You walking, your footprints are the road, and nothing else; there is no road, walker, you make the road by walking. By walking you make the road, And when you look backward, You see the path you Never will step on again. Walker, there is no road, Only wind trails in the sea. ~ Antonio Machado
Hello from Maryland. I did something new with this month’s Talking Back to Walden. For the Talking Back portion, I shared a fictional scene that was part of my novel but is currently languishing on the back burner. Thanks to
and others for encouraging me to bring more of this work into the light. I’m making plans with to serialize a few short stories, starting this spring.There’s been a flurry of new subscriptions recently, for which I am so grateful. Special shout-out to writers
and and reader - who will surely be writing on here before too long. If you’re interested in resilience (climate and otherwise), architecture, community, and the mysteries of our relationship with the natural world, you are in the right place.My obsession with frameworks is directly proportional to my need to make sense of the world. A quick peek at my computer files is a barometer of my anxiety. And that’s not even all of them. Integral, Transition Towns, and Work that Reconnects are filed elsewhere for some mysterious reason.
A good framework helps me to organize my thinking around a complex topic. I’m obsessed with finding patterns, convinced that this will clarify my thinking and at least point me to answers, if not supply them. Since answers are elusive in this time of unraveling, I’ll follow a framework methodically, hoping it will at least reveal hidden paths.
Frameworks are a guilty pleasure, a way of convincing myself I’m doing something productive, when maybe I facing the grim reality might suggest a different direction entirely.1 There are so many design frameworks now, they’re arguably the opiate of, if not the masses, at least design professionals.
Such is my devotion, I’ve created few frameworks myself. One was an elaborate system for helping businesses and organizations go green. We called it the Toolkit for Strategic Sustainability, or TSS for short. Its folder is at the bottom of the computer files in top image. We marketed the hell out of that thing and even got a couple of clients from it. Looking back, my naivete is staggering. I had no idea about Six Sigma and the other Big Consulting tools that were already out there.
I still use this next one in my Ecological Design Thinking class. It’s a mashup of Transition Towns, Eisenstein’s Old Story – New Story2 , Joanna Macy’s Great Turning, and Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of Interbeing. It came out of a zoom conference on Transition, where they showed this graph informed by the Stages of Grief:
To me, it made sense but felt incomplete. It didn’t graphically convey what comes after the Acceptance phase that they advocated. What are we aiming for? Not that I’m looking for guarantees, but clear visions have guided me through a lot of pain and misery. I thought Macy’s “Three Actions” could be a big help, so I set about extending the graphic. First, I organized Macy’s three actions:
I turned this into a more formal graphic:
Then I put it all together with the Transition chart:
My favorite framework of all is a beautifully poetic metaphor. The grandfather of underground architecture, Malcolm Wells, who was a lovely, talented man and (lucky me!) my mentor and pen-pal for a brief period in the early 2000s, created this chart. When I saw it at an exhibit called Emerging Ecologies at MOMA last fall3, I remembered, hey, I made a whole excel spreadsheet of this and used it for projects and in my teaching.
With this framework, Wells asked, if Nature, specifically wilderness, is our design standard, how do our buildings and cities measure up? Answer: not very well. For the glass-half-full crowd, that means we have plenty of room for improvement!
Though I tell people I’ve made my peace with the unknown and unknowable, the truth is, it’s a work in progress. Changing the paradigm is a long road with no map through uncharted territory, trackless terrain, the unknown.
It’s important to find ways to keep from burning out or succumbing to my anxiety. One way that works for me is wallowing in a good framework. What works for you?
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My favorite of Donella Meadows’ brilliant essay “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System” is #2, change the paradigm, followed closely by #1, transcend paradigms entirely.
Here, I feel obliged to say, I was very inspired by Charles Eisenstein about ten years ago and, once I finally met him and saw how he was as a person, got over it. He’s written some good books with frameworks that helped me on my path, so I can’t completely write him off. I agree with others’ assessments that he stands on many shoulders but gives little credit to others in these books.
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I, too, am obsessed with patterns because I’ve found them helpful in navigating personal issues and implementing improvements. In my case, I have to watch/guard against a kind of solving mentality- once I solve the patterns, I’ll be safe. Thanks, Julie!
I deeply resonate with you. Frameworks help us to navigate the complexities of the world! I also enjoying creating frameworks and I've created many of them, both for personal uses and at work.
As un fun fact, I think one of the reasons I've gotten so much into Buddhism is because of that. They express many of their wisdom through frameworks. Or at least, I perceive that way. The four noble truths, the eight-fold path, the five mindfulness trainings, and so on...Those concepts and deep lessons are a good framework for me on how to live and approach life.
Thanks for sharing Julie.