Category: Life
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Christopher Alexander on the Personal Nature of Deeper Order
Christopher Alexander laid a foundation for order to be understood as living structure.1 Living structure, furthermore, cannot be understood as something separate from ourselves. It is both structure and personal. It is related to the geometry of space and to how things work. And it is related to the human person, deeply attached to something…
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Christopher Alexander on the Nature of Deeper Order
The Real Nature of Human Feeling There is a way of understanding order which is general. It is a view of order which helps us understand natural beauty and the life in buildings. It is a view which changes our cosmology. Christopher Alexander assumed the real nature of human feeling — that human feeling is…
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Wholeness is not breakable into parts
Wholeness is not breakable into parts. —Skye Hirst Skye Hirst said in a conversation that “wholeness is not breakable into parts”.1 It caught my attention. I saw it in relation to what Christopher Alexander has been trying to do with patterns. Christopher Alexander attempted to formulate the principles that lead to a good built environment…
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My 10 Year Summary: What I Have Learned
Contents 1. Introduction2. Background3. My Journey 3.1. The initial years (2012–2015) 3.2. The middle years (2016–2018) 3.3. The final years (2019–2022)4. Conclusions5. Afterword6. Acknowledgments7. Recommended Books 1. Introduction I started blogging ten years ago today (Sept 26, 2012). At the same time, I started searching for life-giving ways of working. This is a summary of my journey and…
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Iain McGilchrist on Life & Value
The following quote is from an interview with Iain McGilchrist by Jnanavaca: I believe that values, meaning and purpose are not invented by us, but discovered by us. And to discover means literally to unveil, uncover, something that is there. So we don’t make it. The left hemisphere understands things as it is made. It…
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New orders reflect new values
The world crumbles. New orders are emerging. Conditions are getting worse and worse. There is less and less to hold on to. There are fewer givens to assume. How to live? What to do? How to organize? The world is falling apart. Fear deepens as necessary orders are lost. Events force rapid reassessment of everything,…
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Poem: Life
Life is misapprehended by analysis to parts, the following of procedures: a process that prioritises the known, the certain, the fixed, the explicate, the general, the quantifiable over the unknown, the uncertain, the flowing, the implicate, the contextual, whatever is unique— all that presences to us.
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My story
In one of our conversations, Skye Hirst said: —I think there is an outline that I am hearing from you that I would like you to hear. Write this down… “My journey started as a little boy in Africa. I liked to draw. I loved to be in the forest with the trees. I have…
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Notes on Goethe’s Aphorisms
Daniel Christian Wahl has translated Goethe’s collected aphorisms in ‘The Tip of the Iceberg’ Goethe’s Aphorisms on the theory of Nature and Science. I appreciate that Wahl has attempted to stay as close as possible to the literal meaning of Goethe’s writings in order to avoid unnecessary interpretations. Here are my own brief notes, which…
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Camille Litalien: Embodied Learning
This is a transcript of Camille Litalien’s TEDx talk Embodied Learning at TEDxUSU Dec 8, 2017: Everything substantial I have ever learned I learned through being in my body. I am a dancer… When I dance I recover the ability for my mind to inhabit my whole body. All my senses become active, spontaneously responding…