Architecture and the Integral Life

Bravo! Alain de Botton and Stuart Davis's dialogue about architecture this week is excellent, and particularly relevant for me: my wife and I have an offer outstanding on a new home and I've been considering very deeply what it means to find and cultivate a "place" in which to live integrally.  We are ambitious, having looked at probably 3,000+ homes online and physically walked through another 100-200, homes spread across 5 states and about 35 cities.  The process has seemed a bit obsessive at times. 

But I have held a strong conviction that a real home is a special and rare thing, a unique relationship created between the exterior of a house's architecture and the interior arising within us as we come to know its every fold, color, texture and angle.  This relationship cannot be forced, and while unique, it must come into its own through a silent conversation that occurs between the heart and the eye as one wanders around every next corner, thrilled and surprised, provoked and assuaged, content and yearning, with nothing less than a love affair ensuing...

When we found the house that we finally(!) made an offer on, I noticed two things: first, that I was wrong in thinking that one becomes less attached to a sense of place the less one holds a sense of self identified with material "stuff."  I had come to believe, largely through the excruciating process of looking and being consistently underwhelmed, that it wasn't the houses we looked at that were underwhelming but rather that it was in fact me that was underwhelmed - that is, I started to think that I probably am just less apt to identify with what any given house represents and therefore a home will just not be as exciting to me as it used to be.  The Integral Life is characterized by seeing oneself reflected in everything, and I merely suspected the downside was that one does not, therefore, see oneself reflected strongly in anything.

Second, I now recognize the opposite is true.  Because I was less attached in general to most of what I experienced, the counterpoint was that much the sweeter when we found it.  You might say that an integral sensibility of patience and detachment caused me to be more picky, more specific, and therefore more delighted when we found something we really loved.  And the key, in retrospect, is to view the process of exploration as a process of self-exploration, a fascinating and at-times quirky introspection. And now that we've actually found a place we love, this brings me to the deep inquiry of what it means to actually cultivate our space for integral living ...

Alain makes the observation that architecture has historically conveyed within it a moral statement, and only through the utilitarian tide of modernism and the relativistic tide of postmodernism have we lost both our personal awareness of notions of aesthetic goodness but also our willingness to insist that "place" can and should be beautiful.  We are both numb and lulled into resignation and, I suspect, quietly ignoring our strong intuition that we desperately seek an exterior space that reflects the truth, goodness and beauty of our inner life.  We want a home that can be a statement of our spiritual radiance while also representing a living process of our own integral unfolding.  Why integral? Because I believe that each space in a home has some unique self, as it were, some special purpose to bring to the family it cares for.  So the question to which I return is what is the art for every room in the integral house (art broadly as color, texture, furniture, design, and actual art)?

Should the kitchen be a place where our art and design celebrates breaking bread with family, the collective aspects of our lives, and where we are reminded of the solar plexus chakra (manipura, related to the stomach, strength, will and sustenance)? Is it masculine or feminine? Or should the kitchen evoke the procreativity of the sexual chakra (svadhistana, related to sex, emotions and feeling) and the reminder to be in touch with the natural biosphere which sustains us?  How can we balance masculine and feminine expressions in the bedroom, emphasize the male/female duality which is at the heart of all creation? Should the bedroom provoke us to rend our hearts open in sexual yoga (as David Deida would put it)? How can the family room be a place of light-heartedness, communion, playfulness and interpersonal development?  Where do we go for individual time, contemplation and study, cognitive and spiritual development? Where do we serve ajna, the third eye chakra of imagination - an art room, or just a place in the house with palette and paint, pen and paper, or a place to sit?  And what role for the yard, a space that might remind of how immense the universe is as we walk into the outdoors and away from the safety of the inner-space? Can it prompt in us the humility and gratitude that we are even here at all, that in the unimaginable complexity and scale of 400 billion galaxies that we have emerged as self-aware expressions of Spirit-in-the-making?

A home is an expression of the art of living, an art form we all practice but one which we often don't recognize.  Not just static art to be hired away to an interior designer to be completed and delivered, but a living process of our own unfolding, a process that demands nothing less than our deep awareness of ourselves as the artist, and indeed even us as the art.  (But a great interior designer can be thought of as a spiritual coach in this broad sense, a far higher calling than merely exterior adornment. Let this be a call to any integral interior designers if you're out there, we want to talk to you!)  All this and more has been on my mind lately, and I am deeply gratified that  Integral Life has done something that fulfills why we founded the company in the first place - it has given me permission to simply be who I already am, freely and fully, by making explicit the rightness and naturalness of a deep intuition I've felt about the need for "place" to be beautiful.  My deep gratitude to Alain and Stuart for this wonderful gift.