Welcome to Saved by Design

New Stuff:

In Home Page: An Hour With Paul Goldberger

In A Miracle Of Coincidence: “It is finished.”

In A Year In Lent: Only Consistency Allows Change

In Random Stuff: Pearl Harbor

In Absence: Easters

In Left To Myself: A Decade In Memory

In Emily’s Days: Coda

In Not (As) Fat: One Meal A Day

In Finding Home: Occupation Preoccupation

In The Rules: 1) Plan. 2) Section. 3) Elevation

In Silence In Spring: Astonishing

In Days ’till Spring: “Karening”

Some things that fly there be

25 of 40

Some things that fly there be—
Birds—Hours—the Bumblebee—
Of these no Elegy.

Some things that stay there be—
Grief—Hills—Eternity—
Nor this behooveth me.

There are that resting, rise.
Can I expound the skies?
How still the Riddle lies!

Emily Dickinson

Today I am on a plane that flies. A hundred years ago, I would be a hero. When Emily Dickinson wrote, I would be a bumblebee.

We have the same brain over these years, but time is unrelenting. The things we do leverage more things we do. Training animals, using water, containing explosions, now choreographing electrons that you see here.

50,000 years ago (because we have analyzed it so) scientists now deduce that our brains changed. Our prefrontal cortex overcame its “normal” reactionary limitations and exploded into creativity, memory, understanding.

Why?

I doubt we know what actually happened, or will. The bits of sculls that write a saga are thin gruel to create a full course meal around, but the self serving prefrontal cortex can cook up plausibility because we are great chefs.

But things happened. Tools, drawings, dwellings all just happened. Like the insane complexities in every living thing we see no origins, only outcomes. So we look for the origins in us.

We create the same feasts of intelligence we applied to the prefrontal cortex and discern the origins we cannot know, just by asserting that we know them. Just like we know what happened 50,000 years ago. There is no video to prove or disprove or deep fake, so you can gorge yourself on the elaborate cuisines of religion, science, ritual.

But we know some tiny facts of 2,000 years ago, as well as we know almost any facts from then. After a small government murder of a perceived threat, a small bit of humanity became undeniable, creating their versions of video that is at the core of a billion or two of us.

Sure, there were deep fakes then, and 50,000 years ago. We were given that prefrontal cortex. And that is the reality that has no deep fake. We did not deep fake our own impossible complexity in existence, the world’s life, the unknowable precision of innumerable bits just to be alive.

And we think it is a miracle to fly. I do.

The threat of 2,000 years ago was not our prefrontal cortex on another mission of creation. 2,000 years ago, enough of us touched what made the prefrontal cortex, that since that connection untold numbers have failed to deep fake Jesus’s irrelevance. Because faith is not proven. Faith is just in you, me.

I have no faith in the airplane I fly because a bunch of me made it, fly it, and accommodate it. And we mostly do that well enough that I can risk flying.

“There are that resting, rise.
Can I expound the skies?
How still the Riddle lies!”

The pre-frontal cortex did not make itself, or Faith. Faith just is. So is fear. But fear is reasonable – risk and get hurt. Faith has no reason. 2,000 years ago there is no reason, no benefit, to saying the murdered threat was back, and was even more threatening.

People were as quickly and efficiently killed as Jesus for that video sharing because they were feared, too. These few hundred saw that what they could make, understand, use was the tiniest end of a reality that can only be accepted by faith, because we did not make ourselves.

We like making fantastic feasts with what we know – I do. The scientist, the pilot, even the priest can use what they can know and cook up fully delightful realities.

But faith is not in what we know. Faith is in what we cannot know.

“Some things that fly there be”

HOME outside

NOON THURSDAY March 23! WPKN 89.5FM or STREAMING WPKN WPKN.org

“Gardening” and “Landscaping” are the ways we officially connect with the land. We can look out a window, go for a walk, even camp out: but on our knees, with our hands in the dirt, humans are in a dance with the outdoor world.

But that intimate relationship of partnering with our land to create growth manifests a human desire to be with the world around us. Extending where we live beyond our four walls is not just opening a window or sitting on a deck. Why do some of us want to live beyond the interiors of our homes?

Whether renting and planting in a community garden or constructing a raised bed, fencing, planting, and weeding on land that you own, the landscape around where we live can, for some, become an extended home.

