two songs and some words in between … all sincere, beautiful and touching:
two songs and some words in between … all sincere, beautiful and touching:
I am not yet a fan of the product but a long standing fan of the company, how they came into existence, operate and now how they have approached funding:
“Redeemable preference shares … a way of providing a fair return to investors while also protecting our social mission …
Redeemable preference shares are a fairly conventional financing instrument, but aren’t widely used in the startup world. “Redeemable” means that the shares are not traded externally. Instead, the shares are eventually purchased (“redeemed”) by the company with an agreed-on return, after an agreed-on period of time, provided the company is producing sufficient surplus. In our case, setting up the investment mechanism meant creating a new class of impact-investor shares. These shares sit alongside the worker-member shares in the cooperative, which are non-financial governance shares. The interests of the company and the interests of investors line up.
In terms of accountability, we work closely with our investors as trusted advisors. We take their input seriously, and if they ever feel we’re getting off track, with our business or our social impact focus, then we’ll engage in deliberation to come to a shared understanding. But the bottom-line decision-making sits with the cooperative. And our investors are comfortable entering into a collaborative relationship on those terms.
This trust comes from a strong sense of alignment with a shared social mission, and from the shared risk in the development of Loomio. There has been a huge amount of unpaid time on the part of the founders and workers, so they’re carrying risk just like our investors do. Clearly, the founders aren’t aiming to get rich quick and walk away, so it feels much healthier than the strained founder-investor relationships you sometimes see in the conventional startup world.”
I’ve had a fairly continuous period of practice … the main interruption ironically due to my visit to Israel to study Yoga. There have been a few of minor illness / slight injury related interruptions.
I’ve continued with the same practice plan. I have still not felt inclined towards exploring the alternative shoulder-stand path of practice. One reason for this is that I have enjoyed the continuous practice and evolution on the maha-mudra path – developing my breath, physical posture and quality of presence and engagement with the asana. Another reason is the illness interruptions during and after which I did not feel vital enough to approach the alternative path and I preferred to stay with a variation of the core practice as a practice of healing and rejuvenation.
Early in this practice period I decided to soften my attention and relationship with breath. I stopped counting the length of my breath in asana practice. Sometimes when counting I feel that I deny myself access to my full and present ability by adhering to an expected breath length … sometimes not breathing to my full capacity and sometimes slightly pushing beyond what is right for me in the present moment. I feel fairly well tuned to my breath and body, so this is not a gross but a subtle aspect of practice. It is sometimes a fractional difference that resonates deeply. It could be a difference between feeling vibrant or drained, feeling soft or agressive, feeling attentive or absent.
After some time (I estimate something like 2 months) I decided to consciously sample my breathing once again and to see how it developed, and I was surprised by the changes I discovered. Since then I have continued counting and continuously developing my breath throughout my practice. Every asana has had its own gradual path of development, some have been slow to develop, some have been continuously developing, some felt like they suddenly changed.
I have overlayed onto my existing practice plan my current breathing ratios including some slight modifications I’ve made to the practice. Most of the changes are of a langhana nature (which is particularly helpful to me in this period where numerous intellectually demanding projects are moving around in my mind), some have a slightly tonic, more brmhana quality (mainly: parvrti trikonasana, the krama variation of utkatasana and the upper raised leg sequence where I gradually move from 90 to 180 degrees).
I’ve also felt a kind of crystallization of experience during these last few monts of practice in regard to continuity. It is a process that I’ve been aware of for ~2 years but that feels more concrete to me now. I have found that after a disturbance in practice (be it an emotional disturbance, city day away from home or an illness or a strain in my back):
The result of this shift is a change in my overall attitude toward practice. In periods with disturbances (which I have been a regular aspect of my life for the last few years) I used to feel that I was making progress and then regressing. I felt that my disturbances were slowing the overall evolution of my practice. That is changing. I now feel that the disturbances are informing ang guiding me … sometimes even boosting the evolution of my practice beyond its “normal” rate of change. The feeling is of more continuity and less fragmentation.
