Garden of Hope part 2

I spend some time bringing some more images of the front yard to me, reminding me of the transformation that took place of a weedy patch in front of a commercial warehouse. I could have edited the first part, and added photos, but I decided to continue in good old blogging fashion, retell the story with maybe repeated, maybe new elements guided by the visual aid.

That's how it looked like when it started, or so I thought before I went back to google maps. So let me interrupt here my own narrative for a second to provide some 'historical' background. According to our lovely neighbour next door, this specific patch used to be a permanent eyesore. 

Google's prying eyes saw this barren patch of unused green strip in November 2007, probably popular with neighbourhood dogs, handy to drive over occasionally to park in front of the warehouse.

Two years later an attempt to utilise the space was made. The fencing suggests guarding something precious, but it certainly prevents uninvited canine friends. It looks like a rosemary bush acted as centre piece. The combination of deteriorating eyesight, low resolution and lack of botanical knowledge make this a pure guess. Never trust anything on the internet, research for yourself.

In January 2014 the fence was gone, only the hardy rosemary remained in an otherwise unexciting stretch of weeds. 

You can't see the rosemary from this perspective, it lurks behind the compost bin. I took this shot in January 2015, using the wild constellation of random objects as backdrop for one of my tensegrity structures. 

Composting was one way of showing how sustainability begins at home, but it took an accidence to get the work started. We reunited two parts of the same branch as an arch, weeding and digging the whole patch, leaving only the rosemary and a healthy parsley bush behind.

The beautiful aloe vera plant had changing luck - after mulching the entire bed it got dug under by some nasty dog for some weeks. It took months to get it back to health, until someone unrequested gave it a new home. 

While some of the succulents grew prolific, it took Adrian to introduce more of the leafy and flowering parts of the garden. 

The sunflowers didn't grow tall, and I don't know whether any of the seeds would germinate. Having about a dozen tiny sunflowers guarding the garden provided a great sprinkle of colour.

I enjoyed watching different parts of the garden grow, but there seemed to be space more. I wanted to experiment with a tensegrity structure as support for ranking plants.  Unfortunately, although I manage to make it relatively wind proof, it was certainly not fool proof. I lost a couple tomato plants when someone stepped onto the structure, breaking a strut.

Comfrey certainly made the biggest attempt to take over. I need to get into the habit of drying and using plants growing in 'wrong' spots, it can't harm to have some supplies of the 'bone-healing' herb.

The compost bin remains in the same place like last year, just like the arc we build. Yet the rosemary bush gained lots of company since then.

Against the stream

For many people, sacred geometry has become the buzzword to sell their ideas. Yet we can only sell profane things, sacredness resonates with our hearts, not our wallets. Sacred knowledge can only be experienced individually,  teaching acts only as a guide to venture within the depths of one's own heart.

Geometry offers an excellent tool to comprehend the metaphysical aspects of our physical surroundings. Many processes in the scenario universe follow simple rules, which in interaction with specific, unique circumstances create abundant complexity.

The tetrahedron acts as smallest possible 3 dimensional system - four focus points arranged in the closest packing possible. The Platonic Solids describe the idealised regular structures which compose the complex details of our perceptual reality.

Humanity's creations favour the square, or variations of it, with a few triangles thrown in. Not too surprising, as the 3 dimensional accounting system uses a cube as base unit. In the minds of commonly educated people, the 3d world is cubical, not tetrahedral. It takes observation and experimentation to understand the fundamental difference between these approaches to our physical reality.

I'm not too sure how much we are wired to perceive and resonate with geometric structures and symbols, but I suspect they have a much deeper reach than words. The use of geometric symbols predates the use of written words in this phase of known human history, indicating a commonly accessible knowledge about the deeper fabric of our universe.

The five Platonic Solids play an essential role in sacred geometry, due to their unique qualities (all edges of the same length, all faces the same shape). Traditional Western esoteric systems use only four elements (air, water, earth and fire) as universal elements, with ether clumsily tagged on as fifth element.

The Five Element Theory, part of Chinese philosophy and medicine, doesn't need to add anything to incorporate the five regular building blocks of reality Plato described. While it seems similar esoteric as the Western hermeneutic approach, it has some metaphorical power due to added (geometric) layers.

The tetrahedron represent Fire, the element of creation and inspiration. The ashes turn into Earth, the cube. You need two intersecting tetrahedra (a merkaba configuration) to build a stable cube, consisting only of squares it tends to distort and collapse.

Earth, element of stability, compresses everything beneath, and so creates Metal. Cube and Octahedron have the same number of edges, the compression transformed the cube into its dual. Metal condensates, and Water emerges. The icosahedron is the largest structure consisting only of equilateral triangles, introducing fluidity.

Water nourishes the Wood, transforms the icosahedron into the dodecahedron. Plato's 'secret' solid, showing twelve pentagons symmetrically and spherically arranged. That's the element responsible for good flow of Qi, unsurprisingly unfamiliar in Western systems.

Wood feeds the Fire, the dodecahedron collapses back into a tetrahedron, and the cycle begins anew. The beauty about the Five Elements theory comes from this conclusive idea of creative transformation in this cycle, combined with a tetragram in its centre describing the inhibiting influence among the elements.