Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
- Sonorisms I
- More than just a machine that runs along
- Nobody was doing anything
- NYLA
- Aggressively Zen
[Life] frequently sets its problems in terms which must be altered if the problem is to be solved at all.
If we conclude that creative mind is in fact the very grain of the spiritual universe, we cannot arbitrarily stop our investigations with the man who happens to work in stone, or paint, or music, or letters. We shall have to ask ourselves whether the same pattern is not also exhibited in the spiritual structure of every man and woman. And, if it is, whether, by confining the average man and woman to uncreative activities and an uncreative outlook, we are not doing violence to the very structure of our being. If so, it is a serious matter, since we have seen already the unhappy results of handling any material in a way that runs counter to the natural law of its structure.
‘You must have a vast and magnificent estate,’ said Candide to the turk.
‘I have only twenty acres,’ replied the old man; ‘I and my children cultivate them; and our labour preserves us from three great evils: weariness, vice, and want.’
Candide, on his way home, reflected deeply on what the old man had said. ‘This honest Turk,’ he said to Pangloss and Martin, ‘seems to be in a far better place than kings…. I also know,’ said Candide, ‘that we must cultivate our garden.’
Today, most work is knowledge work, and knowledge workers are not "finished" after 40 years on the job, they are merely bored.
There are three ways to develop a second career. The first is to actually start one. The second is to develop a parallel career. Finally, there are the social entrepreneurs.
There is one prerequisite for managing the second half of your life: You must begin long before you enter it. If one does not begin to volunteer before one is 40 or so, one will not volunteer once past 60.
One can gain a glimpse of the quality of a people’s life by the kind of paper they use for writing letters, for literary works, and for various other tasks. Paper should not be deprecated. To do so is to deprecate beauty itself.
We can easily imagine from our own experience why fire might be used as a symbol of the life of a house and the family that lives there. The fire was certainly the most lifelike element of the house: it consumed food and left behind waste; it could grow and move seemingly by its own will; and it could exhaust itself and die. And most important it was warm, one of the most fundamental qualities that we associate with our own lives. When the fire dies, its remains become cold, just as the body becomes cold when a person dies. Drawing a parallel to the concept of the soul that animates the physical body of the person, the fire, then, is the animating spirit for the body of the house.
If we reach such a very ordinary state of daily life, and then back it up with building and construction that comes from the depths in us, then that gradually accumulates our value in the world, all of us together as a whole. Later, then, perhaps hundreds of years later, people will look back at our stones and say to themselves, "My word, those people way back then — they certainly knew how to live," and they would say this because they could see the lingering whispers in the walls and mosses, and could read them, and could treasure them, and would learn from these traces how to live like that again.
People who force nature force themselves. When we grow only wheat, we become dough. If we seek only money, we become brass; and if we stay in the childhood of team sports, we become a stuffed leather ball.
To become a complete person, we must travel many paths, and to truly own anything, we must first of all give it away.
Problem
No people who turn their backs on death can be alive. The presence of the dead among the living will be a daily fact in any society which encourages its people to live.
Solution
Never build massive cemeteries. Instead, allocate pieces of land throughout the community as grave sites—corners of parks, sections of paths, gardens, beside gateways—where memorials to people who have died can be ritually placed with inscriptions and mementos which celebrate their live. Give each grave site an edge, a path, and a quiet corner where people can sit. By custom, this is hallowed ground.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
If I don't ask, I won't get.
We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, that living one's life is a skill that has to be acquired, like learning to ride a bicycle or play the piano. But what does wisdom counsel us to do? It tells us to aim for tranquility and inner peace, a life free from anxiety, fear, idolatry, and harmful passions. Wisdom teaches us that our first impulses may not always be trustworthy, and that our appetites will lead us astray if we do not train reason to separate vain from genuine needs.
This is precisely where “burglary” becomes a myth, a symbol, a metaphor: it stands in for all the things people really want to do with the built environment, what they really want to do to sidestep the obstacles of their lives.
The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well - the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.
He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
How life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world.
Rather than convey "be like me," better parental advice should be more indirect: "This is how I lived" invites the child to reason about that example. Such advice omits "Therefore you should..." Find your own way; innovate rather than imitate.
Even if you were to live for three thousand years or ten times as long, you should still remember this, that no one loses any life other than the one that he is living, nor does he live any life other than the one that he loses, so the shortest life and the longest amount to the same.
Some day, will you be satisfied and want for nothing, yearning for nothing, and desiring nothing, animate or inanimate, to cater to your pleasures?
In our lives, this quality without a name is the most precious thing we ever have.
