Opening to Pattern

Ladders along a wall at the Rocks in Bethlehem

Seedling fur trees
ready for planting,
Rocks Estate
in Bethelehem.

Cedar shakes alive with last year's growth awaiting spring.

“One day passes and another comes along, and everything happens the same. But basically, we are so afraid of the brilliance coming at us, and the sharp experience of our life, that we can’t even focus our eyes.” Chogyam Trungpa in True Perception

Are there times we are afraid to open our eyes? Do we see everything as the same, as one giant, boring pattern? Each element of the pattern has a sameness and repetitiveness that we impose upon it because if we truly saw each person, object, and element as special it would overwhelm us into the brilliance of our lives.

Yet every person, object and element IS unique. No two people look alike (even for identical twins as the years mark their faces and bodies in different ways). No two people feel, experience, love, approach living the same.

Here are photographs I took recently that reflect a repetitive quality. Yet, if we look closely we will see the multifaceted quality of each and every object.

Try seeing in this way for an hour or a day. Use your camera on a walkabout to find pattern and then be still enough to be awed by the differences and let the brilliance of that seeing in.