Three people who live lives that extend beyond their homes, professionally and personally are with Home Page Today: Bob Golde,  a Landscape Architect who has envisioned whole exterior worlds, and his backyard,  Christine Woodside, a naturalist and writer who lives in the world and writes about it. and Nancy DuBrule-Clement, who has been fully meshed in personal landscapes for decades, including creating Natureworks in North Branford.

Glimpse

24 of 40

The Brain — is wider than the Sky —
For — put them side by side —
The one the other will contain
With ease — and You — beside —

The Brain is deeper than the sea —
For — hold them — Blue to Blue —
The one the other will absorb —
As Sponges — Buckets — do —

The Brain is just the weight of God —
For — Heft them — Pound for Pound —
And they will differ — if they do —
As Syllable from Sound —

Emily Dickinson

“The brain is just the weight of God”

Our inheritances are the sea we swim in. What we have been given is so vast as to be infinite, unknowable. But we know it.

This AM a view seen 1,000 times means something, because words I have read connect with it, directly. The words

“The one the other will absorb –

As sponges – buckets – do -“

are an arrow to an ancient oak backed by 39 years ago, held by 23 years ago, of my construction.

But of God’s creation.

A President, before a Senator, before that another politician j’accused all creators with the indictment “You didn’t do that!” I bridled. I had built these things, my life. The politicians meant that their creation, the government, that they provide, is the provider, and those provided for merely do as allowed.

But they were right. Not about our creations, but that we, I, “didn’t do that!”

What we do, we see, we are is “the weight of God”.

We are the residue of machinations so vast as to be imperceptible. So tiny as to be immeasurable, so complete as to beg for our intervention.

We frame our perception with a bizarre sense of entitlement and outrage. We were given that, too.

We were given Emily, because we were given all of us. We “didn’t do that.” We conflate what we control with its imperative. The residue of our weight was not made in the weightlifter’s determined consumption and dedication – no, our weight, our ability to perceive that capacity and have that determination does not come from us.

Even though it is, really, all about us.

Emily Dickinson lived in a room all but one year of her life. From that room, given to her as her birthright, and the family also given to her, she used the brain God has given us.

Emily, the tree, the buildings, the day, this moment go away. Time, also made without understanding, weaves the gifts into the place we glimpse at, a bit.

Some glimpse at the bit that time has, 2,000 years ago. We, like now, know nothing. Especially what we want to know. But knowing is not the point. Revealing what is there is the glimpse. A murder, became a glimpse 2,000 ago, because, in some way, life was revealed. And life is the sea we swim in, without knowing it.

The Brain — is wider than the Sky —
For — put them side by side —
The one the other will contain
With ease — and You — beside —

The Brain is deeper than the sea —
For — hold them — Blue to Blue —
The one the other will absorb —
As Sponges — Buckets — do —

The Brain is just the weight of God —
For — Heft them — Pound for Pound —
And they will differ — if they do —
As Syllable from Sound —

Season Greetings

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown –
Who ponders this tremendous scene –
This whole Experiment of Green –
As if it were his own!

Emily Dickinson

There really has been no winter in our microclimate. One cold week. One light snow. Five miles north winter has raged, fifty it has been a full winter.

But, here, this has been a winter of rain, 40F, and winds. So there is less joy at the piercing of the brown debris with green shoots. But there is joy.

But right now, this minute, I think, Spring has sprung, even though the time of sun and time of night was fully equal three days ago, twelve hours of light, twelve hours of dark – so Spring Has Sprung.  Light becomes the dominant condition. More light means more heat, more heat means more life, more life means joy.

Why?

If we truly knew the world, dismissing the serendipities and having no need for faith, only having the hard truths of biophysical engineering in the certitudes found in the reality is our sun, then no joy is necessary. We may fret over human screw ups of disease and climate change, but in the seasons, the unending dance between light and dark, the two realities are the same sides of the same coin. No reason to be happy. Or sad, really.

Similarly, a birth is just what happens when bodies combine correctly. Death is just when those bodies end functioning. Nothing to feel emotion over, it is just our facts. We can know them and just live on. Until we don’t, or can’t.

