The Keeper

Stabilizer Self-sufficient World Process

Think of someone who has kept a mountain path safe for thirty years, out of sight.

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The shape

This shape looks after something other people need, such as a family's affairs or a mountain path, and keeps at it year after year, mostly out of view. Each task leads to another, and the work moves on before any thanks arrive.

In ordinary life

A retired forester in Slovenia has cleared fallen trees and repaired the bridges and signs on one mountain path for thirty years, and most of the walkers who use it are strangers to him.
A homemaker in Alexandria has kept her extended family's papers, medicines and important dates in order for decades and calls each of her aunts every Sunday, of her own accord.
An IT technician at a school in Warsaw has kept its old network running for fifteen years, mostly in the evenings and on weekends, so that lessons start smoothly each morning.

Lives with this shape

Each life here is drawn from its own record, which shows the shape.

Jeon Hyeong-pil (1906 to 1962)

From the early 1930s, while Korea was under Japanese rule, Jeon Hyeong-pil spent much of a large inherited fortune on Korean paintings, ceramics and calligraphy. Among the things he kept was the copy of the Hunminjeongeum Haerye, the 1446 book that explains the Korean alphabet, found in Andong in 1940 and now a National Treasure of Korea. Keeping for decades what a whole country would later name a national treasure shows the shape from outside.

Sources: koreatimes.co.kr, koreatimes.co.kr (2), media.unesco.org, en.wikipedia.org

Penelope (fiction)

In Homer's Odyssey, Penelope waits on Ithaca for the twenty years Odysseus is away, and for three years holds off the men who want to marry her by weaving a burial cloth by day and unpicking it by torchlight at night. Hidden work, repeated for years, that keeps a household intact for the people in it shows the shape from outside.

Source: gutenberg.org

Closest neighbor

The Lighthouse shares three of these sides and differs on being seen: it gives steady care for years as a presence people can see and turn to, while this shape works out of view, where the work counts in full.

One side away

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

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