The Transformation of Chris Corrigan
Micheal Herman and Penny Scott have nothing better to do than play around with Photoshop.
Will someone kindly hire them?
Over the past few months, several people have been exploring the applications of Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language to endeavours other than architecture.
Peter Lindberg has been concerning himself with the application of patterns to software development. The folks at BlueOxen have been looking at Patterns of community building and collaboration, Mike Lee blogged patterns of introducing change into organizations last summer, and Michael Herman and I took a shot at defining some patterns of Open Space Technology
based on The Nature of Order. We’re not done yet.
(I have to say that pattern languages have not helped the patternlanguage.com people design very good websites)
Perhaps it is time to propose a set of patterns for blogging about patterns?
At any rate, I use this entry more as a bookmark, to gather these conversations into one place for the time being. I’ll shortly add a page on the Parking Lot wiki to extend the collection. In the meantime, what do these pattern conversations mean to you? Are there other places you have seen people talking about patterns?
From the Winter 2001 issue of Barrow Street:
Balance
by Jane Hirshfield
by Jane Hirshfield
Balance is noticed most when almost failed of-
in an elephant’s delicate wavering
on her circus stool, for instance,
or that moment
when a ladder starts to tip but steadies back.
There are, too, its mysterious departures.
Hours after the dishes are washed and stacked,
a metal bowl clangs to the floor,
the weight of drying water all that altered;
a painting vertical for years
one morning-why?- requires a restoring tap.
You have felt it disappearing
from your own capricious heart-
a restlessness enters, the smallest leaning begins.
Already then inevitable,
the full collision,
the life you will describe afterwards always as “after.”
There is something to this, this noticing of balance when you don’t have it anymore, like the old blues song “You don’t miss your water ’til your well runs dry.” If we want to achieve and sustain balance in our lives, communities and organizations then, I think it’s not a bad idea to engage in the practice of noticing it when you have it, rather than trying to identify it when it is about to collapse. At that point (a tipping point?), as the elephant is falling off the stool, or the dish is crashing to the floor, you are reacting to losing something you were only slightly aware that you had. The crises mode is exactly NOT the state you want to be in to contemplate balance again.
This kind of proactive mode of inquiry can extend to many other areas of life too. Peace? Do we have peace right now? What does it look like? Success? Stability? Happiness? Noting these thing now means that when they start to slip, you can remember what they were so that as you cruise and surf on the changes, you have an idea of where you might want to go.
Thanks to riley dog for the link.
Genevieve Bergeron
Nathalie Croteau
Anne-Marie Edward
Maryse Laganiere
Anne-Marie Lemay
Michele Richard
Annie Turcotte
Helene Colgan
Barbara Daigneault
Maud Haviernick
Maryse LeClair
Sonia Pelletier
Annie St-Arneault
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz
The New York Morning News correspondant Rosecrans Baldwin chooses his own assignment: walk the length of Manhattan.
He starts out at 5am and in the course of walking the 13.5 miles of the island’s length he seizes upon a moment where even in a huge metropolis, the city can belong to the citizen:
Sometime in the early morning, just before Central Park, I called my wife because I was simply too happy to contain myself. I had to tell her something, but I couldn�t put it into words. Perhaps I had never been so alive. New York can be like that � once in a while the city slows down and becomes ours, we look up, we see ourselves as a part of something very fine and rare, green and black, slowly growing. Not I am, but there it is. That New York exists is a miracle, and for its citizens, the city offers as good a shot at transcendence as any forest or cathedral. The awareness of being part of something more sublime � this crumbling, singing city, and all our lives crumbling and singing too � somehow walking the island�s body before people are on the streets makes the chance to have that feeling much greater. It�s a fleeting moment, only two seconds long, but it�s there.
Thanks to portage for the link