Of Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building and Ethnography

I was on a wine farm in Stanford, South Africa, when a handwritten note on my bed started me down a new but not new path.

You have always used your mind, but now it is time to use your hands as well.

The stories that reside deep within my soul are cultured ones. Of beauty. Of flourishing. Of warmth and love and laughter.

When I step into a place, I see the people, the land, the built spaces with the eyes of my heart. I see them whole, original, fulfilled. It's a principle I call, "Delighting." I delight in people that inhabit places, and the places that hold the people.

This summarizes my journey in Ogbomoso. I have held and still hold the place within me. Nourishing it by immersing it in the overflow of my delight.

Because of this, there's a need for language that encompasses, that does justice, that unfolds and knits and frames. This language is poetry. It is song. It is glossolalia.

Over the years I have built this language one step at a time. I have coined and "vernacularized" new words, parsed some from those I have heard, but much more harvested others verbatim from men and women living and dead.

When I saw some titles of Christopher Alexander's books, I felt these words could easily have been pulled from my inner language.

The Timeless Way of Building. The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth. A Vision of a Living World. The Process of Creating Life.

It's 9 months since I joined the Building Beauty programme. While not a direct student of Alexander, I am just a generation removed as I have been taught and guided by those who worked directly with him.

In these months, I have learnt about centres, nested centres and field of centres. I have recognized the place of feeling in designing, creating and building. I have conceived and moulded clay ornaments, from my garage in Ogbomoso to a kitchen in Maryland, DC. I have built human-sized cardboard mockups of furniture in rooms and shaped the volume of an entire house using bamboo sticks and surveyor's tape. Now, at the tail end of the programme, I am writing a Project Language for a space we are designing for the Ogbomoso community. The unfolding of that has been heavenly!

So, in these past months, just like that note foretold, I have extended far beyond the use of my mind to the use of my hands in delighting, shaping and building. On the other hand, in these past months, and this is the greater miracle of the entire process, I have arrived at the confluence of my thoughts and work, Christopher Alexander's thoughts and the praxis of ethnography in designing and implementing interventions for the places we seek to serve.

I realize that the past decade and some of living a rooted life in the place I call home, and the practice of delighting in it, is one of the reasons we have been able to really build something meaningful here. Within the past year, Christopher Alexander helped me move beyond language to embodied practice. With many reaching out to us over the years to understand how we have done our work in Ogbomoso, we are now able to distill what we know and have experienced in our almost incarnational presence here into an ethnography praxis that will lead to transformation and flourishing beyond imagination in Nigeria and across the continent of Africa.