Wendell, Chris and Me

I've been going to work for more than 30 years. In my 20s, I was a television news producer. In my 30s, fresh out of architecture school, I ran redevelopment projects in my home city of Portland, Oregon. Through my 40s, I was hired by a couple of nearby suburbs to lead municipal planning and public works departments, and I returned to the City of Portland in my mid-50s to play out my career in public service.

Or so I thought.

Like so many others in 2025, I learned that my employer had other ideas. I wasn't even laid off as part of a restructuring (not that that's easier); instead I was shown the door, just me, with nothing but an apology reeking of indifference and superiority.

Disoriented and despondent for a couple weeks, it felt like I had passed a professional "sell by" date I didn't even know I had.

It's interesting what happened next. With clarity about just a couple things -- being my own boss and working "in place," I started a venture that, I'm now convinced, had been gestating in me from the start. That is, I think it picked me more than the other way around. The company, called HERE, helps Portland-area businesses find Portland-based freelancers and independent consultants who offer professional services. It's an offline, in-person, local-only, handmade and slow-growth throwback to a bygone way of doing business.

It's taken 30 years but I finally feel like I'm part of the world-remaking project of my two intellectual heroes, Wendell Berry and Chris Alexander.

I've written about the pair before (Battle Cries for Life). Born three years apart, they published their magnum opera, A Pattern Language and The Unsettling of America, just weeks apart in the summer of 1977. (Please! Someone! There's a book or documentary waiting to be made about the nearly simultaneous birth of these twin peaks of antiestablishmentarianism).

Better than anyone, these two understood and described what we were losing in the 20th century. It wasn't just that industry, corporations, and technology were funneling more and more of our lives into their machinery. The ground itself was falling away. We were losing our ability to understand what was happening to us.

Alexander and Berry wrote how modernity was destroying traditional connections that bound us to the places we live, work and sleep, and especially to the natural world to which we immanently belong. They explained why it was happening -- how architecture and farming that once supported the togetherness of people, and the feeling of togetherness in a person, was being systematically sacrificed in the name of progress and productivity.

Over decades and in millions of words, they also posited how we could recover what was being lost. Their stubborn adherence to their ideas, and their drive to practice and perfect them, was matched only by the other. The most shocking fact about them may be that they lived and worked contemporaneously without any knowledge of each other.

Chris Alexander died in 2022, having completed his life's work, the four-part, million-word essay The Nature of Order: On the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe. Wendell is still with us. He released Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story earlier this year. In their combined hundred-plus years of writing, they produced an edifice of protest -- one urban, the other rural. One grounded in concrete, ceramic and color, the other in soil, food and community. Both replete with alternative ways of thinking and living to overturn the systems that alienate us from nature and life itself.

I was powerfully drawn to their diagnoses --- young adults are commonly attracted to older adults who explain why the world is more cruel and less fair than it ought to be. But the prognoses I found in them -- these lifted me straight into the air, much the way I imagine the Hallelujah chorus or Eucharist does for the devoted.

The path home, they teach, is right here underfoot. It's in our hands. It's entirely at hand, and nowhere else. It's made knowable through our senses and affections. To get home, you don’t reach and strive for ideas and ideals. Instead you use your God-given faculties to appreciate where you are. "Look and see," Wendell would say. "Listen for the small voice," Chris wrote. "That tiny soft-and-hard vulnerable feeling, recognizable as something you know."

How comforting. How beautiful. The Buddhist and Taoist texts I had also discovered in my 20s were saying exactly the same things. I had all I needed. We all do. We just need to stop pretending like we know, believing that someone else knows, distracting ourselves with ideals and idols.

These guys were living proof to boot. They created gardens, farms, buildings, fields, books, lectures, poems and paintings that made their ideas manifest in the material world. Also in the minds of so many of us who yearn for a paradigm that would center the organic in place of the mechanistic.

And so in my 58th year, I finally get to try my hand at creating a tiny fractal of all this. I'm working to circulate prosperity and build resilience in my home place for the people who live here and who are working outside the corporate regime. It's as slow as the building of healthy soil -- a one-person-at-a-time project, succeeding through real-life conversations and the sedimentation of familiarity, trust and affection that accumulate from there.

