“There is nothing but love here for you. We welcome you and cannot wait to hold you in our arms. We support your life, whatever you need. We are here to love and honor you. We will be here for you no matter what. You are safe.”
Sunni Karll

Sacred Birthing

Power and Love

Published: January 3, 2018
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“Power without love is reckless and abusive and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”

Martin Luther King via Adam Kahane

 

…  ha-tha yoga

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Christopher Alexander – Degrees of Life

Published: December 28, 2017
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“In the 20th-century scientific conception, what we meant by life was defined chiefly by the life or an individual organism. We consider as an organism any carbon-oxygen-hydrogen-nitrogen system which is capable of reproducing itself, healing itself, and remaining stable for some particular lifetime … There are plenty of uncomfortable boundary problems: For example, is a fertilized egg alive during its first few minutes? Is a virus alive? Is a forest alive (as a whole …) …

… We have have, it is true, begun some extrapolations of this idea of life … For example, we have somehow managed to extend the mechanistical concept of life to cover ecological systems (even though strictly speaking an ecological system is no alive, because it does not meet the definition of a self-replicating organism). We consider an ecological system … though not alive itself,certainly associated with biological life.

… But this extrapolation will not do to help us understand truly complex systems as living things. The mixture of natural and man-made … raises complicated questions of definition, which we have hardly begun to answer.

… Throughout this book, I shall be looking for a broad conception of life, in which each thing – regardless of what it is – has some degree of life. Each stone, rafter, and piece of concrete has some degree of life. The particular degree of life which occurs in organisms will then be seen as merely a special case of a broader conception of life.

… In the present scientific world-view, a scientist would not be willing to consider a wave breaking on the short as a living system. If I say to her that this breaking wave does have some life, the biologist will admonish me and say, ‘I suppose you mean that the wave contains many micro-organisms, and perhaps a couple of crabs, and that therefore it is a living system.’ But that is not what I mean at all. What I mean is that the wave itself – the system which in present-day science we have considered as a purely mechanical hydrodynamical system of moving water – has some degree of life. And what I mean, in general, is that every single part of the matter-space continuum has life in some degree, with some parts having very much less, and others having very much more.

… If the conception of life is completely general, we shall then be able to extend it from the purely natural (such as conservation of a beautiful stand of trees), to the cooperation between natural and man-made (roads, streets, gardens, fields) and then also to the building themselves (roofs, walls, windows, rooms) … we can then simply proceed with the general idea that all of our work has to do with the creation of life and that the task, in any particular project, is to make the building come to life as much as possible.

… I shall … try to persuade you, by example, that we do feel that there are different degrees of life in things – and that this feeling is rather strongly shared by almost everyone.

… it is undeniable – at least as far as our feeling is concerned, that a … breaking wave feels as it if has more life as system of water than an industrial pool stinking with chemicals. So does the ripple of a tranquil pond.

… A fire, which is not organically alive, feels alive. And a blazing bonfire may feel more alive than a smoldering ember …

Gold feels alive. The peculiar yellow color of naturally occurring gold, so different from pyrites, or from the gold in the jeweller’s shop, has an eerie magical essence that feels alive. This is not because of its monetary value. It got its monetary value originally because it had this profound feeling attached to it. Naturally occurring platinum, comparable in value … [does] not have the same feeling of life at all.

… We often see a piece of wood and marvel at its life; another piece of wood feels more dead ….

… We shall see later that this feeling that there is more life in one case than the other is correlated with a structural difference in the things themselves – a difference which can be made precise, and measured.

… One person may be glowing with life, which transmits to everyone around. Another person is drooping … different organisms, all alive in the strictly mechanical sense, impress us as having more life or less life.

… it is this feeling of life and love of nature which stimulated the young discipline of ecology … we recognize degrees of life, or degrees of health, in different ecological systems … one meadow is more alive than another, one stream more alive … one forest more tranquil, more vigorous, more alive, than another dying forest … we experience degree of life as an essential concept which goes to the heart of our feelings about the natural world, and which nourishes us fundamentally, as a fact about the world.

… The ‘Life’ which I am talking about also includes the living essence of ordinary events in our everyday worlds … a back-street Japanese restaurant … an Italian town square  … an amusement park  … a bunch of cushions thrown into a corner window-seat … This quality includes an overall sense of functional liberation and free inner spirit. It makes us feel comfortable. Above all it makes us feel alive when we experience it.

