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... let our houses first be lined with beauty,
where they come in
contact with our lives,
like the tenement 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 ordi-
nary, 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 :l0,8)
(with photos by Ancil Nance)
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 teach-
er. 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 round.
The central counter is in the shape of a nine. The threes are
integral everywhere.
"By choice we can create such an
atmosphere around us that the idea
of war won't even be in comic books
anymore."
"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 th.ere is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but
if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands , and pro-
vided 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?
When Randy took time off from hauling and building, he found
Thoreau to be right in his suggestion. Poems did "begin to write:"
There is a lite that can be seen
I only know for it has shown where
I have been
Tis bright as day & all of life
I say this now-I've seen it twice
It holds strength & wisdom to be, I do find
Surely meant for a lost bewildered
But seeking mankind.
The lite of wisdom, the lite of day
Call it what ever you may
I know its strong & know its bright
And should I ask the lord, I
Know he'd say, "Its out of sight".
It took him only three months and $5,200 to build his house, his
intensity and summer shaved head chasing off an occasional visitor.
Ancil Nance (whose photos have been RAIN covers since Vol. I)
found him early into the project and turned us in his direction.
When Randy and I first talked about his home he said "we're in
the process of realigning things that were shaken up when our
ancestors came and interrupted the generations that were here."
Now he is "trying to understand the kind of temperament that life
wants back from us .. . to participate in the laws of that vision, to
reestablish the beauty of the laws. By choice we can create such an
atmosphere around ourselves that the idea of war won't even be in
comic books anymore."
The vision of the 'house grew into a vision of how to live "in
synchronization with the rest of nature; to invite the world back onto
this land . . .. There are laws about the vision. The vision is
governed by laws and is the governor of laws."
A few months ago he was motorcycling down the highway when
a tiny fawn stumbled out from the tree line. Randy knew that a doe
had been hit by a car near that spot so he figured the fawn had been
orphaned. He tucked it into his jacket (a goatskin jacket at that) and
rode home with it. "Buck Buck" hangs out on the farm now,
running in patterns back and down, around the ponds or over the hill.
"That deer can't escape the law that he couldn't starve to death ...
that he walked out onto that road and rode home in my jacket."
"Just recently I had the opportunity to watch a big ' ole bull bear
sniffing around down by my trout pond, my dog barking at him,
him not paying attention. I followed him across the path between
the ponds. He went on up the hill, stopped there for a second,
oblivious to us, and then went on."
"We're trying to understand the
temperament that life wants back
from us."
"I am learning to have a secret without tarnishing the secrecy of
it. If I have had one vision in 35 years, what has it done for me? It's
taught me that visions are some right of ours, that its OK that we
live in both worlds and are not perplexed about the spiritual
existence. That the cause and course of visions is all a part of us, like
our blood flowing and the work of our muscles. That there's a joy to
it and you can't separate that from a man."
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