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…