If we hope that Western humanity in particular can move beyond an exploitative attitude toward nature and the human body, if we hope for the emergence of people who are genuinely "personal/planetary," we must encourage our children to be Earthlings, i.e., embodied beings, not paranoid Cartesian minds lodged in bodies that are devoid of spirit. -Micahel Zimmerman, "Learning to be Embodied: A Recommendation for College Curriculum Transformation," The Trumpeter
In winter he has to set out for school while it is still dark. With his lamp casting a halo before him, he rides through the mist, breasting its velvety softness, breathing it in, breathing it out. Some mornings the metal of the handlebars is so cold that his bare hands stick to it. -JM Coetsee, Boyhood, 1997
The recuperation of the incarnate, sensorial dimension of experience brings with it a recuperation of the living landscape in which we are corporeally embedded. As we return to our senses, we gradually discover our sensory perceptions to be simply our part of a vast, interpenetrating webwork of perceptions and sensations borne by countless other bodies-supported, that is, not just by ourselves, but by icy streams tumbling down granitic slopes, by owl wings and lichens, and by the unseen, imperturbable wind. -David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 199
I know that pretty fields are very much part of my annual profits. -David Masumoto LOST
I had my face to the ground the other night, inhaling, trying to find words for what I was taking in. Then it occurred to me that this image - my nose in the grass, knees and hands on the ground, butt in the air - is the image that captures best what I've been up to in this first packet. I've been attending to my senses, really trying to use my body to inspire writing and access memory. I have placed my face, and often my whole body, against lake, shale, trees, mountain, stone, grass, bark, flower, catalyzing memory of place, investigating the margins where senses encounter the physical world. -student Anne Bergeron |
"Obedience to feelings, which is obedience to the body and all that implies of obedience to weather, season, stars, etc."
Placed Bodies
This page groups embodied approaches to ecology, architecture, building and landscape construction, travel, anthropology and sense of place.
- More kinds of questions about place:
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- - What place is in the womb
- - Perceiving and place
- - Nonverbal contact with place
- - Nonconscious contact with place
- - How to talk about place and self non-dichotomously
- - What place is in the womb
Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni walked across the field, the dust on his shoes, the dried mealie stalks cracking under his feet. The earth was generous, he thought: sand and soil could be persuaded, with a little water, to yield such life, and to make such good things for the table. Everything depended on that simple generosity: trees, cattle, pumpkin vines, people everything. And this soil, the soil on which he walked, was special soil. It was Botswana. It was his soil. It had made the very bodies of his people, of his father, Mr. P.A. Matekoni, and his grandfather, Mr. T. Matekoni, before him. All of them, down the generations, were linked by this bond with this particular part of Africa, which they loved, and cherished, and which gave them so much in return.
- Alexander McCall Smith, The Kalehari typing school for men 2002, 123-4
I define deep adaptation as the type of spatial adaptation which occurs between neighboring elements and systems, and which ultimately causes the harmonious appearance and geometrical cohesion we find in all living matter. Deep adaptation is the process whereby the landscape, or a system, or a plant, or a town, proceeds by a series of spatially organized adaptations in which each part is gradually fitted to the parts near it: and is simultaneously fitted by the whole, to its position and performance in the whole. This concept, greatly needing elaboration, is possibly the most fruitful point of contact between the theory of complex systems, and the problem of architecture.
Interestingly, neither biology, nor ecology, nor architecture, nor city planning, so far have a profound or illuminating model of process which creates suitably complex, beautiful, and sophisticated well-adapted structure in this kind of adaptation: mutual adaptation among the parts within a system.
- Christopher Alexander
If the house, the garden, the street, cities, landscapes, works of art, were to become normal objects of our interest, and that the creation of such things, instead of being split off as 'art'' were to be given the deep affection, passion which it deserves - if, in short, the questions of science would move from analysis and hypothesis making, to a larger view, in which making were also to be included - would we not then have a more beautiful science, one which really deals with the world, one which not only helps us understand, but which also begins to encompass the wisdom of the artist, and begins to take its responsibility in healing the world which unintentionally it has so far created, and which it has, sadly, unintentionally, so far helped to destroy. But, of course, this could not be the dry-stick view of mechanizable questions such as traffic flow, or strength of materials. They would have to embrace the real questions, the hardest questions, of the relationship between human joy and health, and the geometrical organization of the planet, as a source of life, at every scale.
- Christopher Alexander
From the fisherman's wife with whom I lodged I learned that her daughter had recently bourne a son, but was now up and about again, though for the first time, that morning. We went to her, about noon. She was not in the house. A small cabbage-garden lay behind, and beyond it the mossy edge of a wood of rowans and birches broke steeply in bracken and lonroid. The girl was there, and had taken the child from her breast and, kneeling, was touching the earth with the small lint-white head.
I asked her what she was doing. She said it was the right thing to do; that as soon as possible after a child was born, the mother should take it - and best at noon, and facing the sun - and touch its brow to the earth. My friends (like many islanders of the Inner Hebrides, they had no Gaelic) used an unfamiliar phrase: It's the Old Mothering."