… It has nothing to do with images. It occurs most deeply when things are simply going well, when we are having a good time, or when we are experiencing joy or sorrow – when we experience the real.

… Under these circumstances, we are free of our concepts, able to react directly to the circumstance we encounter, and least constrained by affectations, concepts, and ideas. This is the central teaching of Zen and all mystical religions. It is also the condition in which we are able to see the wholeness which exists around us, feel it directly, and respond to it.“

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life

 

 

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Christopher Alexander – What Kind of Thing is Order?

Published: December 27, 2017
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” … to make buildings which have life and profound order – it is necessary to be rescued from the mechanistic trap by concentrating on life and order of a building as something in itself. I believe such a formulation can only come from a new view of the world which intentionally sees things in their wholeness, not as parts or fragments – and which recognizes ‘life,’ even in an apparently inanimate thing like a building as something real.

… Such a new view of order will create a new relationship between ideas of ornament and function. In present views of architectural order, function is something we can understand intellectually … Ornament, on the other hand, is something we may like but cannot understand intellectually. One is serious, the other frivolous … There is no conception of order which lets us see buildings as both functional and ornamented at the same time.

The view of order which I describe in this book is very different. It is even handed with regard to ornament and function … they are really only different aspects of a single kind of order.

… the structure I identify as the foundation of all order is also personal. As we learn to understand it, we shall see that our own feeling, the feeling of what it is to be a person, rooted, happy, alive in oneself, straightforward, and ordinary is itself inextricably connected with order.

… The theory which I shall lay out is in no sense against science; it is simply an extension of science …

… it is not only the detail of what ‘order is which needs to be questioned, but also the very nature of order. So long as we have a confused or inaccurate conception of what kind of thing order is, we shall inevitably make buildings which are ugly, houses which do not support ordinary human well-being, gardens and streets which are at odds with nature, and a world which destroys our souls.”

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life

reference: Could bad buildings damage your mental health?

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Inside Grand Seiko

Published: December 26, 2017
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“This is the minimum requirement in making a beautiful watch: First, each individual part must be beautiful.”

 

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Christopher Alexander – Mechanistic: A Mental Toy

Published: December 26, 2017
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“The mechanistic idea of order can be traced to Descartes, around 1640. He ideas was: if you want to know how something works, you can find out by pretending that it is a machine. You completely isolate the thing you are interested in … from everything else, and you invent a mechanistic model, a mental toy, which obeys certain rules, and which will then replicate the behavior of the thing …

However, the crucial thing which Descartes understood very well, but which we most often forget, is that this process is only a method … [it] is not how reality actually is. It is a convenient mental exercise, something we do to reality, in order to understand it …

Descartes … was a religious person who would have been horrified to find out that people in the 20th century began to think that reality itself is actually like this … treating reality as if this mechanical picture really were the nature of things, as if everything really were a machine.

… [this] had two tremendous consequences, both devastating for artists. The first was that ‘I’ went out of our world … Of course, it is still there in our experience. But it isn’t part of the picture we have of how things are. So what happens? How can you make something which has no ‘I’ in it, when the whole process of making anything comes from the ‘I’? The process of trying to be an artist in a world which has no sensible notion of ‘I’ … leaves the art of building in a vacuum. You just cannot make sense of it.

The second devastating thing that happened … was that clear understanding about value went out of the world. The picture of the world we have from physics, because it is built only out of mental machines, no longer has any definite feeling of value in it: value has become sidelined as a matter of opinion, not intrinsic to the nature of the world at all.

And with these two developments, the idea of order fell apart. The mechanistic idea tells us very little about the deep order we feel intuitively to be in the world. Yet it is just this deeper order which is our main concern.

… In the world-view initiated by Descartes … it is believed that the only statements which can be true or false are statements about mechanisms. These are the so-called ‘facts’ familiar to everyone in the 20th century.

In the world-view I am presenting, a second kind of statement is also considered capable of being trye or false. These are statements about relative degree of life, degree of harmony, or degree of wholeness – in short, statements about value. In the view I hold, these statements about relative wholeness are also factual … They play a more fundamental role than statements about mechanisms.

… Suppose I am trying to place a door in a certain wall. While I try to decide where to put it, I can make various mechanical statements of fact … it is wide enough to allow a refrigerator through it … it will resist a standard fire for one hour … it weighs 25 kilograms … people can see through [it] … All these statements are, potentially, statements of fact in the 20th-century mode.

