Once you've worked with love, you won't want to work in any other way.

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole, and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.

I first feel existence shimmering in reality, and I then feel it deep enough in the thing I am looking at and trying to make, to know it is worth capturing in concrete and wood and tile and paint. … This thing, this something, is not God, it is not nature, it is not feeling. It is some ultimate, beyond experience. When I reach for it, I try to find— I can partly feel— the illumination of existence, a glimpse of that ultimate. It is always the same thing at root. Yet, of course, it takes an infinite variety of different forms.

This is what I have felt on the beach on the north shore of Point Reyes, near San Francisco, when the sea comes crashing in with enormous force, when the water and wind are too loud for me to hear my voice, the waves too strong for me to think of swimming, the force of the water and the wind, the white foam of the waves, the blackish green moving water, the huge, loud grinding swells, the beach sand that goes on forever, the seaweeds strewn on the beach that have been hurled by a force greater than they are— as I am, also, when I walk among them. Yet, even though I am next to nothing in the presence of all this forces, I am free there. In such a place, at such a moment, I am crushed to understand my own smallness, and then understand the immensity of what exists. But this immensity of what exists— and my connection to it— is not only something in my heart. It is a vastness which is outside me and beyond me and inside of me.

A pattern language is what we create for a project to specify this project at the right level of abstraction. It gives us a stepwise path through the problem-solving process, so that we can, step-by-step, adapt each center to the neighboring centers, and weave them into a field of centers which are all working together. It allows us to avoid overspecifying all the details that we don't understand in the beginning. – Ryan Singer interpreting Christopher Alexander

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Alexander on Patterns

Framing, from intro: The Timeless Way of Building says that every society which is alive and whole, will have its own unique distinct pattern language; and further, that every individual in such a society will have a unique language, shared in part...in a healthy society there will be as many pattern languages as there are people... we have written this book as a first step in the society-wide process by which people will gradually become conscious of their own pattern languages, and work to improve them... We have spent years trying to formulate this language, in the hope that when a person uses it, he will be so impressed by its power, and so joyful in its use, that he will understand again, what it means to have a living language of this kind. And yet we do believe, of course, that this language which is printed here is something more than a manual, or a teacher, or aversion of a possible pattern language. Many of the patterns here are archetypal... it seems likely that they will be part of a human nature...We doubt very much whether anyone could construct a valid pattern language, in his own mind, which did not include the pattern Arcades (119) for example, or the pattern Alcoves (179)... This sequence of patterns is also the "base map", from which you can make a language for your own project, by choosing the patterns which are most useful to you. Well that's incoherent...

http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/AlexanderPatterns

from Christopher Alexander: A Primer