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I am convinced that the Earth Blessing is more ancient than the westward migration of the Celtic peoples.
I have both read and heard of another custom, though I have not known of it at first-hand. The last time I was told of it was of a crofter and his wife in North Uist. The once general custom remembered in a familiar Gaelic saying, the English of which is 'He got a turn through the smoke.' After baptism, a child was taken from the breast by its mother, and handed (sometimes the child was placed in a basket) to the father, across the fire.
I think it is an ancient propitiatory rite, akin to that which made our ancestors touch the new-born to earth; as that which makes some islanders still baptise a child with a little spray from the running wave, or a fingerful of water from the tide at the flow; as that which made an old woman lift me as a little child and hold me up to the south wind "to make me strong and fair and always young, and to keep back death and sorrow, and to keep me safe from other winds and evil spirits."
- from: "By Sundown Shores - Studies in Spiritual History" by Fiona MacLeod, pp. 90-94
Too much of Christian religion is rooted in the idea that the world is awful, and that what we all want is to escape it and get to another place which we call heaven.
But there is also a tradition in the church that heaven is here-it's within us and it's present to our senses. I felt this as a child, standing in the light, or watching the wind flare the leaves of Lombardy poplars, or hearing the wind drive through the branches of eucalyptus trees. I had this wordless sense that I was in the presence of the divine. But as I grew older I never heard these things mentioned in the Church of which I was a part.
It wasn't until I began traveling with Native American people and with Eskimos that I realized many other peoples and cultures had lived for millennia with this same awareness that I had experienced as a child. The fact that you could sense the divine in the real world around you was no mystery at all to them; it was part of everyday life.
- Barry Lopez, interview with Diane Osen in The book that changed my life, 87
If the house, the garden, the street, cities, landscapes, works of art, were to become normal objects of our interest, and that the creation of such things, instead of being split off as 'art'' were to be given the deep affection, passion which it deserves - if, in short, the questions of science would move from analysis and hypothesis making, to a larger view, in which making were also to be included - would we not then have a more beautiful science, one which really deals with the world, one which not only helps us understand, but which also begins to encompass the wisdom of the artist, and begins to take its responsibility in healing the world which unintentionally it has so far created, and which it has, sadly, unintentionally, so far helped to destroy. But, of course, this could not be the dry-stick view of mechanizable questions such as traffic flow, or strength of materials. They would have to embrace the real questions, the hardest questions, of the relationship between human joy and health, and the geometrical organization of the planet, as a source of life, at every scale.
- Christopher Alexander
I began to realize a further layer of the unthinkable things which had begun to appear, gradually, in the evolution of my empiricist and scientific thought:
First, that the core of the issue, the core of the architectural issue, was the extent to which people's inner feelings and desires their reality - could interact with buildings. This topic ignored, and rendered almost horrible in the disdain and supercilious know it all of contemporary architects, was vital and quite horrible. The simple proposition that all this has to do with the extent that people feel rooted in the world, was paramount.
Second, that a well place, a healing environment, a house, or a room, or a village, or a major urban street, are valuable, only to the extent that this environment is made of living centers which resemble, and remind us of the person's own self. Thus in a healthy structure, we have a structure (in a city street, say, or in a window sill) which is like the hundred million buddhas or angels, all crowding into space. This is not used as a metaphor, but as a nearly literal description of the condition in space when the density and packing of living centers in a structure is profound. This was startling, and a revelation.
As I began to contemplate the coincidence of the living center, its objective geometric structure, and the presence of a resemblance to the human soul, or of the "I' shared by all human beings, began to suggest a connection between all of us: a substratum or plenum, in which people are united in their similarity (80% of the structure), and in which their belonging to the world, the nearly unattainable goal, depends on the degree to which people are able to create stuff which does resemble them, and which does contain or reflect the I.
This rule is then to be applied when a window is placed in a wall; it is applied when a building is placed on a street; it is applied when a neighborhood is constructed or reconstructed in a city. In every case, what is paramount is the healing of the whole, the living wholeness of the earth, in that quarter, and the love and dedication which sustains it and preserves it and extends it.
This is entirely totally different from the present conception in which each thing done lives largely for itself: in which development, stylishness, and profit, are the guiding motives.
- Christopher Alexander
notes from Laura Sewall's Sight and Sensibility
The ecological crisis ... a crisis in perception; we are not truly seeing, hearing, tasting, or consequently feeling where we are... In fundamental terms, our evolutionary challenge is a matter of perceptual development
capacity to sustain observation
... a matter of grace. Are we able to open with ease when the occasion arises? Are we able to fine-tune the quality of our presence, shifting the form and degree of our receptivity? ((( 246-7)
... here's the skill: In the face of the clearly not so beautiful, we do not look away or unconsciously close in a spasm of denial. Skillfully, we witness ...
... the Other is an opportunity for relationship... distinctions and differences that show us what is possible for a life. Most fundamentally, difference is a manifestation of potential ...
The acknowledgment and experience of fear is the door that opens us to heightened presence and perception through which we learn to live in the world as it is. (119-120)