No, joy and sadness are who we are. Because we were made for them. We have hope no other being has. We have fear that is unknown to any other being who is not directly threatened. We see the grieving pet over the death of its owner, we call pets “fur babies” – our pets become our hopes and fears. But we also grieve over the death of a personality we have but glimpsed on a screen. Humans feel the unnecessary, because we can. Now one says “Vernal Equinox – time for joy.” We just feel it.

The absence of proof of meaning in all the measurables of life makes joy and sadness that is unreasonable, indefensible and wholly real in every moment. A baby is just beauty, not a young human. Those green shoots may just be a biochemical response but we live a moment of ecstasy when we see them. My father dying 35 years ago has no meaning, except I hurt when I think of it.

And some guy in the Middle East being murdered by bureaucrats 2,000 years ago is just one of the billion and billions of human lives that have ended in these millennia. Meaningless, all of them. Or not.

But beauty, death, love are who humans are. We are the things that should have no meaning, but do. Because we did not make ourselves. If we did, no graveyards, no birthday parties, no music, no food beyond calories.

But we are Spring beings, even as we wait thru winter, see the death of autumn, even bask in summer sun – humans are Spring beings because no their season is Joy. Because life is joy, because God made it. Jesus lived, died, and lives again. Whether the facts support hard benefits of outcome or condemn us to accepting those facts as our lives, humans cannot reject Joy. Even when Spring happens without a winter.

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown – 
Who ponders this tremendous scene – 
This whole Experiment of Green – 
As if it were his own!

Emily Dickinson

POMO IN CONNECTICUT

Time Is What We Remember

23 of 40

They say that ‘time assuages,’– 
Time never did assuage; 
An actual suffering strengthens, 
As sinews do, with age. 

Time is a test of trouble, 
But not a remedy. 
If such it prove, it prove too 
There was no malady.

Emily Dickinson

We forget that time is the other gravity.

Time is there in everything, everywhere, like gravity. But gravity does not rely on human perception to exist. We only know time when we remember it.

When Ronald Reagan was in the end of his days, an intimate said “He is making new friends every day.” When my mother was in a similar place she simply had no history of the day she was in, but realities I had never heard of were recounted, newly remembered.

I do not remember if I used Emily’s words above in the last four years of these creations. So the poem is new to me. “Time never did assuage” for our intimacies. What we did is us, it we remember it.

I will be five years old, in a black room, tucked into bed, alone, for as long as I remember it. The sinews of the response to malady were strengthened over these sixty-two years, and could be gone tomorrow.

Memory becomes history, and society remembers time when human events lose it. The realities that are created from events are not always the events but they are the history of time.

There are those who know the absolute impossibility of Jesus. The present overcomes the history when our history is defined by who we are now. Legends are not history. Of course, inventions that pretend to be events, are events. But legends can be dismissed.

History is, like facts, a sticky thing. Because time is part of our lives, we know it. We know the entropy and impossibility of denying the Holocaust, despite the desires of some. We know that history is not now, despite those who want to recreate the 1903 Penn Station Railroad in New York City.

So it is fact, not legend, that something happened 2,000 years ago.

There is no videotape, but now we know that anything described by anything can be as manipulated as any memory, So, like gravity, the fact of time travel in history cannot be wished away by the facts we know.

Something happened.

People, all of them in all recounting, were not noble, they were afraid 2,000 years ago, My ignoble generation will see the anniversary of 2,000 years of time passage since an event that has uniquely focused part of humanity.

We look to find salvation. We want time to heal all wounds.

“Time is a test of trouble,

But not a remedy.”

Building a new Penn Station will not make our culture great again, even make what ails us better. I can never undo my childhood, because it is with me every day. What happened, has happened, if we remember it.

Inventing the impossibility of facts is something we try very hard to do. A beloved friend said to me “I can have a good childhood if I want to.” No, only if you do not remember time, without memory, there is no history,

History happened 2,000 years ago. It broke the norms of what was history then. It was supernatural because we do not understand it.

I do not understand why I was not alone in an empty, black room sixty-two years ago. But I was not. For some that is childhood compensation, a PTSD response. Sure. We all cope when “suffering strengthens”.

But no. I was there. I am there now. Love was there, because it just is. It is not healing the pain that is, and will be there. Love, like time, does not “assuage”. Jesus was murdered. But love is God in our lives. Completely unnecessary, unearned, most often unrequested, I am loved.

I just have to accept it. Not easy, because I know history.

