BUILDING WITH THE BREATH OF LIFE - Tom Bender - revised draft text 8 Jan.1999

FOREWARD


We are learning slowly the elements of personal health and of community - of dealing with our inner relationships, those with other people, and with our surroundings themselves. Yet the realms of life are far more vast - the standing people, the winged ones, the legged and the finned people, those who surf our inner seas; the people of earth and rock, of water, fire, air, and spirit. There are the ancestors, the beings of light and darkness from other domains, and the consciousness that inhabits the far reaches of stellar space.

From the depths of time, we have been part of and have communicated with this vast and wonderful community. We have danced and sung together. We have shared wisdom and pain, undertaken adventures, experienced mutual awe at the wonder of Creation. Until recently, that is, when we shut ourselves off inside walls of greed and self-centeredness.

In these pages lies a story of acknowledging this wonderful room full of strangers that are really dearest friends. It is a story of learning how to again communicate and share with them. It is a story of how to rejoin Creation and accept a new and more wonderful role in its dance and in its song.

Our surroundings consist of far more than buildings and concrete. Aligning our individual and community intentionality with that of all life brings the power of rightness and the love, support, power and knowledge of all Creation to all we build or make.

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The companion volume to this book - SILENCE, SONG, AND SHADOWS: Our Need for the Sacred in Our Surroundings - is a monograph with over 200 full color illustrations. It explores several dozen of the central concepts of energetics of place which can be applied independently of the historical and theoretical material in this volume.