As I've said many times before, I'm no farmer nor much of a designer. But I do know people, and my long apprenticeship under the influence of these men has taught me to see and seek what is healthy, whole and life-giving. I'm in business to fill a gap in the labor market but not only that. I'm also in business to knit an in-person community for so many whose work is too solitary, too meaningless, and chained to a screen of faces in faraway places.

***

This became a walk with Wendell and Chris because I've been reading Wendell's fairly famous 1980 essay "Solving for Pattern." Alexander's best known work, "A Pattern Language," theorized that buildings and communities achieve life through specific, nameable configurations or patterns that describe relationships. These relationships are what allow a space or structure to be whole. They resolve a field of forces, or create a zone of coherence that contributes to a larger coherence. Some of the sentences in Berry's "Solving for Pattern" are so Alexanderian you'd think they were plagiarized. For example, here's Wendell on the harmony of a good solution:

A good solution acts within the larger pattern the way a healthy organ acts within the body. But it must at once be understood that a healthy organ does not -- as the mechanistic or industrial mind would like to say --- "give" health to the body, is not exploited for the body's health, but is a part of its health. The health of organ and organism is the same, just as the health of organism and ecosystem is the same.

In Berry, the ultimate standard of goodness is always health. In Alexander, it's life. What is good is alive and is known by the feeling of aliveness that it evokes in us. He theorized that this quality of life is comprised of centers -- the smallest essential building blocks that must be present for a larger structure, whether a physical building or a human community, to feel alive and whole. Alexander is always oscillating between the cosmological and the everyday. He was at pains to provide the empirical evidence that proved the theory. Here is how he saw this quality of life activated in a simple terrace of bays and columns:

"The terrace is made of structural bays—each made by four columns—each roughly square... Each of these bays is itself a center. The columns are centers too. And on each column, on each of its corners, there is a chamfer. The chamfer is once again a center in its own right. Each of the four-column bays is helped to be alive by these tiny chamfers on the columns at the corners of the bay... each bay becomes more of a center, and is more alive, because of the chamfer."

These are not easy concepts to get because they insist, against our Newtonian indoctrination, that parts are also wholes and that wholes exhibit health or aliveness. Further, wholeness is comprised of other wholenesses, which interact and enliven each other while maintaining their own integrity too. It's heady stuff and perhaps beggars belief, but part of Alexander's charm is his accessible and confessional writing style, especially when toeing these conceptual cliffs. Here he is in the preface to Book 4 of The Nature of Order:

The real heart of the matter is something which is not so easily talked about, something nearly embarrassing, which we would not feel entirely comfortable to blurt out too easily, even to mention...But when I am part of the making of a building and examine my process...I find that I am nearly always reaching for the same thing...It is that shining something which draws me on, which I feel in the bones of the world, which comes out of the earth and makes our existence luminous.

In his Author's Note at the beginning of the The Luminous Ground, he analogizes what he's trying to describe with quantum mechanics. When first formulated, quantum mechanics "stood apart from other fields of physics and even today (exhibits) questions and inconsistencies internally." It's hard to fathom how physical space may be alive, sure. But subatomic particles aren't supposed to exist in multiple locations at once either, and they decidedly do.

Alexander endeavors to describe how the metaphysical can be observed. Berry, on the other hand, finds God's laws revealed through observation itself. These are the ultimate patterns for Berry and are made legible through “standards. Like Chris, Wendell is forever considering standards -- discernments of what's good, or more precisely, what's healthy, and what's universal. Where Alexander found centers of life at every scale, Berry sees standards of health applicable across every domain.

Critical standards...will work to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy farms, as well as between the oversimplified minds that solve problems for some X such as profit or quantity of production, and those minds, sufficiently complex, that solve for health, or quality, or coherence of pattern. To me, the validity of these standards seems inherent in their general applicability. They will serve the making of sewer systems or households as readily as they will serve the making of farms.

What are these standards? He describes 14 at the end of the "Solving for Pattern" essay, and they are worth reading in full.