Time

22 of 40

Before He comes we weigh the Time! 
‘Tis Heavy and ’tis Light. 
When He depart, an Emptiness 
Is the prevailing Freight.

Emily Dickinson

I have only two appointments this weekend. No article due. One thing to write. One design to consider. Have I failed? Is this success?

My iceberg is, now, mostly underwater. Never a mountaintop, my days are spent staying above the water. It is too cold and wet and early to rake out the gardens, but soon. Yesterday I received enough funds for three payrolls, and the most overdue bills are paid.

But next week, next week, touring sites with an editor, a full design review of my class, a radio show, visiting a site in Virginia, an article published, and a room filled with staff, working on the thoughts and problems for many places.

But this morning, day, the next, is time.

Capacity renders time a failure and a gift.

After three silent weeks of mornings with Emily, I should be happy. The broken tube in my head has stayed sealed, my eyes and my innards are actually, medically, better. Confirmed, but without treatment. So why is time “Heavy” and never “Light”?

There is never enough, when it is what we have been given. Always a potential for failure, never a bask in success.

I think the “Heavy” life for some is because we cannot fill the holes we did not dig. No matter how intense the filling. You cannot work well in the rain, but you work. “An emptiness is the prevailing freight”.

The schedule becomes the measure. A “Light” now looks at a “Heavy” one. Weights and measures are what humans do. They have been given to us, too. These dark, gray mornings should be how we see the color of the world that is the God who made us. But it is harder to see color than to feel weight.

It is easiest to work, it is who we are. It is harder to know that work will not, well, work. Things are done. Good is done. But the good I do is not who I am. But the tube, eyes and gut know that work did not heal them. God made them, and me.

So the hardest thing is to do by not doing anything.

“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matthew 11: 28-30

Work

21 of 40

Who has not found the heaven below 
Will fail of it above. 
God’s residence is next to mine, 
His furniture is love.

Emily Dickinson

It’s official. Three years since we were to stop a plague in two weeks.

We went home. To work. Then out. With masks. We connected without touching. We worked without working. We were humans in full inhumanity.

The damage has been transcendent of our understanding. The young are bent. The working are, well, not working has they had worked. Worship is in isolation for most. Love, if not had before the break, is complicated for more. So more isolation after house arrest ended.

More people smoke weed than cigarettes. Every regular anything: shows, meals, visits, all accept irregularity, even impossibility as just what happens. We still test for the plague and act as if it’s presence is death to our days.

We have come to know our furniture. Our cooking. Our wardrobe. Our bodies. The B-Roll Flip Side of work is at home with most of us in everything we do.

Life has turned into work without a boss.

Who has not found the heaven below 
Will fail of it above. 
God’s residence is next to mine, 
His furniture is love.

We, I, look to the obituaries every day and marvel that my life pales against those who lived fewer years. We now touch through touching screens. We know, more, the death that was always there, but have the Heaven below set away from our lives. By fear. Of what?

God’s residence is next to mine. The banal is, in fact, the sacred we do not see. Because we fear. So life becomes work to avoid hell. When Heaven is below.

Having had children, I know we are them. Told to change or die, we all changed. Not for two weeks, but for two years. The last year has come to know that death is always there, and it’s rule has never changed: We Die.

Somehow it was deemed far worse three years ago. We now know what we once knew, but we are changed. But God has not. So I am with Him more.

Who has not found the heaven below 
Will fail of it above. 
God’s residence is next to mine, 
His furniture is love.

To Be White and Male in 1940

20 of 40

I took my Power in my Hand—
And went against the World—
’Twas not so much as David—had—
But I—was twice as bold—

I aimed by Pebble—but Myself
Was all the one that fell—
Was it Goliath—was too large—
Or was myself—too small?

Emily Dickinson

In 1940, Thomas Midgley, Jr. was a 51 year old white male who was at the peak of chemical science and invention. Besides winning top awards and honors, his most memorable inventions, lead additives and chlorofluorocarbons in gasoline, changed our lives, then and, by consequence, now.

He was afflicted with polio in 1941. And was rendered unable to walk. His extreme abilities enabled Midgley to create a machine to lift and deposit him into his bed. Amazing. And getting him into bed one night in 1944 that machine strangled him to death at 54.

