I gave myself all day to take photos as I walked various places. I'm very fortunate to have a partially active commute through some fairly natural areas, and I chose a day where I was going to several parts of the city so I could see a variety of patterns in different areas. The venerable tree branches form my favorite of my photos.
I spent a great deal of time in the last 2 weeks thinking about patterns. I believe that most of the time when I have really grasped a subject I'll have my own take on how best to think about it.
I spent a lot of time on how to group the patterns I see or know about into coherent categories. Some make sense to cluster together - under the heading of radial symmetry I gather sphere, starburst, concentric rings, and cones, as well as flatter shapes like flowers. Spirals and helices group nicely together; it makes sense to me to include DNA and twisting vines as cousins of the nautilus, hurricane, and galaxy. Others are harder to group - do lobes belong with fractals & branching, as ferns have fractal-like margins to their lobed fronds? Or with flows and erosion, as rivers form lobe-like patterns? It is important to me to include nonliving natural patterns as well as those in plants, animals, and other life. Rocks can have layers, cracking, and other patterns, as well as crystal structures that I group under tessellations like honeycomb and wasps nests. Gradients occur in light in the sky, in the deposition of particles by size by rivers, in sunlight transitioning to shadow. My favorite moment from my walk was expanding my photos of waves; I didn't include the screenshot in the collage as the neon colors were jarring amongst all the nature photos but I used the BirdNet app to capture the waves of birdsong as I walked. I also threw a stone into a puddle and realized anew that waves can be concentric as well as linear.
In the end I don't have a neat set of patterns to point to, rather an evolving set of loose groupings that will likely fluctuate as I study and practice permaculture more.
As part of my study for this unit I read Phillip Ball's Patterns in Nature about the mathematics of natural patterns. While groupings of bubbles seem like pillows of moss and puffy cloud forms to me, Ball points out that mathematically they are closer to honeycomb as their connections form slightly irregular but predicable tessellations. As I wrapped up the book I was struck by the life-symmetry of the quote on the final page: "Our cities are best considered as organisms or ecosystems themselves, with their own metabolism, transport networks, and patterns." My next permaculture read is Toby Hemenway's The Permaculture City and so this quote was an apt transition as I delve into the patterns of urban and semi-urban life.
