World Building 101

A dance between spirit and form

I was relating the dance of life between spirit and form to the jitterbug that we have been learning about from the book club reading through A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller by Amy Edmondson. I have associated the three elementary forms of the Bauhaus, the blue circle, yellow triangle, and red square, to the design process: imagine, design, and build. Design sits in the gap between vision (imagination) and reality (architecture). In Buckminster Fuller’s understanding, the triangle is the metaphysical concept that we apply to our understanding of three-dimensional geometry and four-dimensional process, with the tetrahedron as the elementary form of Nature’s architectural framework. It was in the conversation between Rob and Kristen Bell that I heard them exploring the themes of his new book, Everything is Spiritual. Reminded of how Buckminster Fuller said, “I seem to be a verb,” I thought of the three-word title of Rob Bell’s book, focusing on the two-letter word in the middle, a conjugation of the verb, “to be.” Then Rob and Kristen were talking about how form needs spirit and spirit needs form. It is a kind of dance. The parables of Jesus were a dance between spirit and form. I was thinking that parables could be summarized by the phrase, “The physical is a metaphor for the metaphysical.” It was a play on the words meta, “beyond,” physics, and metaphor.

Physics (from Ancient Greek: φυσική (ἐπιστήμη), romanized: physikḗ (epistḗmē), lit. ‘knowledge of nature’, from φύσις phýsis ‘nature’) is the natural science that studies matter,[a] its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. Physics is one of the most fundamental scientific disciplines, and its main goal is to understand how the universe behaves.

— Wikipedia

A metaphor is a comparison of two different things to relate them to an idea or concept, thereby connecting the physical to the metaphysical.

We use symbol systems in language to create mental associations between audible sounds formed by oral manipulation of the flow of breath past vocal chords and abstract concepts in the form of words.

Words are one of the ways humans engage in a sort of dance between spirit and form.