Path of LivingThe sixteen types
Theme

The Gardener

Stabilizer Self-sufficient Self Process

Think of a dentist who has played the cello alone at home each morning for fifteen years.

One of the sixteen types a reading can name. Begin the reading

The shape

This shape is a small, settled life looked after day by day, often around one place and one craft that gets a little better each year. Nothing in it is waiting to be finished or approved by anyone; what counts is that the looking-after goes on.

In ordinary life

Lives with this shape

None of these people took the reading. The record of each shows the shape.

Giorgio Morandi (1890 to 1964)

From 1910 until his death in 1964, Giorgio Morandi lived on Via Fondazza in Bologna with his family, painted the bottles, bowls and boxes he kept in his room there, and did not visit Paris until 1956. One street, one city and a few ordinary objects, returned to for more than fifty years, show the shape from outside.

Sources: bolognawelcome.com, en.wikipedia.org

Candide (fiction)

At the end of Voltaire's Candide (1759), after wars, shipwrecks and losses across Europe and South America, Candide settles with his friends on a small farm near Constantinople and answers his tutor's last grand theory with "let us cultivate our garden." An ending that chooses a small piece of ground and the daily work of keeping it over every larger scheme shows the shape from outside.

Source: gutenberg.org

Closest neighbor

The Keeper shares three of these sides and differs on where the change lands: its care goes to a household, a place or people that depend on it, while this shape's care goes into its own life.

One side away

Each shares three sides with this shape. On the right is the side it has instead.

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