My father was fully, deliriously, happy in 1940. He was the first in his family to graduate from the 8th grade, then college, then law school, then gain a fantastic job in New York City with an entré from his academic mentor. He found an artist-beauty in Cafe Society to wed. He had finished his eight years service in the Army Reserves after his ROTC years in college. At 31, a high-income lawyer in the unending Depression economy, he was where all educated, white males should be: in charge of his life.

Then Pearl Harbor happened.

No military commission, no job, no more parties at their East 10th Street apartment with the 20 foot long terrace. He scrambled to get a commission in the Navy and spent years on aircraft carriers.

The booze that was joy, became necessary. The cigarettes that manifested the cool of the society he bathed in became first line therapy. The wife was with him, but the rest of his life left him. Because, like Midgely, being white and male was no longer enough to gain access to what he wanted.

We think we make our lives, we have to. The extreme effort and talent Midgely and my father has was not a self-rewarding entitlement, despite his demographic. No, my dad and Midgely just had the right gender and race to compete in their worlds. Others were not allowed to. Because humans try to make our lives.

But we do not. Polio happens. War happens. And we can cope and learn and adapt. Or we can try to defeat what is not ours to defeat. We can use the gifts that earned us so much to overcome our injustices. And we can end what we have been given.

Strangulation by your invention is not limited to Thomas Midgely. Eight million returning men were damaged in World War 2. The lives they invented after that coped, but also killed many. The alcohol and smoking that were what the returning soldiers could use to cope with a broken world killed many of my parents’ generation. Including my parents.

We all become David in the world where Goliath lives. We think that the pebbles of our invention can overcome the existential threats we face. But David did not kill Goliath. God did.

We are given everything. We can understand that, or we are entitled to the lives we work to have. When you are white and male in 1940, the entitlement is personal. When it is, then polio and a world war are personal injustices – ones you can defeat.

But you can not.

I took my Power in my Hand—
And went against the World—
’Twas not so much as David—had—
But I—was twice as bold—

I aimed by Pebble—but Myself
Was all the one that fell—
Was it Goliath—was too large—
Or was myself—too small?

Emily Dickinson

It’s A Bet

19 of 40

We lose—because we win—
Gamblers—recollecting which
Toss their dice again!

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson saw the gambling bee – testing each blossom for the nectar that was made honey. We do the same. “We lose – because we win -“

World Wide Entertainment (WWE) creates professional wrestling. It is not sport, there are no empty or full blossoms to be discovered. There is an explicit map of their garden, that they drew, and every Emily watching knows that the “wrestling” is choreography. Made by us, for us,

The WWE wants to allow gambling on the results by those watching the show they created as if it’s wrestlers were bees and those watching can wager on which blossom has nectar, and which is dry.

It would be as if an author wants their readers to buy their book and then bet upon the outcome of their story. Somehow the unknown, but scripted, may be enough to risk in hope. Layering hope upon distraction, in full cynical avarice.

“We lose – because we win – “

We all know our script’s end as we are writing it. We know we die. We gamble that this pleasure or this pain is a bet that we will win validation, or love, or something, before we die. But we only aspire because we fall short. Because, somewhere, there is nectar.

We then make God the WWE, who made the choreography we are trying to predict. But God did not write our script, God made us to find Him. Thats it. There is no map to the nectar we seek.

I admit, I want my children to follow my map. I know they cannot, because they are not me (or their mother.) But I want to win my bet that they find the nectar, even if I have not. My siblings were fully damaged when that expectation, of being their parents, was not who they were.

The bee is not broken when there is no nectar – the bee just moves in the way God made him to the next blossom (made as surely as a WWE wrestler follows his script.)

Expectations of the bee are not those of the wrestler. The bee hopes. The wrestler performs. We want to perform, to win what we know we deserve, because it is scripted for us, but all we, and the bee, has is hope. And faith.

The WWE has no known winners because their script is theirs. Gods script is short, complete, and fully available. We are loved. That’s it. We have been given everything, and that is the full meaning of love.

The bee knows that because there is nectar, somewhere. And he follows that faith.

In the end that is all we have, all that we have been given. The exploding quadrillions of datapoints we now generate every nano second accrue to the fact we cannot know the script, see a choreography, know which way to bet.

The map is in us. All the finite laws of religion can try to be the datapoints we choreograph, but every life knows that there is no map. There is only the hope of Grace that passes all understanding.