Ring Six — The Beams
02032
A story worth living outgrows its teller.
The story goes like this: New College, Oxford — founded 1379 — discovers the great oak beams of its dining hall riddled with beetle. No oak that size can be bought. Someone finally asks the college forester, who says: we’ve been waiting for you to ask. A grove was planted at the founding, for this exact day.
The story spread through Gregory Bateson and then Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn, and it is almost true. The college’s own archivist checked: New College really did hold oak woodland for centuries, and when the hall was re-roofed in the 1860s, the oaks really did come from college land. What no one can find is evidence that anyone marked those trees for that roof. The neatest part of the story is later polish on a plainer thing.
The plainer thing holds, and is better: an institution simply kept planting oaks it would never live to use, generation after generation, because that is what keeping a thing alive for six hundred years requires. Nobody needed the legend’s foresight. They needed the habit.
Plant the habit. The strangers will find the beams.
What are you planting that only strangers will harvest?
← back to the lightThis page will never ask you for anything.
No account. No list. It only gives.
— Ian ✦