I am expecting a review of my Pranayama practice with my teacher in the coming weeks. I have completed the previous sequence that I was given:
8.0.12.0 | x6br | anuloma ujjayi |
8.4.12.0 | x6br | anuloma ujjayi |
8.4.12.4 | x6br | anuloma ujjayi |
4.0.8.0 | x6br | anuloma ujjayi |
4.0.4.0 | x4br | ujjayi |
… and I have taken one additional variation on my own … essentially increasing the number of breaths in the core sequences from 6 to 8 for the sake of being able to resume a pratiloma practice .. making my current practice:
8.0.12.0 | x4br | anuloma ujjayi |
8.4.12.0 | x8br | pratiloma ujjayi |
8.4.12.4 | x8br | pratiloma ujjayi |
4.0.8.0 | x8br | pratiloma ujjayi |
4.0.4.0 | x4br | ujjayi |
This is merely an opening for a subject that is covered in more depth in book 4
“I believe that color, like music, holds the key to life as it appears in art; it is, perhaps, the most fundamental way in which things in geometry – that means real physical things in the world – make contact with God. It is the blue of the bell, the deep green of the sea, the yellow of the crocus, the white of the snowdrop, the awesome darkness of the mountains at night, which reveals their wholeness, and lets us reach God.
As a maker of things, I found that it is through color, above all, that one has the chance – however slight – of reaching this domain.
… In the search for color, when you really pay attention and try to find out what produces inner light, step by step, the result is often very surprising.
… Color is a fundamental human experience. It is natural to put color on things, and to make things out of colored material. It is, for many people, the most natural thing …”
Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 3: A Vision of a Living World
“If the field od centers comes to life when it is endlessly differentiated and extended, then that same field of centers – which is after all a pure structure of geometry in space – will find its most living state when all creation, everything in the word, really is ornament.
… I know that I am using the word ornament in an unusual way as I say this. But sometimes, thinking in this way, seeing the field of centers (living structure) as a pure geometric structure, I think of animals, and plants, and human beings, too, as ornaments in this sense: ornaments which have unfolded out of nature, and which might for this reason then truly be seen, as if in the eyes of god, as ornaments”
Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 3: A Vision of a Living World
“Ornament arises naturally, when a person is making something and seeks to embellish this ‘something’. The embellishing is spontaneous. It comes from the continuing unfolding of the whole … it arises as a result of the latent centers in the uncompleted thing requiring still more centers, requiring still more structure in order to be complete. That requirement, when followed faithfully, creates ornament.
This is a natural process, whenever the thing is being made. But if a building is ‘produced’ – not made – in a technically divided situation where making is severed from design, the process of ornamentation cannot occur naturally. There, when an architect tries to draw the ornament … within the technical process, what happens becomes awkward, stilted, too stiff, not fundamental – and also not profound – because it does not arise from the joy of the making process itself. It can not be profound because the maker is not reacting to the whole in its state as an unfinished thing, which may then be complete by the ornament.
… At a certain stage in the making of the building we have produced a field of centers there. But the field still contains rough spots. It is not perfectly resolved. Some parts are not intense enough; the centers are not distributed to produce the most perfect field. At this state, some additional ‘smaller’ structure is necessary.
The so called ‘ornament’ is simply this smaller stuff … Thus it is not something extra or extraneous; it is a continuation of the same process we have followed in creating the field up to this point. It is necessary in order to complete the field.”
Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 3: A Vision of a Living World
“We need new types of materials and techniques which have the following two functionally necessary attributes fo the construction process:
- We need to be able to shape materials rapidly and carefully so that the process of shaping … easily creates living centers …
- … We also need the the process of shaping and forming centers to be adaptable, so that subtleties of dimension can be accommodated easily and can be made cheaply.
While preindustrial society often had a labor-material ratio of 5:95 or 10:90 for building construction (materials being far more expensive than labor), in modern society more than 50% of the cost of building now lies in labor. Labor-material ratios of 50:50, 60:40 and even 70:30 are nowadays common in building construction. Labor is the expensive item. Since we can no longer afford labor-intensive ways of making beautiful details … we need … ways of achieving the two functionally necessary attributes, but by new means which are not labor intensive.
