(noon. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
Move toward a Resiliant Suburbia?
moving solid line | stable divided line | moving solid line … fire moving to earth
stable divided line | stable divided line | stable divided line … earth
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36. Wounded Brightness
Being weakened. It is good to work diligently on the situation. (The brightness is the light of consciousness, one’s aliveness, one’s energy. It being injured means that one’s aliveness is diminished, one is being weakened.) |
2. Land
There is a new potential, for you to develop. At first you’ll not know your way, but you’ll gain a handle on the situation and eventually master it. Just calmly proceed. It is beneficial to make partners and allies, and not to move on with people who have different interests. (At the original place and time of the Yijing, allies were in the southwest, territory they wanted to conquer was in the northeast.) |
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NB. Click on the link in the closing credits for the Casting the Beauty Platform series
the moving lines …
Line 1:
Wounded brightness during flight,
lowering its wings.
The noble one on a journey,
for three days does not eat.
Having a place to go to.
The master and the people have a talk.
Being weakened in the course of pursuing a goal. One is giving up necessities in order to put as much of one’s energy and resources as possible into the pursuit. It is a good idea to discuss the situation with those involved.
Line 3:
Wounded brightness at the winter hunt in the South.
Getting a great start.
It is not possible to be fast and dedicated.
Despite having a good start, things go slowly. It is not possible to speed things up.
The Reading
The heading “Resiliant Suburbia” refers to the “Collapse of Suburbia” scenario.
There are, of course, two ways to read the phrase. It can be read as a prediction … “no, suburbia will not collapse, because it is resiliant” … and it can be read as a goal … “no suburbia need not collapse if it can be made resiliant”. And it should be no surprise (cf. Retrofit Suburbia Redux) that I incline to the second reading, to Resiliant Suburbia as a goal.
Oddly enough, so does the cast of the hexagrams.
Where do we start? Wounded Brightness … a quite apt image for an energy intense means of living as we slide along the downward slope of the Oil Peak toward the accelerating declines on the shoulder of the bell curve. “Being weakened / it is good to work diligently on the situation”.
And in this situation, what moving trends rustle my copper fingers as I dip them into the moving stream? In line one, there will be sacrifice, and the people involved must be engaged in the task at hand. In line three, there is low hanging fruit to be plucked, but after that, it will be a long, hard slog.
And the hope at the end of the process? Not an end to a journey, but rather the beginning of one. A new relationship with our land that provides the basis for a stable community of interest.
Sustainability is not, after all, an end in itself. Its a goal so that we can be in a position to pursue goals … that is, goals over and above bare survival, in a life that is nasty, brutish and short.
Share your ideas on how to move to a more Resiliant Suburbia … whether the low hanging fruit that the Moving Line 3 alludes to, or the slower, harder steps that it suggests will take some time.
Musical Analogy
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retrospective told that girl I can start right away |
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perspective Welcome to a new kind of tension. |
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introspective Walking down the road |
Beauty Platform Closing Credits
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Long Live the Beauty Platform! |
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43 comments
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… burning down the house like ah fire.
The Book of Change is a good place to turn to for the restructuring of the sprawling populations we have developed. The one area you have not discussed is the mind set of the people who look at suburbia as the Dream. The ones who’s life style is so important that they are willing to set the world on fire in order to live in what they consider to be their own personal Manifest Destiny.
My children live in this Dream. They could have lived in a very livable sustainable city but they are dedicated to the idea that somehow living in Suburbia in a giant house with an artificially green lawn and a two car garage is the American way. They have built their life around this unsustainable myth, they think it’s the safe place in a sea of rabble, where gangs don’t roam, homeless threaten, and weirdo’s won’t pollute their children’s minds with unamerican ideas. Mainstream and safe they say as they pour chemicals in the air and ground.
They live with no sidewalks. How can they walk, it is built to discourage walking and if you do you walk it’s to a series of Big Box Malls all inaccessible unless your in a car on a freeway. While change is coming and it needs to bring community, I don’t see how it can occur as long as this life style is held in the minds and souls of the suburban dweller as the promised land. The best place to live and raise a family.
I live in a city neighborhood but it wasn’t when it was built in 1910. Each city block has in the sidewalk the date the block was developed, their are metal rings on the curbs where people used to park their horses. The largest building was the ‘insane asylum’, out of the city a day trip to visit, from downtown. When I look a photographs of my area I wonder how did it develop into what it is today I wonder how it became a liveable community with in a city? It was an organic change one that occurred slowly. Is it possible for the sprawling mess only miles away, yet such a distance in life style to grow into a landscape that includes walking around and public transportation when it has no soul other then the Big Box packaged Dream?
When I visit this land I see no signs of the building slowing down, or any attempt at creating communities other then gated ones. The only concessions to space are the huge complexes of hideous condo units already looking like the slums they will become. So my question is how do we change this dream? I hear from the pols all about how this middle class dream is going to be resurrected and made attainable but nothing about real community. Flinging money at GM says it all. Their is no Main Street anymore then there is family farms.
Eastern approach to suburbia. Brilliant.