Every piece of the bark of a ponderosa pine fits together… and comes apart. It is a kind of hieroglyphic language — a special one, in which each word is unique and […]
Reading Trees
Where is the Sun? On Earth!
See, here’s the thing about the globe in the sky. You can make it yours, as the Oregon grape does in bloom… … or you can gather it in as the […]
Ponderosa Pine’s World
The land has a spirit. You can find it in a dead ponderosa pine. You can find it in a living stone. In the long life record of pine bark and pitch. […]
Towards a New Cartography 7: Islands as a Model of Mapping
There’s a little bit of modern science that speaks for randomness, and an exquisite branch of mathematics that calculates it, and yet, as red osier dogwood points out, it’s not right. Rowan […]
Writing and Reading as Natural Pattern: No More Classrooms, Please
You know, it’s beautiful. Patterns. A gravel pit, even. Now, if you walk to the side and look back, what do you see? Other patterns. Rhythms. And a relationship between round […]
The Stars of the Earth: a Christmas Meditation
On Earth, stars are not abstract symbols. They are particular. They are also less than individual. It is the human eye that sees a star, or shall we say “recognizes it”. This […]
Patterns in the Earth
Life branches. That is a consequence of being a chain of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Even the ants below are making branching patterns out of their nest. That’s the earth for you. […]
Meditation on Fall Leaves, in Four Words
Music? Mathematics? Beauty? Life.
The Language of Crows
I feel this language in my bones, but it’s not in words… … or mathematics, as is this one, but what different mathematics they are! (And they’re not about numbers. You have […]
God and Evolution in the Age of Information
I’ve been showing you patterns in the leaves, and patterns of birds. Here they are together. One version of the theory of evolution holds that it’s all survival of the fittest, that […]
