Hello beautiful human,
It’s breathtaking how fast the trees fill out once the buds break open. The windows fill with green. The grass grows lush. The leaves cast shadows on the side of the neighbor’s house and suddenly my morning view is dramatically altered into pattern, dapple, movement.
Dapple is a lovely word.
The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in his poem “Pied Beauty”:
Glory be to God for dappled things – For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All the spotty, mixy, messy beauties of the world. And in that last line he seems to suggest that all trades—all human efforts and errors and work itself—equally changing, mixy and evolving.
The world is a patterned place and humans are a pattern-seeking and pattern-making species. Noticing a pattern allows us to navigate into the unknown. Pattern is map. Pattern is expectation. Just the other day my oldest said to me I want to get to a place of stability. What does stability look like I asked. Like I know what’s going to happen.
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