Repeating Patterns

Where There Is Beauty, There Is Hope

I’ve been following the images being sent from the James Webb Telescope, which captured this view of a galaxy 32 million light years away from earth, with its arms and filaments of cosmic gas and dust spiraling outward. Looking at this image I can sense how it is moving, but at an utterly expansive timeline. It is a reminder of the briefness of my own timeline here on this blue green planet, and yet I find myself comforted by the familiar shape of this spiral galaxy, The natural world is filled with fractals, hexagons, wave patterns, circles and spirals. The shape of a galaxy is the same pattern we see in an eddy at the ponds edge, a tiny snail shell or unfurling fern. Humans have continued to repeat the shape by carving it into ancient stones and structures, they painted it on walls and ceramics, wove it into garments and other fabrics, we see it still in the headstocks of cellos and the gathered hay in the fields.

Repeating patterns

There is something right about the patterns that keep showing up in the natural world, from the very smallest to the most expansive expression of the shape.

I visited London this week. We had a bit of time before heading to the airport, so my husband, Robert, and I stepped into the British Museum. We visited a section of the museum that had examples of ancient and contemporary art from Africa. In one room was an large beautiful contemporary sculpture of the Tree of Life. After a terrible civil war, a local spiritual leader in Mozambique had suggested people be offered to trade their guns for useful and life giving farming tools in a project called Swords into Ploughshares . The thousands upon thousands of collected guns were cut up into pieces so that they were rendered forever useless as weapons. Then four artist took the pieces and welded them into the winding trunk and outward reaching branches of the Tree of Life. This is a link to a more detailed description of how and why the piece was created in honor of those who stood up against a culture of violence.

Yes, our unkindness toward one another is a repeating pattern and I suppose until we learn how intimately we are connected and how long an unkindness echoes, it will continue.

And yet, there is another ongoing pattern that expresses itself in the beauty we create and the goodness we aspire to live in daily, direct and indirect ways. There is a pattern of people who stand up to create change even when the issues they face seem like insurmountable. There is a pattern of love being the greater power for true and real change. I have a deep sense that in the end it will not be our cleverness that saves us, but our love of what is decent, kind and beautiful, our attraction to an elegant spiraling line, our impulse to sing along with a song that expands the heart, the retelling of a story that reminds us of the best of who we might be.

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Practice

Go outside and look for a repeating pattern in nature (a spiral, a hexagon, a fractal, etc) that is pleasing to you. Take a photo of it close up. Send it to a friend in an email or text. Ask them to take a photo of that same pattern and send it back.

Question

What was it like to look for a repeating pattern? Did you notice that pattern in places you hadn’t noticed it before.

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Things I’ve Been Reading

“This is Happiness” and “The History of Rain” By Niall Williams. Beautiful incredibly wise and poetry storytelling and writing.  Much appreciation to my friend Scott Russell Sanders suggested this author to me.  Truly beautiful writing.  I wiped a tear in the best kind of way at the end of “This is Happiness”.  Side Note:  If you are a lover of audiobooks (which I am) both have great readers.   

“Pipe Dreams: The Secret Diary of a Neighbourhood Plumber” by Nicolas James.  This is a warm, insightful and funny memoir of a writer who makes a living as a plumber in London.  For fans of stories that make you laugh at how wonderfully quirky we all are, while affirming the basic goodness found in unexpected places. Its kind of Ted Lasso or Betty’s Diner with a plumbers tools box :-)   Another well read audiobook.

“Chicago” and “Mink River” by Brian Doyle  I discovered Brian Doyle in the past few years and his writing and worldview are really moving and powerful for me.   His novels and stories are filled with poignant observation and magical reality.  His essays are luminous.  “One Long River of Song” is a great place to start with his essays.

While traveling in Ireland the past two weeks, I’ve been re-reading selections of John O’Donahue’s writing.  If you have not read “Bless the Space Between Us” “Anam Cara” “Four Elements” or “Beauty” I highly recommend them all.

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May Tour Schedule

For more info on these shows visit www.carrienewcomer.com/tour