I've just come back from the office early to cut myself some slack and relax my mind for a bit. The last weeks have been too heavy on the travelling, thinking and playing - I burnt my candles both ends for a little too long. Conversing, reading, listening, talking, presenting, discussing, dialoguing have left me with a deep felt need to stand still for a bit and be quiet to let the brain storm die down. When it doesn't take long for tiredness to kick in it's better to rest than push on and do things half-hearted or second rate.

Sitting in the window smoking a cigarette a black bird landed on the rooftop opposite my house. It looked at me and ruffled its feathers. For a long time. As it sat there staring in my direction all of these things came together. Sitting still, ruffling feathers, looking at the world from my window, fieldwork, network, work-work, time and place. Ruffling. Then the black bird took off, dived down in the garden next door and disappeared. Sometimes what previously seemed like disparate entities come together in a dance to take part in a new or different constellation. This constellation adds a dimension to each entity but it is essentially its own.

Manuel Castell's sees two defining characteristics of network culture: individuation and sharing. Individuation as the basis of human action is the process where the actors define what they do and how they live from their own perspective but not from the perspective of society. It is both individual and collective - it is not anti-social, or even anti-society (whatever that is). It is networked. Networks are platforms of sharing. Both individuation and sharing creates autonomy for actors as users are becoming the producers of these platforms and the technology that underpins them.

This enables cultural change from the grassroots. If culture is that which we pass on between ourselves over generations, worldview and ethics are key to assess what kind of future cultures we may see. The freedom created by networked cultures can be used both to promote healthy communities and obtain more power or privileges in the world as it is. The speed with which new kinds of community platforms and organisations are spreading indicates that the freedom of the network is primarily a healthy and empowering thing.

They may be doing what someone perceptively put to me as the only thing we can really hope to do in the little time we have on this planet: create a little less chaos. This, to me, creates an image of communities as processors of the debris of the post-modern society: places where all that has come unstuck gets picked up and put into a new context. The fragility of the infrastructures we rely on is already showing us large holes in the social fabric, and communities could be in the process of re-using and re-building the fabrics of infrastructures on principles of resilience and self-reliance.

Another insight that someone passed onto me and I am slowly beginning to understand is the connection between beauty and what is right. What is right is often that which suggests itself in the moment, which doesn't take a lot of effort and which feels like it fits. Which fits the condition of wholeness. Beauty, and this is of course the beauty inherent in what we like to call nature, is the principle we have for healthy living, choosing,  navigating, creating.

There is a difference between patterns and harmony. Patterns only indicates repetition which, when it is habitual, lazy, or neurotic, is often destructive. Destructive patterns seem to imply a high level of self-reflection on behalf of that which repeats. Harmony doesn't really require self-reflection as much as it requires unfolding in communion with the surroundings of that which repeats. This movement in concordance with the surroundings gives the pattern more rhythm. It is beautiful in many more dimensions.

Emergence is what happens when things come together and fall into place. What triggers this falling into place?

Ruffling feathers.