Welcome to my blog, Aharon’s Omphalos. This is a space I use to jot down thoughts and comments and ideas to be synthesized later. Less a personal journal of my life and psyche and more of a portal into the sort of noosphere envisioned by Teilhard de Chardin - a capable space where I can work on articulating an insight and in that way process all sorts of ideas that I want to invest more time and study in. Please comment or make a correction if you feel the urge to do so while reading.

Professionally, I am a planner, also sometimes called a community planner, city planner, urban planner, or in the UK, town planner. For the last two and a half years I’ve lived and worked in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My main interests as a practicing planner are in preserving habitat and conserving open space through the planning and redevelopment of human settlements, creating recreational and wildlife corridors in urban greenways, and in general, applying innovative green solutions to traditional planning problems. I also like it when people recognize and appreciate the interesting cool things around them (aka environmental and cultural assets), because in general curious people make for vital neighborhoods and caring societies — and so to this end I have also written a neighborhood planning history. (More about that below.) Since Spring 2007, I’ve been a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners, and I have a resume linked down below on the sidebar if my goals appeal to you and if you’re looking for some help.

Personally, my major interests are in developing my awareness, creativity, and compassion. Having grown up Jewish, I use the lattice of Jewish tradition and the socially and environmentally responsible values of derekh eretz (courtesy and consideration) to advance these goals. Besides planning, I like to think about myth as memory, about fantasy as a gloss on a more magical reality, and about the healing intervention of joy through kindness and communication.

I received my Masters degree in Community planning from the University of Cincinnati in 2004. While in Washington, DC, I served as a researcher and program assistant to Peter Harnik at the Center for City Park Excellence, a think tank of the Trust for Public Land that provides basic research on urban park systems. Following hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the Fall of 2005, I’ve worked in Louisiana providing planning support for city, parish, and regional planning initiatives.

In graduate school, I published a book based on the subject of my thesis, the planning and environmental history of a neighborhood of Cincinnati called Bond Hill. The book was published under an Attribution-ShareAlike creative commons license and is available as a free pdf download. The book can also be ordered in print from the online, on-demand printer, lulu.com.

Prior to my work in planning, I toiled as an open source computer programmer for a small Internet company in Philadelphia and computer tech support worker at the University of Pennsylvania. While there I directed the Philadelphia Ambient Consortium, a community arts organization devoted to connecting artists and listeners of ambient, space, and other minimalist, mostly electronic, music. I enjoy bicycling, canoe camping, cloud watching, hammock sailing, practicing the dérive while exploring new cities and towns, and learning more about urban planning, nature, and myth.

Omphalos

Omphalos is Greek for a navel or belly button. In a particular cosmology widespread throughout the ancient world, the omphalos represented the very center of creation, the first solid created, that first bit of earth spread out upon the primordial waters, the foundation stone of the earth, the divider that separated the waters above the heavens from the waters below the earth, as well as the plug that keeps the waters below from rising back up and flooding the entire world. Handcrafted stones and artifacts representing this myth were celebrated as omphalos stones and cultural geographies determined certain sacred cities to be the omphalos of their world. Delphi, the sacred center of the Greek world, held an omphalos stone. The Black Stone of the Kaaba in Mecca is another such stone. (Interstingly, some scholars believe that the original omphalos at Delphi to have been a venerated meteorite, just as the Black Stone is thought to be. The current omphalos stone at Delphi is an ancient copy of this original lost stone.) From at least late antiquity onwards, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem was held to be the navel of the world according to Jews. According to a popular legend concerning the construction of the first temple in Jerusalem, the Even Shetiyah, or Foundation Stone, located at the base of the Temple also served to hold back the underground waters from reflooding and destroying the world. Jerusalem can also be seen depicted as the “navel of the world” in medieval mappa mundi.

This blog is, in a related way, my omphalos since it is the central point for storing the ideas, observations, insights, and expressions that make themselves manifest when I contemplate my world from inside my head, which I guess in practice might be called navel gazing. My omphalos also imports blog posts I’ve written over time at other sites, and shares images taken by my camera that I’ve used to illustrate my articles here.

Contact me

I can be contacted via email at , by mail at: Aharon Varady, 727 Red Bud Ave., Cincinnati, Ohio, or by mobile phone at (513) 405 3603.