No good title for this

Today seagulls flew over the mountain. Three of them, white with grey wingtips, they looked like staples how they bent. The mountain is green this month, finally, and when they flew in front of it they cut v-shaped holes in it to the cloud behind the mountain.

I see patterns in everything. The way the clouds roll over the mountain and rise above it, a big plume, rounded, and then a smaller trail coming out, and then it repeats until it hits a little saddle and the whole thing comes plummeting down the side, and then it gets sucked back up the far side of the saddle into an explosion of cloud spiral that becomes nothing as it reaches the sky. I always have seen these patterns, and I can't shut down the part of my head that sees the world like a whirlwind of processes. Even in the east, these patterns are there, but they were muddled, and easier to try to ignore. The land is older, it has been used longer, it's more weathered. The trees forgot who they were, and are mixed with things that humans have added in. The natural pattern is gone, unless you remember the history-- in the south, savannah, longleaf, chestnut; in the north, deep bogs, residual organic matter, and slow leeching-- and then you start to see it, the patterns.

Here they are pristine. I can see them every day. I breathe deep air into my lungs. The rains fall, like they did last year, like they will next year. Patterns.

I learned when I studied English that there is a very small, select way of looking at the world through these bright events and patterns. It felt natural to me, more natural than learning about history and methods and culture, to look at words and their arrangement on a page, and to draw from that the meaning of it all. Some authors knew this, and their works were sharp and bright like conifer forests. I can't bear "hardwood writing" now because it's barren and decayed, filled with way too much florid language that ultimately falls off and leaves just a wet, cold stem. There's nothing active or exciting about a wet cold stem. There's nothing exciting about prose without pattern, pattern that acts as a machine to generate output, images, knowledge.

Here the earth trembles and the trees cycle and the rain falls and the clouds roll. The place is alive. The weathered coast ranges are a repository for the history of the volcanic cycles that formed the Sierras and the Cascades a long time ago. My home is being ripped apart by a tectonic fault that in millions (or less) of years will tear western California and Mexico from the plate that the continent sits on. Every day that fault pulls just a little further. It is fascinating to me that this pattern has been occurring since the world began, slowly declining in strength as we cool off. How long do we have until we cool off? How much longer do we get to see the pattern?

It won't change in our lifetimes. The pattern world will keep on dancing, running, singing, and haunting me with stellar views of the sea and the bay and the coastal mountains. And so long as nature keeps on making strange music, I'll continue to try to find those harmonics, understand the song, and write it down for other people to see, hear, and learn to play.