He begins with Limits -- accepting them and working within them. More money and more technology don't solve soil erosion, air pollution or species loss, for example. Limiting extractive activities is a far better solution to each of these problems.

Alexander also rejected modernism's false promise of unlimited possibility. Respecting and even embracing limits of place, materials, human scale, and local conditions is necessary for creating wholeness. The modernist movement that Alexander was fighting -- a universal style to be applied anywhere -- was in fact the very antithesis of the adaptive, living quality that both he and Berry believe emerges only by respecting particular constraints.

Another of Berry's standards has to do with coherence. Solutions shouldn't externalize negative impacts. On a farm, the right solutions would make the place productive and healthful and beautiful and neighborly. Solutions that create new problems, or make "necessary" trade-offs, are no solutions at all. Alexander, a mathematically trained structuralist, understood coherence the same way -- not as a nice-to-have, but as the fundamental quality of a complete and intact system.

The wholeness is a structure which is so coherent, so tightly knit, that it is not possible to change one part of it without changing all the other parts. It is a field-like effect. Because of this, it is also a structure which is very sensitive. It can be damaged easily. Anything which does not actively support the wholeness, destroys it.

In a living system, one bad apple really does spoil the bunch. That's not just an idiom. A rotting apple releases ethylene gas, which signals to apples around it to ripen and rot faster. This is a “field effect:” dead centers and bad solutions are not isolates. They break systems. Without coherence, damage always occurs.

This implies another standard, also captured in an old adage. The reason not to put all your eggs in one basket is because wide margins of error are necessary for tolerating mistakes. Nature spreads her bets and so should we, not just to protect our interests but to protect hers as well. Berry writes "the failure of one solution should not imply the impossibility of another." As always, Alexander says nearly the same thing.

Large-scale design is almost always a failure, because it is impossible to predict the subtle interactions of a million small things. Every large-scale design is a mistake; only the gradual, step-by-step development of a system can lead to a living result.

The state, and all the institutions that grow large under its auspices, are large-scale, health-damaging designs. They are rather mechanisms of human control. Whether in the form of big tech, centralized government, or industrial agriculture -- the big solution governs us precisely because it is manageable. The more uniform and consistent a system, the easier its is to monitor, tax, and standardize.

These standards are perfectly opposed to those championed by Wendell and Chris. Alexander's final work, published in 2012 was unsurprisingly called The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems. He was arguing that these sets of standards are not just oppositional, but are rather at war, ontologically. One system is supportive of life and the other, by its very nature and purpose, is programmed to destroy it. That second system is winning. Life on Earth is losing.

***

I'll often skip to the last paragraph of long Substack posts to read what I hope are the author's tidiest conclusions. Here's what I hope you'll take away from this one:

• In times such as these, when large systems seem hellbent on casting off every last safeguard of care and restraint, it is worth considering alternative, life-affirming ways of thinking, acting and being. Such alternative worldviews and examples do exist in men like Wendell Berry and Christopher Alexander. They spent their lives testing and expounding two such systems which are strikingly synchronous and I would add, beautiful.

  
  

• The large systems that are failing us may be zombies, but they are still artifacts of human enterprise. They were made by people and if they are to be improved, the improvements will also be made by people. And so every aspect of these problems call for virtues that are specifically human: accurate memory, observation, insight, imagination, inventiveness, reverence, devotion, fidelity and above all else right now, restraint (this is straight from WB).

• What we need are good solutions. Solutions that bring more life and health not only to the living, but to the spaces we inhabit, to the soils that feed us, to the groups and circles we find ourselves in contact with every day. We need to learn to emulate the organic by practicing good character, cultural preservation and fidelity to moral law.

• If this sounds daunting, bookmark this short comparative essay of the belief systems of Wendell Berry and Christopher Alexander for reference. It was written by Claude, the AI model, at my prompting. You will be inspired, nevertheless.

• Life, health and beauty are why we are here and what we are. Find the people who help you remember that, and embrace these as your standards. Forget the rest. The only A-B testing worth its salt is the Alexander-Berry test.