Beginnings - Teaching Kiteflying in Bed Stuy, 1977

The most formative experience underlying my life-practice occured on a blustery March afternoon in 1977.

I was crossing the one big lawn on the campus of Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.

I saw 2 young boys attempting to fly a kite.

Unsuccessfully.

Walking over to them I noted that they had come from the nearby neighborhood (whose residents were largely structurally poor or working class and neglected) and were wearing those imitation Artic Jackets, blue with orange lining in the hood, and fake wolverine fur trim. Both were black, maybe 7, or underdeveloped for 12.

They were playing with one of those diamond shaped, wax paper kites on a balsa wood cross that many of us know - the ones with a space ship image on them. It was put together in ways not shown on the directions, and not flying.

I offered to help. They gave me the kite. I put it together correctly, and found some trash paper nearby to use as a tail to counter the gusty winds.

The string they had was a spool of industrial thread from their mother's piece work sewing at home. It was strong enough. I made a yoke, tied on the tail and the spool to the yoke and handed it to them.

Now, for anyone who knew kites and the wind, this was a day that required no running to get a kite skyborne. Merely holding it facing the wind and letting go would suffice.

They were unable to loft the kite. They had no idea how to address the wind.

I showed them, and walked away to the sound of their excited directions to each other as the kite danced above them.

As I left them I was mindful of how much I had learned in my childhood about the fundamental interactions of the pattern of life by flying kites, sailing, playing with snow runoff rivulets on the hills of White Plains, spending days knee deep in living streams, days watching wildlife in the saltgrass marshes and exploring the dwindling woodlands for ponds full of reptiles, and similar playful activities.

Fluid dynamics, flows, dams and catastrophic failures of blockages, how the invisible wind can change the fate of kites. Cycles of life, struggles, birdsongs marking boundaries, fish sheltering in the eddies behind boulders.

I expected that the boys had not lived in places and cultures where those lessons came readily to hand. And yet, I knew that they had internalized other aspects of the pattern of life that I could not imagine.

I reflected on the fact that our urban environment often fails to celebrate the very forces that can teach us, vicerally, how life works: The storm runoff I spent days knee deep in, treated as waste, and shunted into a pipe as soon as possible to be mingled with our effluents and expedited into our waterways to cause rapid flooding, and close beaches when the underground rivers were in spate.

Places barren of life other than human and our domesticated companions.

The plazas where invisible winds undress people, blow over furniture and make kites of abandonned plastic bags.

Having studied the incremental development of NYC, I knew that, as each farm was monetized and sub-divided, it was assumed that there was no need to celebrate the pattern of life - one was surrounded by ever dwindling but reliable living systems, and besides, it was miracle enough to gather millions of folk into a city and have toilets and under ground sewers to eliminate epidemics.

Life, in that sense, was a problem we had solved successfully.

Before I arrived a block away at my apartment, I had picked up kite string at the art supply store, and I'd made several commitments to myself:

1. To always have kite string at hand in case the next boys did not have adequate thread (and I have done so to this day - it's just down stairs)
2. To devote my practice to re-integrating the passive didactic learning that arises from the celebration and mindful enhancement of the pattern of life, which we are each of us always an ephemeral expression of.

And I have done so to this day, in everything I have done since.

• Building Meridian Design Associates, Architects (www.meridiandesign.com)
• Living an integrated life in my communities. (www.westchesterhealthcarereform.org)
• Pursuing the practical application of powerful ideas, such as:
• Bio-regionalism (http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1561&context=ced/places)
• Archeoastronomy (http://sites.google.com/site/meridianmusicproject/)
  
• Evolutionary Urbanism (http://dipw.meridiandesign.com/, http://sites.google.com/site/dipwbronxwhitepaper/)
  
• Living in Long Time (sustaining family, marriage, partnerships, community, places)
  

That is what I do.