And I am free to the extent I have this quality in me.
If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again.
Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, having a drink at a friend’s house, driving on the freeway, going to bed again. There are a few more.
There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen.
When I see how few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t.
The most fundamental splits in contemporary life occur because of the break-up of the old unity of design, production and enjoyment.
Benjamin: It's like there's this whole life I had, but I can't remember what it was.
One thing I assume of age is weariness.
Damned if I don’t get more tired every day.
Tired of what I do, following arcs like lobbed rocks — the inevitability of truth.But the complexity and the gray lie not in the truth, but in what you do with the truth once you have it.
In System A, creation and production are organic in character, and are governed by human judgments that emanate from the underlying wholeness of situations, conditions, and surroundings.
In System B, the production process is thought of as mechanical. What matters are regulations, procedures, categories, money, efficiency, and profit: all the machinery designed to make society run smoothly, as if society was working as a great machine. The production process is rarely context-sensitive. Wholeness is left out.
Identifying these two categories helps us sharpen and clarify the range of differences among ways of creating the environment that exist in different societies. And the two categories serve to identify a dimension of great importance: the dimension that runs from more life-giving to less life-giving.
Pay attention, boy. The next suitable person you're in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, "What's wrong?" You say it in a concerned way. He'll say, "What do you mean?" You say, "Something's wrong. I can tell. What is it?" And he'll look stunned and say, "How did you know?" He doesn't realize something's always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing.
In an intentional bout of concentrated major thinking, where you sit down with the conscious intention of confronting major questions like 'Am I currently happy?' or 'What, ultimately, do I really care about and believe in?' or— particularly if some kind of authority figure has just squeezed your shoes—'Am I essentially a worthwhile, contributing type of person or a drifting, indifferent, nihilistic person?', then the questions often end up not answered but more like beaten to death, so attacked from every angle and each angle's different objections and complications that they end up even more abstract and ultimately meaningless than when you started. Nothing is achieved this way, at least that I've ever heard of. Certainly, from all evidence, St. Paul, or Martin Luther, or the authors of The Federalist Papers, or even President Reagan never changed the direction of their lives this way—it happened more by accident.
I don't envision a very long life for myself.
Like, I think my life will run out before my work does, you know?
I've designed it that way.
I enjoy gardening the most when it aligns with my broader philosophy of life, so I thought readers might like to see that philosophy and see how I apply it to gardening. These principles are in random order, just as they are applied in life. Sometimes my focus is on having fun, other times I'm focused on planning, still other times I just want to kick back and chat to my friends and neighbours.
Introduction / Pareto principle / Balance / Fun / Working for happiness / Family / Purpose / Order / Planning / Flexibility / Variety / Strategic Resilience / Motivation / Sustainability / Invest to save / Kaizen / Kindness / Giving back / Experimentation / Learning
When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and you're meant to just live your life inside the world and try not to bash into the walls too much...but life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact – and that is, that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use.
The “Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka (In Memory of Helen Keller),” built by architects/artists Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, are the first residential units designed “not to die.”
I've been fortunate enough to meet some of my heroes, but I still have a long way to go.
This is a list of people I'd like to high five IRL.
I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, the beloved tale becomes a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. A book may cease to speak to us as we grow older, and our feeling for it will fade. Or we may suddenly, as our lives shape and hopefully increase our understanding, be able to appreciate a book we dismissed earlier; we may suddenly be able to hear its music, to be enraptured by its song.
Holzer began creating these works in 1977, when she was a student in an independent study program. She hand-typed numerous "one liners," or Truisms, which she has likened, partly in jest, to a "Jenny Holzer's Reader's Digest version of Western and Eastern thought." She typeset the sentences in alphabetical order and printed them inexpensively, using commercial printing processes. She then distributed the sheets at random and pasted them up as posters around the city. Her Truisms eventually adorned a variety of formats, including T-shirts and baseball caps.
When we do not cultivate our Pillars, they grow weak and our Platform of Radiance becomes unstable, causing us to fall into one of the four Pits of Suffering below.
Each Pillar has a corresponding Pit of Suffering:
- Love > Attachment
- Compassion > Sentimentality
- Joy > Elation
- Equanimity > Apathy
I’ve written this before but I constantly need to remind myself of it, so, once again: A certain kind of work, lifestyle, mode of living — in and of itself — is protest. That is, work that is curious and rigorous is implicitly an antipode to didactic, shallow bombastity. It is inherently an archetype against bullshit. That to be committed to this work or life of rigor (be it rigor focused on “art” or, as they say in Japanese, sakuhin, or family or athleticism or whatever), and to share it with the world is to opt-out of being paralyzed by idiocy, and help others who may be paralyzed find a path back to whatever fecundity of life it is that they deserve.
