This particular passage was contributed by Lynn Hoffman, who admires, as I do, the writing and philosophy of Christopher Alexander. ________________
The word which we most often use to talk about the quality without a name is the word "alive."
There is a sense in which the distinction between something alive and something lifeless is much more general, and far more profound, that the distinction between living things and nonliving things, or between life and death. Things which are living may be lifeless; nonliving things may be alive... Beethoven's last quartets are alive; so are the waves at the ocean shore; so is a candle flame...
Christopher Alexander The Timeless Way of Building
Lynn Hoffman
Underground Communications
Now I am aware of another shift. I find that I am using a channel that has to do with sensed feelings and emotions -- not the within-person kind bequeathed to us by individual psychology, but something more like an underground communication system. Being touched or moved, sending signals, receiving images, this is the vocabulary that keeps beckoning to me now.
Lynn Hoffman
Harlene Anderson
Endless Forms Most Beautiful
Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Charles Darwin
At Home
And there is a distinction between finding oneself at home and trying to make oneself at home... To that extent one is not part of the ecology of what-is.
Jan Zwicky
Education and the Alive
Today, we pump a little natural history into children along with a little "art" so that they will forget their animal and ecological nature and the aesthetics of being alive and will grow up to be good businessmen.
Gregory Bateson From: Mind and Nature
Something of the Body
Bearing witness is not through and through and necessarily discursive. It is sometimes silent. It has to engage something of the body, which has no right to speak.
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