We are two weeks into the new year, so any resolutions I might have thought of making have had plenty of time to disappear, but I have been trying to formulate and articulate some goals for myself. At least I am making lists of things to do and things I think are important. The clarity of goal making has always appealed to me, but usually when I try to do it, the words I come up with don't hold the feelings and I slip off the whole enterprise like jelly off a doughnut. Well, hope springs eternal, and sometimes even the inadequate words are helpful, so again I'm making lists. Where am I going with my work? What small steps can be taken daily to get me there? What other things need attention? WHAT DO I WANT?
At this point I always think of the architect Christopher Alexander, who says that the only way to be whole and create a wholesome world is to truly please yourself. In his four volume work The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and The Nature of the Universe he says that there is an underlying luminous ground to the universe from which everything arises including ourselves. By making things that make us happy we access this life force, this I-stuff within and make it visible in the world, where it works to heal both us and our environment and society.
"It is amazing to fully grasp the impact of making something beautiful. Have you experienced the fact that when you make a beautiful thing, you feel happy for days?...And the reverse is true, also. When you make something ugly, you may be depressed for days....I believe what happens is something like this. When you make a beautiful thing, the depth of the person within becomes more vivid, lives more intensely for a moment...The connection between the life of a made thing and the healing effect it has on the maker is, I believe, very succinctly put just as simply as this: People are deeply nourished by the process of creating wholeness...There is a direct connection between the living structure of the world and the achieved person-ness we experience in ourselves... Somehow, a person's own self is mobilized, liberated, made more strong by that person's success in making life in the world."1
"It is not so easy to please yourself. Why? Because pleasing yourself is not just having fun or following your whim. Truly pleasing yourself means, in the deepest sense, giving pleasure to yourself, making yourself truly pleased. This is only another way of reaching the I, substantially reaching the eternal self, reaching what Zen calls No Mind, reaching what the sufis call drunk in God...To have a hope of reaching the I, you must make each thing, shape each thing so that you really like it, so that it pleases you."2
I have been reading and re-reading these books since 2004, trying to follow and integrate what he says...leaving them for months and years and then coming back. I keep coming back because of the feeling they always give me that the veil between me and what matters is thinning. I think their genesis in architecture and design helps. I love his assertion that beauty is essential, and a literal presence in our world, not just a subjective fancy that must fall before every other consideration of cost or convenience. Everyone draws from and participates in the luminous ground of being and making things beautiful helps that ground shine out and heal us all.
I could go on and on about this, but as I attempt to deepen my work and my life I find re-reading Christopher Alexander inspires me to articulate my goals more completely, and so they are more likely to be at least partially accomplished.
1 Alexander, Christopher. The Nature of Order, Book Four, The Luminous Ground. Center for Environmental Structure. Berkeley. 2004. Pages 262-264
2 Ibid. Page 275.