The Mark

A doorway at Machu Picchu

In April 2026 I walked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, five days across high passes to a ridge in the Andes. What stays with me is the stone. Walls, windows, and doorways cut more than five centuries ago, still standing. And the doorways are not rectangles. They taper: wider at the floor than at the top.

Geometry that holds

That taper is not ornamental. The Inca cut their stones to fit one another without mortar, and set their walls leaning slightly inward, a batter (the gentle inward slope masons give a wall). Trapezoidal openings and inward‑leaning walls lower a structure’s center of mass and resist toppling. It matters here: the Andes are seismically active. When the ground moves, the unmortared stones can shift and settle back into place. Inca walls in Cusco have outlasted earthquakes that brought down the colonial buildings raised on top of them. The shape is engineering: strength through geometry rather than adornment.

Finding the golden ratio

The doorway stayed with me after I came home. I wanted the mark for Sweldens Innovations to be that trapezoid, but a trapezoid can be drawn a thousand ways, and I did not want an arbitrary one. Working through the proportions with Claude, an AI assistant, we found a trapezoid that has the golden ratio and matches the Inca aspect ratio.

Let the base equal 1. Set the top to 1/φ and the height to φ. Two things follow.

• The top, base, and height read 1/φ : 1 : φ, a geometric progression.
• The base is the geometric mean of the top and the height: top × height = base × base.

And the sides lean inward about 6.7°, close to the batter of real Inca walls. So the mark is a doorway by inspiration and golden by construction.

What it means to me

I see three things in the mark:

• Innovation. A doorway is a threshold, a way through to something new.
• Stability. The design kept it standing through history for five hundred years. That reminds me of the middle way I try to keep in my own spiritual practice.
• Humanity. We can never forget the human hands that cut the stone and built the doorway.

I believe it is a fitting mark for the work we do at Sweldens Innovations.