We are nothing but growth

Growth is extremely noble. Growth is extremely selfless. Growth is more than an extension, an aggrandizement, a push, an increase, a change in current proportions, dynamics, feeling, and form.

Growth is to go beyond the life that had been emballmed in previous ideas, cast from previous lives. Growth is to pump the veins of this moment's capacities with fresh blood, to enliven the limbs of life and let them dance.

Growth is to have the utmost respect and adoration for time. Growth is to selfessly admit to history and time's permanence, a clever smirk ever gazing over the channels upon channels of growing things stuck and floating in space.

Growth is to admit to the reality of the moment, to look existence right in the eyes and to see that we -- as human beings -- are nothing but growth... and decay, rot, death, birth... For nothing changes except that which is changed, and with change a demarcation of the moment is exercised, and with the recognition of a moment's presence one recognizes change between then, now, and potential change.

Growth is to throw away the fears of death and to embrace a reality of freedom. Growth is to be open to maturation.

Like a "Clock of the Long Now," a Building of the Long Now, a City of the Long Now.

To design a building and a city with -- built into the design -- the intentional capacity for continuous regrowth, growth, and for continuous rearticulation and fabrication, continuous articulation and change, and to design it with a capacity for temporal and spatial expression, both within the original vision -- the seeding germ -- and the contemporary ideals -- the stone beams, broken desires, and careful reflections.

This is what man's presence accounts for! It is a dream. It is a reality. It is a phantasy. It is a fiction. It is a fact of dreams, realities, phantasies, and fictions imagined in the past. Our current state of growths is a current state of growths within many growths.

Such growth is long-range planning. Such growth is the institutions of man. Such growth is the Earth. Such growth is the mind. Such growth is the Universe.

We are a long presence! We -- and extend the word beyond our simple connotations -- are growth! Lives as only bubbles on the surface of the ocean. Bubbles of air both critical to and consequential from life within. Bubbles ever bubbling, gurggling, sucked into the waves and gushed out again.

(c) M. Waxman 2007.