… But if I am trying to put the door in the wall, there is also a second kind of statement … when the door is in a certain range of positions, the result is more harmonious than other positions … a pale yellow on this door has more life than a dark gray … They are thought of as statements of opinion. As a matter of principle within the 20th-century mechanistic view, statements of this kind may to be considered potentially true or false.

… As architects, builders, and artists, we are called upon constantly … to make judgements about relative harmony. If the only statements considered potentially true or false mechanistic statements of fact … then, in principle, rational discussion about building should be impossible.

… The devastating impact of this state of affairs on the progress of architecture has not, I think, been sufficiently discussed in recent decades … If we accept the 20th century idea that statements of value are … merely statements of opinion, it is in principle impossible to reach any sensible shared conclusion in the process of making the environment – only arbitrary and private conclusions. The chaos with which are familiar in the built world, must then follow as an inevitable conclusion – as indeed it has.

… Consciously or unconsciously, the architect assumes that only ‘factual’ statements (in the mechanistic sense) can be true, and therefore has it as a further (unconscious) assumption that the idea of what is good is something that you add to the factual statements – something that is … only a matter of opinion.

… Architects make different idiosyncratic choices because within the mechanistic world view it is not possible to function mentally without making some private choices of this kind.

… It … makes cooperative work, collaboration, and social agreement very difficult in principle. It has a superficial permissiveness which seems to encourage different opinions. But what is encouraged, really, is only the essential arbitrariness of ideas rooted in a mechanical view of how the world is made.

What we need is a sharable point of view, in which the many factors influencing the environment can coexist coherently, so that we can work together – not by confrontation and argument – but because we share a single holistic view of the unitary goal of life.”

 

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life

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Graduality and Edges in Practice

Published: December 25, 2017
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Breathing Formula

A prerequisite for following the example in this post is an understanding of an expression such as:

4x 8-0-12-0

It is a formula for breathing, where the breath is made up of four parts: an inhale, a pause, an exhale and a pause. This particular formula indicates 4 breaths each of 8 second inhale, no pause, 12 second exhale, no pause.

Approaching An Edge

In my practice I am exploring going from one breath ratio to another in a particular asana. It is a journey and its map may look something like this:

If I try (I did) to simply jump to my destination I encounter an edge. A tension appears in my breath, If I want to overcome the tension I need to use force which generates more tension and my breath breaks. I am unable to go directly to my destination. The map now looks something like this:

My breath gives me access to part of the range, but not to all of it. So I look for a step that I can do. I start by increasing the number of breaths from 2 to 4:

When I am settled in this new capacity I can then break up those 4 breaths into 2 sets of 2 and add a short 2 second pause after the exhale in the 2nd set of breaths.

I can then introduce an additional pause after the inhale.

I can then bring all 4 breaths into my new capacity, which now includes pauses both after the inhale and exhale:

I can then again split the 4 breaths up into 2 pairs and extend the breath by extending the pauses … again starting from the pause after the exhale:

… and then extending also the pause after the inhale

… and the next step … is my destination … gradual steps brought me to what was previously an edge beyond my capacity.

I am never on the edge. I am always approaching an edge that is always moving away from me. In a way, in good practice I am always surrounded by capacities that once seemed beyond me.

… On the Way

There are also unknown gems I encounter on the way:

Skipping forward in the journey also means skipping over these gems of experience. Gradual steps bring me to them. I may not even be aware of these until I encounter them. They hold both realizations ans unasked questions. They hold wisdom that may never crystallize as understanding in my mind, they may resonate somewhere in my body or my heart. They may change for my perspective and inform my path. Like seeds, they may reside in me until the conditions are ripe for them to sprout and grow.

Taking Steps

Some steps take a short time (a few days), some take weeks, months, years … and maybe even lifetimes. It depends very much on the balance and integration of life and practice. If life throws me too often “into the red”, progress in practice may take longer. For example, I was already well established in 12-4-12-4 last year, but then life happened … and I am only now catching up with where I already was.

The key conscious indicator I have to making a step is breath itself. When I am well established in a practice there is a feeling of strength and spaciousness in the breath. There is a feeling of cofidence that I the breath is able to carry me another step forward in my exploration. I can push my body, I can push my mind, but if I try to push the breath the breath pushes back and teaches me to stop pushing.

