Cities by their normal standard development are generally disorganized, much like a modern day hospital complex. Things become included, places and spaces are added, portion of towns are torn down, then rebuilt, or built atop the ruins of the last, neighborhoods are forced to divorce by the powers that be. The Paris’s and Savannah’s and Washington DC’s are the few exceptions, maybe New York City where patterns were either overlaid or established from the near beginnings of a city’s origin.
It is likely a city has been developed around a node; say a river, the foot of a mountain, on a mountain, a transportation intersection, a fortress, or other natural or man-made place. What we are left within today’s western American version of the city is a hodgepodge, sometimes chaotic, collection of streets and vehicles and buildings where people are subservient to a machine age of industrial complexes incorporating undesirable results. Suburbs that attach themselves to peripheral parts of the city are often like the large internal intestines of an animal, twisting and turning through a labyrinth of curvy corners and entangled guts.
Golden triangle and the natural order of life
One little zoetic message is not going to make everything right for the built environment. However we can use our brain power and our willpower to design better environs in concert with mother nature and all her glorious examples to emulate.
Indeed history suggests notable ways people have lived in concert with the natural world symbiotically for millennia. Our own backyards in the US of A tell us, Native American cultures historically communed so very well on the plains and virgin forests, until Europeans settlers imposed ideas, commerce, enslavement, sickness, and religious values on the indigenous populations. Not until the colonization of lands in the New World was this Gaia sensitive lifestyle interrupted, then sometimes decimated.
A few years ago I started exploring one of the basic design elements of nature found in the Fibonacci sequence. Everywhere we look there are clues to its prevalence in everything and all things. In the end we find it in proportion to harmonic convergence with the Golden triangle and the natural order of life.
… a believable image within the brain to see the scene collectively
It isn’t that we need to move away from our own happy city, we need to expand our sensibilities restoring sanity in our decisions. Some may want to start from the beginning again. I know the desire. We culturally don’t seem to care much for biophilia, we often disregard biomimicry, and we get ourselves in a biohazard zone, needlessly, thoughtlessly, and sadly, purposefully.
I know you may not be able imagine what I’m saying because you don’t see evidence here in some sort of three dimensional rendering. Those visualizations have been sketched. Today suffice to say the written word is where our imaginations take us and then subsequent forms and banners will constitute themselves as needed.
For instance, visualize the slightest white snow flurries dropping over a framed view of yellow forsythia shrubs, that contain the dark red maple buds blossoming from the maple tree, backed dropped on a canvas of the blue in the spruced needles, that is vignetted with grey and cold and windy skies. We need only our ability to read, for our minds to make a believable image within the brain to see the scene collectively.
I felt connected and lonely concurrently.
I question the workings of the contemporary American city. A few reasons are itemized in the book, ‘Needful Logic’1 and consequentially focused on a reduction of car cultural conditions. For instance New York City where I lived for enough years to have a sense of good and bad qualities it processes, for its inhabitants was gleaned. I walked or biked most everywhere locally. If I needed to go to work office, more than not I took the subway, including to the airport, always LGA, to fly to distant states. The flying part I did not care for, it was part of the job, not city living.
I enjoyed hanging out at the garden. It was satisfying to return to the overpriced 500 square foot rental apartment and instantly squelch the extraordinarily voluminous city sounds after shutting the front door. The only rumbles where those of the sub-terrestrial trains and the procreating couple sounds through the tenant party wall. Culturally, the city was the 21st century pinnacle of potential possibilities for any individual to avail oneself. Social scenes were antithetical to a hermit’s home. Diversity of human life was on a large consistently active stage. Compost pick up was regular.
One in thirty-seven people throughout the entire US of A live in NYC. One imagines they know each person, or their brother, sister, cousin, mother or father. They look like someone you know or have met, always. Those I associated with closely were loving and kind, just as most of our relatives and friends tend to be. I felt connected and lonely concurrently.
Conversely the criticisms of NYC living are many. The obvious detriment is an over abundance of vehicles. Residents haven’t come to the realization if the automobile was heavily restricted then the livability would increase a hundred fold, if not more. Suicides, homicides and pedestrian collisions would be reduced drastically. Noise factors are not enforced, and should be within tolerated and regulated decibels. Trash pickups are notoriously a nighttime activity, that few sleep through, even with a strong window glazing sound mandate. Streets are dangerous. Homelessness remains. Thugs continue not to do the hugging.
In a zoetic city any aspect that does not contribute to restorative environs is not welcome to the over all urban fabric. The form of a zoetic city follows the universal historic elements with us since the dawn of time in this space. Earth that you walk upon, air that you breathe, water that you drink, food that you eat, and the sky that you shelter under. are vital, important and a Zoeticism. With Earth, Air, Water, Fire and Space theories are created, names and objects are applied. In it all, we are left with simple, stable properties of all life. Attributable data is applied.
To earth latches the land and food. Air arranges as gas and wind. Water is known as ice and vapor. Fire equates to heat and ash. Space senses the sky and aether.
Marianne Williamson said it succinctly last week in her excellent piece:2
No data can save us. No technology can save us. No amount of money can save us. No, the only thing that can save this world is something that’s not of this world.
While the ‘thing’ may be not of this world, it illuminates all of us while we parade through our steps in this world. All is by light in shade and shadow and starshine. Complication arises with complexity. We forget our destiny.
Contemplation on only the basic necessities of living allows true freedom from materiality and conquest. Controlling another has never been part of the the cooperative coupling of life. Yet look around your city, your town, your village your family. At every hour and on every corner are there not human vultures encroaching on your lifestyle and well being? The vitality of life diminished through spam, junk mail, unsolicited telephone calls, physical solicitations, government overreach, bad design, terrible managers, war and defense funding, and on and on.
A zoetic place wants to minimize the worldly intrusions so relationships with earthling (human, animal and plant) life is supreme from midnight to midday to midnight again. When gathered together in an ensemble of vital nodes a holistic healthy hub happens.
Plant a tree. The tree makes fruit, produces nuts. Shade shelters that within its influence. Wind whistles widely through its branches. The tree connects with other life in an intertwined line of communicative ties. A baby tree grows, is nourished by water and sunshine, shoots skyward, branches out, and lives a long strong life until fire or calamity strike.
Live on earth. Eat the fruit of its seed, the bounty of its seas. Smell the aroma of its flora, of its fauna, of its forests. Breathe the clean air of its atmosphere, suck it in deep and full, exhale until the last gulp is gone. Touch the flowers, hug the trees, pet the cats, embrace the dogs, wrap your arm about everyone and anyone in the world. Drink the succulence of water free from additives and carcinogens. See if you can open the blindness of the mind, mindful that blindness is prevalent worldwide.
A Zoetic Message
In the midst of life from our arrival, from the womb of our mother’s protection, through the days given us under our mother, Ms. Gaia’s paradisiacal umbrella, our one mantra that is worth repeating incessantly is the sentence, “I care”.
Our mind is formed so our memories shared will suggest to others, we cared, or we didn’t, once the light disappears this side of the veil. We individually and collectively, hourly and daily, are given freedom to choose to find and restore and magnify our zoetic cities by our decisive important moments while living.
In harmony’s hands I work the land, with arms held high, to talk to the sky, listen to whispers, sleep in soundness, eat with knowledge, and breathe with the constancy of fulfillment.
Let us move.
http://apple.co/3qwkXni Apple Books c 2021
Transform with Marianne Williamson, “God Isn’t Letting Children Starve”, We are. March 26, 2022