#Lifecraft financial group series

#Lifecraft financial group series

This is the third in a series taking a thoughtful tour through a house, room by room, based on the writings of Christopher Alexander. The first group of videos will clarify concepts of household and home. ** Special Announcement: COMING NEXT WEEK for LifeCraft Members (see below), a new library of short videos.

And they offer us extraordinary fruits, every day. These activities are or should be вЂordinary,вЂ™ but they now call for extraordinary attention. We can craft this space so that it will reflect our priorities, precisely by its evoking and facilitating certain human activities. At the same time, our space must answer to something we can achieve today. We need to learn from traditional patterns of life in the home-considering for instance the perennial importance of physical substances, such as wood, stone, metal, and fire, and how these intersect with food and its preparation and consumption, as well as with other home-arts and home-leisure. It will be something answering to the name of вЂhearth.вЂ™ And we can start by choosing one space to be the heart of the home, and invest it with our heart. We can, however, reimagine, reconfigure, and reanimate them with a new vision. Perhaps we cannot change certain features of our living spaces. Here is the primordial context to enact wisdom, to craft human life. But how we design and inhabit our houses, the homes of our embodied life, is in our control. The human house should be likewise so fitted. The human body itself is fitted to be the place, as it were, of human life in all its richness. Human life, as all life, requires and responds to a congenial context. To do this is to take a great step toward addressing the crisis of our day. Perhaps with a little help from others, we can craft a space that itself crafts life. This can be the stuff of our reflection and intentionality. Imagine! Chairs that gather life around them, concentrating and liberating human energy, human life. Others seem somehow to gather life around them, to concentrate and liberate energy.вЂќ Most seating arrangements are sterile, people avoid them, nothing ever happens there. вЂњMake the kitchen bigger than usual, big enough to include the вЂfamily roomвЂ™ spaceвЂ¦ Make it large enough to hold a good big table and chairs, some soft and some hardвЂ¦ and make it a bright and comfortable room.вЂќДЄnd then there is this gem: вЂњA group of chairsвЂ¦these are the most obvious things in everybodyвЂ™s life-and yet to make them work, so people become animated and alive in them, is a very subtle business. Such is in our power.Д¬onsider some concrete suggestions of A Pattern Language: It begins with a vision and a will: a vision of rich, shared life, and a will to do all we can to actualize it. We can rediscover and remake such a space.

Because of what was done there-work, eating, and leisure, it was the beating heart of a vibrant household body. Traditionally, the hearth was just such a space. It is open and welcoming, yet intimate, so not exposed and public.

It is comfortably furnished, but not posh-as such would distract. It is a space for real leisure-in the sense of meaningful, rich, shareable actions. It is a space for good work-the kind of work that can be done together, or at least in the presence of others, especially by hand. Such a space can have varied forms, but it must have certain characteristics. I mean a space of human proportion-fitted to the number of people that live in our home and those вЂguestsвЂ™ that are nearly-household-members a space that by its physical constitution fosters something we so crave and need: sustained shared life and real presence. And so, we have no place that daily draws us together, whether by necessity or by choice, where we live in mutual presence where we can be together as only human persons can, in body and soul, in mundane but natural activities. Or perhaps I should say of individual proportions: i.e., the individual persons we care about most. Though less obvious since we have become used to it, this is a crisis of civilizational proportions. I will focus on one that is squarely, indeed physically, within the four walls of home-yours and mine. Their effects more proximate, they call with urgency for special attention. I am not sure what to do, for instance, about the things stuck in the ports of our nation.Д¬rises closer to home are different. Some crises are more remote in their causes and thus more difficult for the common man to address. This is a time of crisis in multiple aspects of human life. The term вЂcrisisвЂ™ is bandied quite a bit-undoubtedly, often with good reason today. With persistent centrifugal factors eviscerating our home life, we feel discouraged, even overwhelmed. вЂњThe hearth, the place where food was made and eaten, was the heart of family life.вЂќДЄ Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander, et alia вЂњNo social groupвЂ¦can survive without constant informal contact among its members.вЂќ