The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do.
So I bet it would help a lot of people to ask themselves about this explicitly. What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you?
The wind is rising!
...We must try to live.— Paul Valéry
Nothing gives man fuller satisfaction than participation in processes that supersede the span of individual life.
— Gotthard Booth
The word “meaning” has two quite different meanings in English. It can refer to the meaning of symbols, such as words and road signs. This book is not about that kind of meaning.
People also speak of “the meaning of life.” That is the sort of meaningness this book is about. So I apply “meaningness” only to the sorts of things one could describe as “deeply meaningful” or “pretty meaningless.”
The conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of the landscape with people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.
The word Permaculture is taken from the Latin Permanens–meaning to endure of persist through time and cultura–referring to cultures–coming together. Permaculture is an interdisciplinary design science in the field of sustainable system design, with sustainable defined as:
a system which over its lifetime produces energy equivalent to or in excess of what it consumes.
Permaculture operates on three:
- Care of Earth
- Care of Species
- Return of Surplus to the first two
I have spoken, on a more mundane level, of using akido on the landscape, of rolling with the blows, turning adversity into strength, and using everything positively. The other approach is to karate the landscape, to try to make it yield by using our strength, and striking many hard blows. But if we attack nature we attack (and ultimately destroy) ourselves.
There are two basic steps to good permaculture design. The first deals with laws and principles, while the second is more closely associated with practical techniques.
The principles are inherent in any permaculture design, in any climate, and at any scale. They are, briefly:
- Relative location: every element is placed in relationship to another so that they assist each other
- Each element performs many functions.
- Each important function is supported by many elements.
- Efficient energy planning for house and settlement.
- Emphasis on the use of biological resources over fossil fuel resources.
- Energy recycling on site.
- Using and accelerating natural plant succession to establish favourable sites and soils.
- Polyculture and diversity of beneficial species for a productive, interactive system.
- Use of edge and natural patterns for best effect.
The core of permaculture is design. Design is a connection between things. It's not water, or a chicken, or the tree. It is how the water, the chicken and the tree are connected. It's the very opposite of what we are taught in school. Education takes everything and pulls it apart and makes no connections at all. Permaculture makes the connection, because as soon as you've got the connection you can feed the chicken from the tree.
To enable a design component to function efficiently, we must put it in the right place.
For things to work properly, we must remember that:
- The inputs needed by one element are supplied by other elements in the system; and
- The outputs needed by one element are used by other elements (including ourselves).
Each element in the system should be chosen and placed so that it performs as many functions as possible.
Important basic needs such as water, food, energy, and fire protection should be served in two or more ways.
Sectors deal with the wild energies, the elements of sun, light, wind, rain, wildfire, and water flow. These all comes from outside our system and pass through it. For these, we arrange a sector diagram based on the real site, usually a wedge-shaped area that radiates from a centre of activity.
Elements are placed according to intensity of use, control of external energies, and efficient energy flow.
Permaculture systems seek to stop the flow of nutrient and energy off the site and instead turn them into cycles, so that, for instance, kitchen wastes are recycles to compost; animal manures are directed to biogas production or to the soil; household greywater flows to the garden; green manures are turned into the earth; leaves are raked up around trees as mulch.
The British devised a system of farming in which pastures were broken up after the animals had been on them a few years. The pasture was plowed up and put into a high nutrient-demand crop, followed by a grain crop, followed by a root crop. One year it was left fallow to rest the soil. This was sustainable, but it took a long time to cycle.
Masanobu Fukuoka, that master strategist, deals with time stacking. He does not have to follow, because he never removes the main part of the crop from the soil. He starts the next crop before the last crop is finished.
In conventional agriculture, vegetation is kept at the weed or herb level using energy to keep it cut, weeded, tilled, fetilised, and even burnt; that is, we are constantly setting the system back and incurring work and energy-costs when we stop natural succession from occurring.
Instead of fighting this process, we can direct and accelerate it to build our own climax species in a shorter time.
There is no attempt to form the garden into strict neat rows; it is a riot of shrubs, vines, garden beds, flowers, herbs, a few small trees, and even a small pond. Paths are sinuous, and garden beds might be round, key-holed, raised, spiraled, or sunken.
To the observer, this may seem like a very unordered and untidy system; however, we should not confuse order and tidiness. Tidiness separates species and creates work, whereas order integrates, reducing work and discouraging insect attack. European gardens, often extraordinarily tidy, result in functional disorder and low yield. Creativity is seldom tidy.