We know from the green movement, and from current thinking about sustainability, that building materials are a matter of major importance in maintaining life on earth. There is, for example, a green index which aims to describe those materials that have long life, least energy drain during production, that use renewable resources ….
Does this mean that using green materials is the secret of life? Absolutely it does not! The assumptions in the “green” analysis are too limited …
For example … In its original form, the use of straw bales for walls has wonderful attributes. It is a renewable resource, it is cheap and easy to cut. It has the wonderful quality that you can lay out a house, then get a feel for the room sizes and opening, then move them around and adjust them until the house is really comfortable. Only then, plaster it. All this is hugely positive. But as implemented in its evolved high-tech version, because of earthquake problems, and for various other structural reasons, another way of using straw bales has evolved; this adds an inserted standard timber frame … and ties the frame together with a beam and braces.
In this new form, now widely used throughout the United States … the high-tech straw-bale technique has lost nearly all the adaptive qualities of the original straw bales themselves. They have now become merely infill panels …
… The essential thing about a living architecture is not the greenness of its materials but the capacity of its materials to form living centers … That requires a different kind of thinking, a determination to focus without wavering on this aspect of their adaptive process …
I would argue, that it will require, primarily, process-based methods – methods which use high technology to give us processes, not components, and processes which can create sophisticated elements and members, fast and cheaply, yet fitting local circumstances and the eye of the person doing the work …
No matter how wonderful a stone wall might once have been, if you cannot afford to build a stone wall now in a house of ordinary price, it is wasteful and foolish to dream too much about stone walls. Stone walls were part of the technology, economic life, and social life of another era, Primitive technologies are unlikely to work for us because, so often, they just don’t work economically.”
Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 3: A Vision of a Living World
I am reading these books with two conscious “agendas”. One is a nourishment for my soul (through which it is touching on many aspects of life). The other is as a practical guide on how to build a future house. It is on this practical aspect that I’ve felt questions and tensions regarding the feasibility of what Alexander writes about in my life (and in the lives of others who are in a situation similar to mine or even less well to-do).
I want to completely embrace Alexander’s centers and fundamental process and so I am constantly asking how to do this in a practical way. I agree with Alexander, that the assumptions of the “green analysis” are indeed limited … and ironically often very mechanistic … however … my exploration of “green” materials has not been ideologically driven. It has been practicality driven. I have an abundant supply of clay-rich soil which can be used to fill earthbags, plaster walls and floors.
I do feel a change, inspired by Alexander in relationship to concrete (which he uses a lot and in very creative ways) … it is still not a material that appeals to me, but it is a material I would consider using now in a relevant context. However, I do NOT have an abundant supply of wood to build forms, metal to create reinforcement, cement to mix concrete or tools to apply it. Making it an impractical material.
Alexander’s position (see excerpt above) on “green” materials is based on the increased proportion and cost of labor in construction. That, in my mind, goes to the heart of the matter. Since this text was written and published there has been a major shift in money and labor. Money has become scarce and jobs are disappearing. This means that many more (often skilled) people now have plenty of free time which can be dedicated to labor-intensive construction of private houses.
That is the position I am in. I cannot find a role in society that will provide me with enough money to build a house in processes that Alexander describes. Even the “low cost” examples he describes feel completely out of touch with me and my life. I can however dig up clay-soils around me and try to use them to build a house.
Granted, this solution does not scale up well. I am not going to become a builder. I would not make this effort for any of my neighbors. And you will not see large scale building being built this way. But that is the exactly the point. I have drifted away from the world of large scale buildings, in a way rejected by it. They are becoming a less significant part of my life, as are the people that inhabit them.
Most people, in the world I know, live in lifeless architecture in cities. They are not content, but they are complicit, doing the best they can within what they have. They are not reading Alexander and wondering about how to create living structures. I am, and increasingly more people like me are. This raises many questions on how Alexander’s precious and inspiring work can be contextualized and applied where it is, for now, welcomed.
