Charging...

The ebb and flow of things. I study this act of motion in all things. Often I slow myself down long enough to capture that ebb and flow. People walking on a crowded street. It looks all random and haphazard at first glance. But if you study it, there's a rhythm, a pattern to it all. Have you ever seen the movie August Rush? A young prodigy hears music in all things. The sounds of the city are a symphony to him. For me, visually, the movements of the city are the same. But not just cities. Dear no.

Trees. Water. Clouds. Especially clouds. I could stare at clouds all day watching for the patterns, the trends. Shapes morphing from one fantastic sketch to the next. I have spent a few, though not enough afternoons sitting on the grass with my children staring up at the clouds. We pick out shapes we see. We comment on the jet stream of airplanes. We wonder who's in those planes and where are they flying. My daughter thinks every plane is headed to Disney and my son thinks they're all headed to the north pole.
They don't have the patience for the patterns, though. I do. I watch them always. I look for the patterns on the highway. Shopping. In meetings. Meetings are great places for patterns. Wait for someone to yawn in a meeting. Or check a phone for messages. A chain reaction hops like a frog around the room, working outward from the initiating behavior like the epicenter of a disturbance in a calm body of water. Ripples of reaction occur in an ever-widening ring from that point of creation.

Speech. Patterns abound here. People altering their mode of talking to adapt to the group. Volume. Pitch. Tone. Vocabulary. All trends and patterns. Motion. All these changes and adaptations suggest motion. So while I may sit completely still saying nothing, my environment is a riot of motion. A hurricane of activity, though all anyone else may see is a slow moving stream, smoke from a chimney, a flight of birds, eggs on a griddle or rain on the car roof.  Ebb and flow.