Saturday 11 May 2013

Shapes and patterns


How we crave shapes and patterns. When I was a kid, you used to see this kind of dense, geometric, primary-coloured planting in every public park, on every traffic island. Now it's rare and tends to scream irony. This is rather lovely, though.

Finally, perhaps I am finding some shape and pattern in what I'm doing, some intellectual ground from which to think and write, and which is also a context for the editing and translation work. It's been more than a year of feeling very lost and frightened...

7 comments:

Loren said...

Glad to hear that things in your life seem to be fitting together better. Change, even necessary, positive change, so often seems stressful.

Tom said...

Jean: I remember that kind of municipal planting. Still see a great deal of it over here. We do indeed crave shapes and patterns, (I wonder why), and sometimes see them where they don't exist, or see them in other imaginative places.

Jean said...

Thanks, Loren - yes.

Tom, whether shape and pattern - in life, in thought, in art - actually exist is a deep philosophical question, I think, but perhaps that matters less than whether we think or feel that they do.

Natalie d'Arbeloff said...

Beautiful picture and hopeful thoughts.

Of course nature is a treasure-trove of amazing patterns underlying the basic structure of everything.

I tend to see and look for patterns in everything, inner and outer, and find the process very useful in clearing paths that are otherwise invisible in the jungle of data surrounding us, whether visual, psychological, intellectual, emotional etc.etc.

Les said...

That is lovely, Jean, and lovelier still to hear that you're beginning to settle in with some structure. Things have devolved here, though now I am pursuing a potential job, possibly part-time possibly full-time. The process for these things is never fast enough for me, it seems, but I expect some resolution will be had within a few weeks, for better or worse.

Beth said...

That's good news, Jean, I'm glad. shape and pattern; yes, we do crave them and try to see them, I suppose because we long for order, or a sense that there is a design somewhere that makes sense. What do you think?

Jean said...

Leslee, thanks. Wiahing you everything you want, with or without this particular potential job xxx

Beth, ah, as mentioned above, I think why we long for pattern and order is a deep philosophical/ existential/ ontological question. While I don't personally sense any 'design', that doesn't stop me feeling that there's much more to life and human needs and motivation than we have begun to know.