Patterning

and another love poem

The day I learned about patterns, a late autumn thunderstorm whirled outside my classroom window. My teacher slid plastic beads across the wooden desk one at a time. Blue, green, purple, blue, green...What comes next? I spent play time that day laying out wooden blocks and asking my classmates to complete the sequence. Quickly, I found myself obsessed with shapes, colors, even numbers in pattern.

You, too? My friend says she sees prime numbers everywhere: license plates, especially. In the grocery line, a woman discloses that the color yellow seems to follow her, showing up in significant moments of her life. This month, I’ve had my own encounters with nature’s way of patterning. The Fibonacci sequence draws my eye to flower petal fallen to the asphalt. Tessellations in a honeycomb mesmerize me on an early spring walk. Stratocumulus clouds tilt my chin upwards after rain one afternoon.

Some of it makes sense. Scientifically, logically. Checks out. Some of it really does not. Today, I find a handful of brightly colored origami cranes fallen out of a dumpster. The orange one is sitting square in my path, right side up. Stray cats inexplicably flock to the front yard, never fed. Volunteers cram my car full of gifts for Eid. The new song I weep to in Spanish translates to the deepest heart-prayer I have had for years. Ada Limón’s “Dead Stars” is read on NPR. My baby nephew shows off his dimple at two months old. Wars, so many wars. I lift a little girl to reach an Easter egg hidden in the scar of a tree.

God is, daily, asking, “Are you paying attention?”

I am trying, and I ask it right back. Brian Doyle’s One Long River of Song helps:

This is what I know: that the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that this is love, and then there is everything else.

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Everything Else / Cough

Idling with the engine on, I watch a couple 
wading through a sea of blacktop. He grips the neck
of a cloudy bottle of strawberry lemonade they share.

She’s got one of those coughs the clinic calls
productive. Forceful. She stops her shuffle
and bends double. A crow mimics, bobbing

and barking from high on a lamppost. The woman 
plugs one nostril and snot shoots onto the asphalt. 
In my rearview mirror, he pauses with her, 

his scarred face turned toward hers,
eyes intent. A cloud uncovers the midday sun.
He offers his sleeve in the sudden light. 

What have you encountered in your paying attention? What makes sense in what crosses your path and what does not? Where do you let the wonder in? Consider this my hand patting the seat next to mine. Coffee’s on. Tell me.