One Posture

Things are actually much more colorful in reality where my real exploration was more like this:

In the journey I described above I chose, for the sake of simplicity, to focus on the last two breathes in the sequence. This means that in reality there is room for even more variation and gradually … there is more range of exploration … there can be different paths to explore on the way to my destination.

And there are other dimensions. Consider that in this example I’ve focused just on breath. There are dimensions of physical form (the posture itself), in attention (where focus is placed) and in recent months I’ve been learning about introducing sound. Each of these dimensions have their own gradual path of development and they are in constant interplay with each other.

What more, if I zoom out even more, this so called “destination” is just another step on a much longer exploration.

My destination is really 12 breaths of 12 second inhale, 12 second hold, 12 second exhale and a 12 second hold. That comes to a 48 second breath, repeated 12 times, that comes to an almost 10 minute stay … which is on one side of the posture which is asymmetrical which is therefore repeated on both sides … which comes to an almost 20 minute stay in one posture. That can be quite a space for exploration!

When years ago, I was first introduced to this “destination” the map I saw looked like the map above … it seemed impossible, out of my reach. Today, after years of gradual development I see a different map:

Perception itself changes during this exploration. What once seemed impossible now seems approachable.

A Practice Sequence

But even that is not the whole picture. This entire demonstration has addressed breath in one posture. But I never do a posture. My practice is a caringly assembled sequence of postures. Each posture has numerous dimensions of exploration. The sequence itself is intended as a gradual process of refinement, one posture preparing for the next … each opening doors to different potentials … gradually moving from gross to subtle.

A practice sequence can look something like this:

In a practice there are many opportunities to meet edges. Each edge can be met gradually or as a confrontation that generates tension. A practice can become a generator of tensions. Or it can be refined:

… and further refined:

The potentially wild energies of edges can be harnessed into a directed and limitless exploration.

If there is a downside to this approach it is a lack of superficial satisfactions. It can seem unexciting, even boring. There are no heroic achievements, no exhilarating drama. It requires long term, patient engagement.

Life

… and life is a sequence of practices … and endless stream of edges, often out of our control. Practice is a good space to explore edges. It gives me an opportunity to become familiar with edges, to establish habits that can serve me when life’s edges crash into me.

This post began to resonate in me a couple of months go when Eric posed a question (I’m paraphrasing): how can we design something we cannot even comprehend yet? This post is a first piece of my reflection on this question. It hints at a direction I am exploring: a living process (of unfolding wholeness) that does not require comprehension.

 

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Christopher Alexander – A World Picture

Published: December 24, 2017
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“I believe that we have in us a residue of a world-picture which is essentially mechanical in nature – what we might call the mechanist-rationalist world picture … Like an infection is has entered us, it affects our actions, it affects our morals, it affects our sense of beauty.

… This is a picture of a world made of atoms which whirl around in a mechanical fashion: a world in which it is assumed that all the universe is a blind mechanism, whirling on its way, under the impact of the ‘laws of nature.’ These laws are, essentially, those mechanistic laws which explain how the atoms and the structures made of these atoms proceed on their way … Even tough we would admit that the precise laws and mechanisms may not be known, we assume that underlying our ignorance there are some laws, not quite formulated, which do account for how things work …

I have reached the conclusion that the strange fantasies, the private in-house language about architecture, the strange nature of 20th-century gallery art, deconstructionism, postmodernism, modernism and a host of other ‘isms’, all of which affect our physical world hugely, are created because of an entanglement between the nature of architecture, the practice of architecture, and the mechanical conception of the universe.

… More precisely, I believe that the mistake and confusion in our picture of the the art of building has come from our conception of what matter is.

The present conception of matter, and the opposing one which I shall try to put in its place, may both be summarized by the nature of order. Our idea of matter is essentially governed by our idea of order … So it is the nature of order which lies at the root of the problem of architecture …

When we understand what order is,  I believe we shall better understand what matter is and then what the universe itself is.”

