Patterns

Wednesday, May 6, 2020

As we drove along River Road to the place where we would start our walk this morning, there were sights I’d never seen before. These sights – trees, fences, houses, road signs – had actually been there for years, but in a sense, they were as new this morning as the sunlight shining on them. After all, since yesterday, new dust had settled on them in brand new patterns, the weather had reworked them by further wearing them down, and the light was landing on them in ever so slightly new ways. In that sense, these were sights I’d never seen before, sights that seemed newly redecorated, rejuvenated, and I might say remade in the hours and moments before we passed them. The trees, fences, houses, and road signs seemed to almost flash their newness at us as we passed. I realized, later, that this implies a startling fact about our Universe – namely, the newness of all things. Despite my usual inability to notice it, there is newness everywhere – in trees beside the road, in clouds assembling in the sky in ways no one has seen before, in houses sprinkled with dust in patterns that are each, in tiny ways, different from any previous pattern in the history of houses and dust. I couldn’t stop thinking about it as we did our walk – this newness, this freshness, this utter novelty and originality of everything. It seemed like an astonishing life I was living, a life where starting fresh happens every second, a life in which all things – including me – are no more than one second old! 

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These leaves and sticks along the trail of the Peace Sanctuary (where we walked today) might seem like a disorderly mishmash, but what patterns might I be missing here? Would an artist, or perhaps a scientist, see patterns here that I am totally missing? And how many thousands of patterns do I not notice in my day-to-day life?

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Two little magnetic poems on our fridge today …