Still Life—With Patterns

I read a great quote the other day that went something like this: They say that when one door closes, another opens. What they don't tell you is that most of life is lived in the hallways.

I'm certain it's a function of age (OK, maturation) but I realize more and more how much we rely on patterns for reassurance, for sanity, for comfort, the stuff in the hallways of life.

For example, when I get up in the morning, my first move is toward the end of the driveway where I fetch the daily newspaper (still a habit in this household). My second move is toward the stove where the tea kettle waits for my attention because life isn't life until I've imbibed that first cuppa (as the Brits call it) with milk and honey.

My last moments of wakefulness are spent making the rounds of the house to check on heat settings, the woodstoves, food and water for Goldie and George, that the doors are locked.

Whatever else goes on in the creamy-filling-center in the middle of my day—which can change minute by minute—I'm reassured that the cookies on either end of my waking hours are more or less the same.

Quilting heightened my awareness of pattern, a word that has several meanings in the craft: the way fabric is cut, the figuring on fabric, the way that color blends in a quilt top among pieces of fabric. No matter how much I do this, I still get knocked out by the way that three or four distinct pieces of cloth get blended by my eye to create another, completely different, color situation.

Taking photographs in the woods does the same because catching those moments in time is really a pause to appreciate somethings else's hallway: the color movement in a grouse's feather, the wavy changes in hue of a river rock, the rounded capsules that once held barnacles on a shell, the spiral in a conch's former home, spidery spalting on the inside of a piece of bark, and the rosy rings at the center of a piece of cottonwood.

Patterns in patterns in patterns, our worlds held together by barely visible details that matter more than all the great upheavals combined.