outcomes from the problems facing us in the modern world.

Each of us is many-sided: we have a creative side and an analytical side, a rational side and an irrational side, a feeling side and a thinking side, an adult side and a child side, a male side and a female side.

attaining emotional competence

Often one of these sides becomes dominant, while the others lie dormant and remain unnoticed: but we can create situations where they become integrated and honoured, their needs recognised on equal terms: in situations like that each of us can feel good about what we do: we can feel valued by the people around us: we can feel capable of managing the things that face us: we can feel good about who we are.

Of course there are specific skills you need to be able to do specific things: but the difference between "I can!" and "I can't" is one of attitude and context much more than it is one of inborn talent.

Learning is doing: and doing is learning; we're learning all the time - we can chose to discover new ways in which our prejudices were right, our fears justified: or we can chose to face our fears, to learn new things, to develop and grow.

There is beauty in something which is well-designed for its function: and being surrounded by beauty makes us function better.

making sense of a complicated world

Here is a wealth of pedagogical and cultural material which demonstrates how these ideas and ideals work in practice today.

You may find

• an opera where singers thought they couldn't sing
• decorative murals done by people who thought they couldn't paint
• people who discover in themselves new harmonic, creative personalities, using a language they thought they couldn't speak.
• and many more examples of Renaissance thinking as a model for personal development and human harmony today.

A couple of hundred web-sites are presented here, grouped both by topic, and by date order, latest first.