I am starting to feel a build up of “missing” excerpts … from the first phase of my reading Alexander (before I started excerpting) and from some things which didn’t feel “excerptable” … in this case roughness.
“… to get the perfect adaptation which is required by the unfolding of a field of centers, you cannot avoid a certain roughness in the results. That is because, to make each center come to life, there needs to be give and take that permits the needed complex superposition of relationships… It is not possible to get perfection in the field of centers – true life – and also have the shallow mechanical perfection which 20th century people often seemed to demand of buildings.
In present day construction, especially in America, people in general – and contractors too – have become accustomed to buildings with an almost fanatical level of finish. For example, the tiles of a wall must be flat, square, co-planar, and equally spaced – all to within a few hundredths of an inch. They conform to a mechanical ideal of perfection. Why? Not for any practical reason.
Indeed, the attention needed to achieve this mechanical perfection drives out the possibility of paying attention to real perfection or real adaptation in the centers …
I believe this kind of things happened in the 20th century largely because the real meaning of order and beauty had been lost – and craftsmen therefore maintained their pride of workmanship by appealing to a meaningless perfection of detail.
… True spirituality in a building is achieved when there is a balance of perfection and roughness. It is the phenomenon which the Japanese call wabi-to-sabi: rusty beauty.
… What this amounts to is that we must always allow the essential thing to lead the inessential. We concentrate on the essential and let the inessential trail behind.
… The spirit is essential. It is in the nature of spirit to make a beautiful and special thing where a beautiful and special thing is required, and to offset it with a simple inexpensive thing. That is the most humble way to make it, and the beauty then shines out because of it.
… The field of centers cannot be created as a by-product of some existing process. It will come about only when the entire process of making is organized and concentrated on just this one thing: to create a living field. If you concentrate on something else, you get something else. “
Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 3: A Vision of a Living World
“… the operations of making and construction are distinguished by the way they handle the wholes and centers which are being formed …
The essence of a succesful construction process … is that the team working on a given part of a building have the satisfaction of working on a psychological whole and making it complete. When they are finished with a particular phase of work, they have created a visible, palpable whole.
I do not mean by this that the have necessarily reached a completely finished part of a building … what I mean is that at each important step, some new whole has been sufficiently delineated, and sufficiently filled in, so that one feels the new whole and grasps the way in which it contributes to the wholeness of the larger building … That is where the team’s satisfaction and the craftsmen’s satisfaction comes from. They feel satisfaction because they have completed a whole. And they have been able to achieve this because their job description, or craft, gives them the leeway to have impact on the details of what they are doing …
To accomplish this kind of thing, I have had to hire people who understood several disciplines … Often I had to hire teams of people who – from the outside world – looked almost inexperienced, because their ability to integrate these many trades in one holistic operation was more significant to me than their degree of skill in any one operation.”
Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 3: A Vision of a Living World
“Just as one can hardly make a vibrant painting unless the paint and paintbrush are in one’s own hands, so I cannot imagine how to make a concrete component in a building unless the substance of the concrete, the mold, the forming, the conception, the sizing and shaping – and the sheer love of doing it – are in one’s own hands. You can draw something for someone else to build. But the life blood of the material, knowing what it means to hold a plane, or how to move a piece of wood through a table saw … unless one has the experience and knowledge of the thing in one’s own fingertips, I do not see that it is possible to transform material into a living center.
… Living centers cannot be created merely by design. For the center (and physical components) of a building to be truly alive, they must be made in a way that draws on deeper emotional resources … we must define a new, modern process that we may call ‘making,’ as opposed to production. What I mean by ‘making’ is the physical process of creating the building, which does not call for it to be assembled by a mechanized process, but unfolded by a living process.
… It is a nearly biological process where construction elements unfold, take shape, fall into place in a fashion that les them grow out of the whole and enhance the whole.
… the whole process of building itself – must – absolutely must – be understood as an act of making.“
Christopher Alexander – The Nature of Order – Book 3: A Vision of a Living World