All I can think of is that every time I sit in a place, I start to trace the outline of the window, the parallel patterns on the blinds backlighted by the sun that turn the surfaces concave then convex then concave again. Tracing down a quarter of the way and to the right of the window, the shelves divide the wall into an even rhythm going down. The shelves are lined with books of tall and small, thin and wide, interrupted once in a while by a lone figurine or a medium stack of flat square jewelry boxes from Robinsons May. The sunlight coming through the pattern of the blinds casts bright and dark lines at an irregular angle coming down the opposite wall and across the carpet. Ten minutes later, it's no longer on the carpet, only on everything between the flat plane of the window and the wall. Ten minutes after that, it starts to make its way back toward the window, across the side and the ceiling. The rest of the room is backdrop to the moving light and shadow. An hour later, the sun sets and the room is in an even greyscale, objects eventually compounded and silhouetted in the corners. There is a line of yellow-white light coming through the bottom of the door from the other side where someone is not sitting and watching the shadows as they have shifted across the room over the past hour or so. They are probably reading a book.
I thought I was supposed to be an ecologist or a horticulturist or whatever. I think I may just be obsessed with texture, light, color, shape, and rhythm. That is why I like plants and things. That is why I want to spend hours and years indulging in the patterns and relationships that make up space in all its detailed senses. At home, on the train up the coast, at work raking leaves, after work watching wave after wave after wave, in my nightmares of color underground.
Anyway, Merry Christmas! May your year be full of texture, light, color, shape, and rhythm.