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life

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Christopher Alexander – Human Feelings

Published: December 24, 2017
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“Of course there is that part of human feeling where we are all different. Each of us has our idiosyncrasies, our unique individual human character. That is the part people most often concentrate on when they are talking about feelings, and comparing feelings. But that idiosyncratic part is really only about ten percent of the feelings which we feel. Ninety percent of our feelings is stuff in which we are all the same and we feel the same things. So, from the very beginning, when we made the pattern language, we concentrated on that … part of human experience …”

Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life

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So Much dis-Love: sports, police, sex, marriage

Published: December 23, 2017
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I saw this first video a couple of days ago … my initial thought was: my god how much resources we invest, as a society, into institutionalized, competitive anger and hatred (ie. “the business of sports”). The second video painted in a startling correlation (that I am insinuating!) … a continuum of expressions indicating an absence of love … so many broken hearts? I am holding this as a reminder to myself that whatever future we create and inhabit, we are going there together.

personally … I think marriage itself is one of the root causes for all this confusion.

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Gregory Bateson – An Ecology of Mind

Published: December 8, 2017
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It seems that Gregory Bateson was walking his path at around the same time Christopher Alexander was walking his … I wonder if they and others like them got together.

thank you to Luis for seeding this in the Holochain chatroom.

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Women of Iceland

Published: November 24, 2017
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Overbalanced Wheel – Perpetual Motion

Published: November 21, 2017
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I’d never heard of an overbalanced wheel … but there it is 🙂

 

 

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A Seed of Meditation in Distraction?

Published: November 13, 2017
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I was nearing the end of a practice, sitting. I experience subtle flavors of sitting, but for me they are like dreams, hard to hold on to later.

One of the prominent indicators is a feeling of being welcome in sitting. This time was like that.

Another prominent indicator is an apparent interest to stay in my body. It can be placed on the physicality of the posture, my butt cheecks on the blocks or my spine or lengthened neck. It an be on my breath. It can be on the nuclear-reactor-like-rumbling sound I hear inside.

But almost always there is fluctuation. My mind will wander off somewhere to something bothersome (that I can later try to close off and get off my mind) or something engaging (something I’ve been thinking about recently). Sometimes I am mostly aware of the fluctuation itself … the movement back and forth between body-presence and mind-wandering. Sometimes, I get to taste a flavor a stable presence in body. Sometimes I get “lost” in the distraction.

This “lost in distraction” happened a few weeks ago … but it took on an interesting flavor. I was so immersed in wherever it is my mind had gone, that when I landed back in my body I was surprised. It is only when I got back that I realized I was away. THAT interested me.

I feel in me a(n unfounded) assumption that a stability of mind should appear in the practice itself – that stability should manifest in the bhavana (focal point) of my sitting. But what I expereinced in this particular practice is stability in (what I was framing as) the “distraction”. Can it be that the seed of meditation (a,stable and continuous directed mind) appears first in distraction?

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Jim Carey DeepRest

Published: November 12, 2017
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yes … that

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… and it hurts

Published: November 8, 2017
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Just discovered that Katie Teague, who created Money & Life, has been producing short films to heal our “Sacred Deficit Disorder”:

I Love Therefore I Am from Katie Teague on Vimeo.

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A Living Sharpness

Published: October 29, 2017
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I’ve been experiencing an interesting convergence in my practice in recent weeks:

  1. As distractions dwindle, I feel more collected and focused.
  2. The short visit, at the end of practice, in maha-mudra is becoming more of a stay.
  3. I am settled again in a quality pranayama practice.
  4. I am experiencing more stability in my mind and so am able to sit peacefully.
  5. I’ve started to learn chanting and have added voice and chanting exercises at the end of my practice.

Arriving at maha-mudra used to indicate that the practice is nearing its end. Now it marks the beginning of an increasingly subtle part of practice. What used to feel like the core of practice is feeling more and more like a preparation and gradual movement into the “core at the end” of practice.

After almost 20 years of practice I am amazed that I can still experience such an expansion. Though it does also raise a question of why does it take so long? The answer … Life!

When I moved to Bhudeva I started using wood cutting tools like chisels and power saws in the workshop and especially a chainsaw for firewood. I had a REALLY naive assumption that the saws would keep cutting forever. I was wrong. All cutting tools need to be sharpened (or replaced) more or less regularly (depending on how much you use them). With every cut, blades get duller, with every sharpening, sharper. It is a continuous cycle. I missed this for most of my life when all I had to content with were kitchen knives. It struck my awareness bluntly with the chainsaw.

Practice is like that too. I feel that every practice session is an act of sharpening / tuning. In daily life I apply my edge and it gets dulled (sometimes less, sometimes more … life!). My overall well being is a sum-result of these motions. If I over-use myself or if I don’t tend to myself enough I get dull (and sometimes ill). If I tend to myself as much as I apply myself I end up with a steady state.

