Welcome

The fundamental challenge for us as human, of nature but not living in nature is this: can we achieve a culture in which out hearts are comfortable and readily find the pure, rich, emotional experience, the spirituality, that was the birthright of our pre-civilization ancestors, while retaining the intellectual and artistic riches, the material comforts, and safety that we have attained as a result of civilization?

There is a guiding principle that can be of great practicable value in meeting this challenge. It is one of those ideas that bridge the objective and subjective perspectives as it contains within it a sensibility that can be experienced but not easily articulated in scientific terms.

It is what Frank Lloyd Wright described as “more than nature.” It can be experienced in the homes and buildings he designed; a sense of “rightness” that people feel in the spaces he created, a sense of belonging not unlike being in a purely natural environment. Wright’s structures are not natural environments, of course, but nature is never far from them, nature is invited in through tall windows or invoked through ornamentation taken from natural patterns or honored by structure’s placement on its site.

Wright spoke of his architecture as being “organic.” That does not mean that his designs look like living things but they do share one very important property with living things. Their parts are conformal with one another, each one makes functional sense. No part is gratuitous with respect to another or the whole. Living things, no matter how ungainly or bizarre evolution has shaped their forms, always have this consistency and integrity that identifies them as organic.

Organisms are also in functional harmony with the natural environment that shaped their evolution. That is a given or they would not have survived. So too with Wright’s designs, which seem to grow up from their site, appearing as he put it, “incidents not accidents on the landscape.” He said, “always place a house on the brow of a hill, not the top, or you will lose the hill.” The natural landscape is to be respected even enhanced by the presence of the artificial structure, never destroyed or even subdued.

Wright did not invent this sensibility that his creations so well exemplify. It can be seen very clearly in the Japanese Tea garden and ceremony. The plants and trees retain their natural form and shape but, through the painstaking art of the skilled gardener, now possess a perfection of form and harmony with each other that nature alone could never achieve. Nothing of nature has been lost, but something has been added. Nature plus art – more than nature.

So too with the ceremony itself. People meet and share drink. A ordinary natural, organic function, but here practiced with a degree of formality and grace that elevates the simple activity to high art; an experience of peace and beauty.

The natural environment, untouched by human hands, has a beauty and attraction all its own, it is where humans evolved and where we must return to visit, frequently to recharge the well-springs of our inspiration, to experience the gods in their purest form. But it must be a visit only, lest we forget ourselves and return again to our origins as creatures in nature not of nature. That is, to become animals and lose our humanity.

The natural world is full of beauty but also of danger and hardship. Seeds fall at random and trees strive one against the other struggling for life and nutrients, their innately perfect forms twisted and deformed by the struggle. So with all living things in nature, a natural ecology is a wonder of organization and interdependence but random chance is evident throughout. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution and countless intricate life forms wiped out in the instant of a meteor impact. Life in nature is so often “nasty, brutal and short.”

In the garden, the randomness has been removed, the trees and plants all have exactly what they need, there is no striving. So too with the people in the garden, there is no fear of the lurking predator, no race to secure food and nutrients before strength and vitality fade. There is time and peace to contemplate the divinity in nature, in our own souls, still surrounded by nature, and  – by more than nature.

Finding the balance, enhancing nature, taking away some of its destructive randomness without in any way losing the organic integrity you began with it not always easy. Ultimately it becomes the highest art.