Is there a small sustainable project than this one?

It has been nearly five months since I wrote and placed the above posting at this "Light House Sustainable Building Centre" site. I place the following as an extension to the above, after reflecting on some of the ideas of the Dean of Architecture at Columbia and my own experience. -Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania.
_______________________
A FALLING INTO PLACE

The Dean of Architecture, Planning and Conservation at Columbia University, Bernard Tumey, was talking this morning about his identification with cities and apartment blocks. He has lived most of his life in Paris and New York and he identifies with these cities much more than the countries in which they exist. Listening to this radio interview made me think about the equivalent sources of my own identity. Apt blocks are quite peripheral to my sense of identity and place. I have lived for perhaps two years of my life in apartment blocks spread over three towns. The vast bulk of my life has been spent in houses and large complexes of buildings associated with my places of work.

As I scan my memory horizon and collect about myself the accoutrements of my sense of spacial identity: perhaps four dozen houses, some two dozen schools and other places of employment, an equal number of towns and cities, two countries and this planet earth occupy the solid ground of my spacial identity. The pilgrimage, the journey, that is my life dwells in this physical architecture, in these physical places. The religion I have espoused is one not so much of origins or destinations but one of journeys, paths, roads, valleys, processes. At least that is how I have come to identify with it, with its meaning and with life's meaning.

Buildings, spaces and identity are all intertwined and I post the following poem as a reflection on these interrelated themes. -Ron Price with thanks to "Arts Today," ABC Radio National, 10:05-11:00 am, 3 January 2002; and John Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: A History of Myth and Ritual in Family Life, Oxford UP, NY, 1997, p.62.(the poetic idiom of the following can not be set out in poetry form using the technical facilities of this site)
______________________________________________________________

There is something about

the entire universe that

seems humanly significant.

This is not audacious;

it's just a natural falling

into place, a natural part

of that Oneness which is at

the centre of my journey,

the one I travel in my head

in what often seems an ephemeral,

fragmentary existence with its convoys

of people with whom I have shared my life.

And yet, yet, this journey has brought

sacred and resplendent tokens which have

attracted me to some mysterious place,

some road of holiness, and nearness

and beauty1 which seems not to have any

connection with the landmarks of my life,

these towns, cities, houses where I have lived

my days, my hours and there interminable minutes.

1 Baha'u'llah, Seven Valleys, USA, 1952, p.3.

Ron Price

3 January 2002