Chaotic Beauty
Picking my way through undergrowth on a wooded hill, I pause often to look around and take in the wildness. Life is everywhere: under my feet, grasping at my boots and legs, flitting across my face, swaying overhead. Intermingled throughout are the dead and dying, fallen limbs and withering leaves. Color and motion assail my vision in every direction. Sound fills my ears: birds twitter and scream, insects buzz and shrill, waving trees and grasses sigh and moan with the pulsing wind. With each breath, I take in the scents permeating the woods, aromas rich with pollen and loamy decay, the fragrant exhalations of life and death.
Chaos, we are told, is random, messy, confused and disorderly. How can there be beauty here, when beauty derives from pattern and symmetry? Yet wherever I look as I stumble my clumsy way through the chaos, I find beauty. In the sounds of the woods, I hear melodic tones and echoing harmonies. In the flecks and splashes of bright yellow and red, I sense strange attractors. In the jumble of shapes and textures, I find fractal patterns. In the midst of chaotic, untamed nature, I am immersed in beauty.
Chaos is unpredictable, but not unpatterned. Chaos is life, and death, and the imperceptible instants in between. Chaos is nature in her most subtle beauty.