Things take on a different flavor when I can get past that steady state … when the edge isn’t just maintained but gets sharper and sharper. I had that experience coming out of last winter. Then life peaked … and now, again, I am beginning to sense that different flavor. The addition of chanting introduces another dimension of practice which extends and deepens the overall subtlety and depth of practice. As winter sets on, days get shorter and there is less work to do outside, I move inwards (into the house and into myself).

I can only imagine that if one lives in a monastery where distractions are kept to a minimum and life itself comes into service of practice, that this exploration can be somehow accelerated. Yet I also feel that this exploration gains a quality or depth, that it is somehow tempered differently when it is immersed in life itself. I imagine it to be like the difference between a fine sword that is displayed in ritual and kept in pristine conditions at all other times, compared to a sword that has seen battle and has been worn down but sharpened over and over again … a living sharpness.

 

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Be Just and Good

Published: October 18, 2017
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Al Franken on arete and goodness

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Play and Joy

Published: September 17, 2017
n

She was so funny in the mornings. Watching her trying to hold both the discipline of sitting for food and her joy at meeting again in the morning. She would jump in the air, do almost a full 360 twist and nail her ass to the ground … sitting at attention.

She was the first dog I’d been with from a small two month old puppy. I was amazed by the rate of her growth. It seemed every time she walked past the front door she was bigger. She had no issues, no fucked up history …

Her tail was like a separate being … the engine that drove her happiness … it didn’t swing from side to side … it twisted like a propellor. It seemed to also be where her eating originated … the rotating tail seemed to activate her mouth … and she didn’t eat … she vacuumed food.

She was the first dog I had that actually fetched. Chasing or barking at sheep … NO. Fetching … anything … YES. It seemed she could run back and forth forever … first her funny little duck toy … which lasted sooo long … I was really impressed by it given the treatment it received from her. At first it was the duck for short distances … she couldn’t see far … the grass was stll taller than her. Then the frisbee … longer and longer distances. We could have gone so much further … but not this time around 🙁

She had beautiful golden eyelashes and soft brown eyes.

She was soooo trusting … I could dig with a shovel inches from her sleeping head. No fear … loads of innocent curiosity.

The day before yesterday she seemed a bit weak, and slow … definitely not the enthused-with-life being she usually projected. Her gums where pale. We let her rest. Yesterday morning she was walking very slowly … sadness was creeping in. Iulia and I took her to the vet (local village vets offer only very basic services). She was given basic treatment of antiobiotics and fluids. The symptoms were of  Parvo Virus (even though she was vaccinated), but it could also have been poisning (intentional or incidental). She continued to dehydrate during the day. She was deteriorating.

We have  a hole in the ground behind our outdoor kitchen where sink water flows to. Yesterday afternoon, before going into practice, I found her lying in it. When she saw me she could barely move but her tail still wagged at me … for me … in pain … dying … the source of happiness to see me lived on … that was the last time she wagged her tail. I carried her out and placed her in a shaded spot.

When I came out of practice she was in it again. I felt her surrendering to dying. I didn’t want to leave her in that hole. I carried her out again … put her down on some grass and covered her with a sheet … I sat in the hammock next to her. I remembered she so enjoyed being in it with Iulia … so I carried her, packed in the sheet in with me … and we swung gently for a short while.

I then felt that I was interrupting her surrender. So I lay her back down on the ground … and stayed near but not in contact. Iulia (who was gently holding another delicate loss) joined us and we sat together. A bit later Iulia decided to put in a last effort. She contacted some vets and was given a supportive treatment plan. She went to the village to collect what she needed. While she was away Sia’s breathing got heavier … it sounded like there was liquid in her lungs.

Iulia got a first injection of liquids into her. It was too late. Within a few minutes Sia’s eyes faded … and a few minutes after that she took her last breaths.

pffhhh

….

…

…

Sia departed last night. She lived a full, free, joyful life for 5 months and a week.

For me she was a reminder of pure play and joy … the world was a game to her … everything in good spirit.

When she died I felt I didn’t want to bury her. We chose to cremate her body. After a few of hours of soft departure … lying in her sheet with a candle burning … we lit a long purifying fire that burned into the night and released her form into the heavens … and we were left with her essence of play and joy.

The Hebrew word for Dog is “Kelev” … I have heard that it is a combination of two words “Kol” (which means all) and “Lev” (which means heart).

