Both design and religion are responses to the ineffable. In each, we try to preserve something given by reality, something intuited but not grasped, something that cannot be captured in words. In both, intervention and control by words threatens the quality of our response. Words want to replace what they should convey and preserve.

The more completely language intervenes in perception, the more language logically formats all understanding and the more language directs and controls all action, the less inspired the response will be.

This is what makes so much of what organized religion and organized design produces so flat and dry and stale and boring. Even the words such organizations say are the product of words. Nothing is said or done or given from the heart or hands without being packaged and shrink-wrapped by the brain-mouth.

Again and again we must go to reality, go to the ground and allow ourselves to intuit and respond to what is there, to who is there, to what we are shown and taught. We must change in response, change into someone who responds naturally to what is given. Only if we make this change can our speech can assist us.

Rapport itself a kind of knowledge, not a means to capture data to analyze later. Rapport is an intuitive attunement to some particular personful reality. Rapport does not end when a conversation ends, it continues on in our responses, only some of which is speech, much of which must now be poetic. If you can hold on to the rapport, if you can cultivate a tradition of rapport, if you renew the rapport by returning often to the ground, y’all can be in touch with someone transcending you and your organization.

Both design and religion are alike in this respect.