The dark patterns

I'm writing at the end of the day today. Not by design; I had hoped to be here hours earlier.  What got in the way? A chat with the neighbors, a phone catch-up with my sister, a wrestling match with my laptop, an unexpectedly long editing dance with my post from yesterday.

So often when I write reflectively like this, I do it in the hope of experiencing beauty.  Something appealed to my eye on my walk; I write to rediscover the momentary lift it gave me.  Dimly perceiving one of the grand patterns underlying my life, I write to draw its covers back. It’s satisfying to articulate what I see, even when the pattern is dark or painful.

I caught a fitting image in the meadow of sea grass I walked through today.  A pocket of water abandoned by the leaving tide held two rims of ice, one sliding over another. The lower one was clear and revealed what lay beneath it: a few rotting twigs, misshapen oak leaf, a split shaft of grass.  Sliding over this. a layer frosted second film of glass made a silhouette of ancient mountains, a hip of reclining tide-nymph. So many structures of ice or organism, suspended and decomposing.

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