Today her play and joy are aching in my heart …

Today I feel tired of living …

שלום יפה

update: last night was quiet cool, wind-free, clear-skies … serenity incarnate … 14 hours later crazy powerful winds passed through here for 10 minutes … swept the remaining ashes away … then a light cleansing rain to cleanse

update: more on Sia from Iulia

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Ceptr: Well-Being Do-op Proposal

Published: September 15, 2017
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This is a proposal for forming a new do-op focused on well-being.
It is also an experiment and demonstration of an unfolding process of emergence rather than assembly.

Initial Members: Laureli, Jarod, Jean, Ronen
Coherence holder: Ronen

Initiating members of this do-op are already present and active in Ceptr and, in different ways, caring for well-being. The purpose of this do-op is recognize and focus on well-being as a fundamental aspect of the Ceptr project. The current intense state of work (focused on the upcoming crowdfunding/ICO) together with the physical instability (lack of a physical base, much moving around, unclear personal prospects for the core group, etc.) highlight how challenging it can be to reside in well-being.

The challenge of well-being is fundamental in these early days of forming a Ceptr community. How can we come together in a way that expands us as individuals? How can community be built to support and nourish its individuals? How can we avoid well established patterns that lead to communities that achieve growth at the expense of the vitality of individual members?

It may be worth reflecting on the fact that Ceptr has been and continues to be a long-term effort. It fundamentally questions the very ground we all stand on. It brings us face to face with an unknown and for now unknowable future. Given that scope, we may be embarking on a journey that will outlast our lifetimes. Given that scope, most of our work and its tangible (software and hardware) creations are likely more temporary then we care to admit (think of how the Internet has a continuous existence even though all of its original parts, software and hardware, no longer exist). Time shreds importance. Though in the intensity of the present moment we may feel we are creating important and lasting solutions, the reality of it is more likely that we are conducing experiments. What matters most is a long term process of learning and adapting from these experiments. Well-being is key for us to be able to be around long enough for this learning to take place.

A well-being do-op will act as an intentional seeding of well-being within the project. The group itself will seek first to establish well-being for itself and its members. This may manifest in things like its pace (not being bound to ever-dominant schedules), scope (small, soft actions gently embracing sharper, more massive ongoing projects within Ceptr), tools and methods (evoking spacious, peaceful and reflective qualities).

Its presence will, hopefully, demonstrate well-being within the project. From that place, the group, whose members participate in other do-ops, will try to highlight opportunities and offer subtle points of intervention for introducing well-being in the specific and varying context of other do-ops.

It is our wish that well-being become a fundamental quality and skill within Ceptr. That well-being will become a starting point. That well-being, through tangible experience, will be appreciated and valued as a productive approach (and not as a decoration that we tend to after the “important” work is done and when we are exhausted).

When the do-op is formed, it will start to create a soft, background presence within Ceptr. The team will discover itself and what coming together in the spirit of well-being can be. Initially, it will not be involved formally with any ongoing activities. Informally, its members are already present as keepers of well-being and will continue to do so with renewed focus and grounding.

 

 

 

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Paul Krafel: Spiral

Published: September 8, 2017
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“I can observe how a crack grows by studying cracks within a rock outcrop from thinnest to widest. Like a foot in the door, wind-blown dust drops into these cracks and prevents them from closing. A dusty crack retains more moisture than a bare crack, so when the moisture freezes in winter, the dusty crack will be pried a bit more by ice crystals … dust particles drop deeper into the crack, making space for more wind-blown dust. More dust holds more moisture, which wedges the rock still farther apart, which allows more dust to settle in. Bold plants colonize this dust and send their root hairs prying into the microscopic forerunners of cracks.

This process involves a back and forth spiraling between cause and effect … Does the accumulated dust cause the crack or does the crack cause the accumulated dust? Both, in a spiral of tiny changes.

… Just as an edge dissolves into a gradient when I focus on it so cause and effect dissolve into a spiral when I study them … When I think of change in terms of a simple cause with an effect, I tend to think that large effects require large causes. But when I see cause and effect as a spiral, I understand that large effects can be produced by a very small spiral looping over and over again. Spirals lead me to look smaller. As I open my mind to the significance of smaller changes. I find more and more spirals … The World is full of spirals containing unknown power.”

Paul Krafel – Seeing Nature

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