Life is patterns of repeating repeating repeating, iterating, experimenting, often failing, never lasting.
This blade of grass, gone to seed, fulfilling its pattern, failed. The seed dropped from the edge of a tiny cliff, no higher than the spent husks, mere inches from it’s base. This though made the difference, since said seed can’t survive in the sandy substrate below. The lapping lake shore provides water, yes, but with the violence of wind and wave the seed stands no chance of standing. Two inches leeward and it could have joined its parent on the precipice. Two more and it would have been trampled. The waves repeat and repeat. The patterns persist.
Across the calm cove a pine perches on its own shore. It propagated, probably; its profound posture promises progeny. But it is dead. Split and stripped of bark. It soaks up the setting sun silently. Its pattern past, its body bare. Waiting only to become adrift wood, a driftwood. Fertilizer. Fungus food. The patterns persist.
My pattern too… I command my feet to walk me back to a cold box of calories, full of particular plants and animals. To stuff into a hole; to turn into me. A necessary pattern for all my others. Repeating and repeating.
I should visit the lake more often.
H