August/September 1981 RAIN Page 13 be lined with beauty, where they coIIle in contact with our lives, like the teneIIlent of the shellfish . .. Thoreau We have a habit of thinking that the deepest insights, the most mystical, and spiritual insights, are somehow less ordinary than most things-that they are extraordinary. This is only the shallow refuge of the person who does not yet know what he is doing. In fact, the opposite is true: the most mystical, most religious, most wonderful-these are not less ordinary than most things-they are more ordinary than most things. It is because they are so ordinary, indeed, that they strike to the core. What makes them hard to find is not that they are unusual, strange, hard to express-but on the contrary, that they are so ordinary, so utterly basic in the ordinary bread and butter sense-that we never think of looking for them.-Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (see RAIN, VI:10,8) by Carlotta Collette I think that the teachers are right, those who teach us to "sit still." They suggest for us a quieter place inside that contains a bounty of information to live with. Randy Hager had such a teacher. He said, "Find the most beautiful piece of land and study what takes place there." Accepting that directive, Randy sat an hour each day for ten years. "We're in the process of realigning things that were shaken up when our ancestors came." At some point he began to feel tired of the waiting, impatient, and not a little foolish for his efforts. He had bought some land near where he'd grown up in Oregon, and was trying, with some "gentle persistence" from a friend, to decide what exactly he wanted to do next. In the midst of his stirring and casting about he had a vision: " If I use the word vision, I hope you'll understand." He was sitting in the trailer he lived in when he saw ("very clearly, but you could kinda see through it") a house, round, built of glass and stone, on a piece of land overlooking his own 20 acres. Now maybe it was the ten years of daily sitting and waiting, or maybe it was just that he'd promised he'd build himself a home before he turned 35 (which left him about a week), but whatever the reason, Randy decided that he wanted to build that house for himself. First he had to acquire the land. "I didn't want to go up to the lady who owned it and say, 'hey, I had this vision' ... but later when I did tell her about it she understood. She told me about her people ... she had Cherokee people in her." Then there came the problem of how to build it. "I'd never built such a thing, but I heard about a silo built of tongue and groove concrete slabs, so I made a deal and took that silo apart. It weighed 29 tons, each slab weighed 60 pounds, and I ended up moving the whole mess about nine times before I'd gotten them in place." He'd been told that three is a structurally dependable number, so with due consideration he built his house using combinations of three. The circle is 24 feet in diameter, it is 21 feet to the top of the roof. There are 27 windows in the roof, and another 27 in the "By choice we can create such an atmosphere around us that the idea of war won't everi be in comic books anymore." round. The central counter is in the shape of a nine. The threes are integral everywhere. "When I was looking for the supplies and all to build it, nothing went badly. There were no busy signals when I called people, no lines to wait in when I went to buy things." Thoreau said: There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? cont.- Carlotta Collette
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