Perhaps we could say that tidiness is something that happens when compulsive activity replaces thoughtful creativity.
The importance of diversity is not so much the number of elements in a system; rather it is the number of functional connections between these elements. It is not the number of things, but the number of ways in which things work.
Guilds are made up of a close association of species clustered around a central element (plant or animal). This assembly acts in relation to the element to assist its health, aid in management, or buffer adverse environmental effects.
An edge is an interface between two mediums. Edges are places of varied ecology. There is hardly a sustainable traditional human settlement that is not sited on those critical junctions of two natural economies. Successful and permanent settlements have always been able to draw from the resources of at least two environments.
The edge (boundary) acts as a net or sieve: energies or materials accumulate at edges, e.g. soil and debris are blown by wind against a fence; seashells form a line at the tide-marks on a beach; leaves accumulate at kerbsides in a city.
Disadvantages can be viewed as "problems" and we can take an energy-expensive approach to "get rid of the problem", or we can think of everything as being a positive resources: it us up to us to work out just how we can make use of it.
"Problems" can be intractable weeds, huge boulders lying on the perfect house site, and animals eating garden and orchard produce. How can we turn these into useful components of our system? Boulders on the perfect house site, for example, can be incorporated into the house itself, for beauty and as a heat storage system.
It is the quality of thought and the information we use that determines yield, not the size or quality of the site.
There are several ways to start the design process, depending on your nature and needs. You can start out by defining your goals, as precisely as possible, and then look at the site with these goals in mind. Or you can take the site with all its characteristics (both good and bad), and let goals suggest themselves. Of the two questions—"What can I make this land do?"—or—"What does this land have to give me?"—the first may lead to exploitation of the land without regard to long-term consequences, while the second to a sustained ecology guided by our intelligent control.
Maps are useful only when they are used in combination with observation. Never try to design a site by just looking at a map, even if it is thoroughly detailed with contour lines, vegetation, erosion gullies, and so on marked in.
Maps are never representative of the complex reality of nature. Remember, "The map is not the territory."
As we walk about a site and talk to people, we can note our observations. At this stage, we try to store the information we gain in some accurate way, carry a notebook, or a camera and tape-recorder, and make small sketches. The notes we end up with can later be used to devise design strategies.
We do not just see and hear, smell and taste, but we sense heat and cold, pressure, stress from efforts of hill-climbing or prickly plants, and find compatible or incompatible sites in the landscape. We note good views, outlooks, soil colours and textures. In face, we use (consciously) all our many senses and become aware of our bodies and responses.
Beyond this, we can sit for a time and notice patterns and processes: how some trees prefer to grow in rocks, some in valleys, others in grasslands or clumps. We see how water flows on the site, where fires have left scars, winds have bent branches or deformed the shape of trees, how the sun and shadows move, and where we find signs of animals resting, moving, or feeding. The site is full of information on every natural subject, and we must learn to read it well.
In a natural landscape, each element is part of the greater whole, a sophisticated and intricate web of connections and energy flows. If we attempt to create landscapes using a strictly objective viewpoint, we will produce awkward and dysfunctional designs because all living systems are more than just a sum of their parts. Our culture has tried to define the landscape scientifically, by collecting extensive data about its parts.
These methods are much like the group of blind mullahs in the Sufi tale, who try to describe an elephant.
If you have to stand somewhere doing tedious work, at least make it interesting.
The main problem lies in the often perverse arrangement of older houses, which face the road rather than the sun, and in the mania for glass windows on all outside walls.
If you are having trouble knowing where to start, always start at the doorstep.
The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. The American lawn could feed continents if people had more social responsibility.
Why should it be indecent to have anything useful in the front half of your property or around the house where people can see it? Why is it low-status to make that area productive? The condition is peculiar to the British landscaping ethic; what we are really looking at here is a miniature British country estate, designed for people who had servants. It has become a cultural status symbol to present a non-productive facade. The lawn and its shrubbery is a forcing of nature and landscape into a salute to wealth and power, and has not other purpose or function.
The only thing that such designs demonstrate is that power can force men and women to waste their energies in controlled, menial, and meaningless toil.
I see no other solution (political, economic) to the problems of mankind than the formation of small responsible communities involved in permaculture and appropriate technology. I believe that the days of centralised power are numbered, and that a re-tribalisation of society is an inevitable, if sometimes painful, process.
The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens.
People who force nature force themselves. When we grow only wheat, we become dough. If we seek only money, we become brass; and if we stay in the childhood of team sports, we become a stuffed leather ball.
To become a complete person, we must travel many paths, and to truly own anything, we must first of all give it away.