Houses

Our bodies are housing our hearts, souls and intellects. It is our biological house.

We started to live in artificial shelters when we started to tame the fire. We gave fire a shelter and so we found one too.

The most primitive, artificial shelter for very few people is the hut, which centralizes the fireplace and let all community members and house inhabitants circle around it.

The communities grew bigger through time and from one little hut it became a village. Often circular arranged with an outer line of living houses and one central community building with the ceremonial community fireplace.

As long as the access to the fireplace was equally each member of the society had similar rights. However as soon as the community reached the threshold that not everybody could reach the central fireplace equally, the village stratified into many smaller circles and developed a hierarchy with circular structures to reach everybody.

Such political structures allowed the development of larger societies without much contact between the different layers. The leaders of such community fulfill now the role of the central fire, which nourishes the bounds of the group. Once the group reaches a state wide character and identifies itself with a territory and nation we face the alienation of certain parts of the group which are marked as outlaws, foreigners or terrorists. They will fall outside the social housing.

We live in houses. Cities are houses for our culture. Nations are the modern houses for larger territories.

Houses have walls which protect the inhabitants and locks out all strangers. The same applies to cities and nations.

But a house with open doors and windows invites creativity, plurality, and widens the possibilities. A shut closed house features ideologies and estrangement of outsiders. Everyone who does not fit in is a foreigner.

Therefore, we should consider to open our hearts, houses, cities and nations for new ideas, people and cultures.