The Pattern Atlas

The Foundation of Vitality. A series of posts organizing the thinking on how to live in the light. The most critical is understanding our relationship to nature.

If you don’t know already, I live by the belief that nature was here first, created us, and will always win.

And we were born here, standing only here because of Nature’s gift to us. We are not separate. Our veins and her leaves are the same interconnected network, like a blueprint. We keep tripping over ourselves, forgetting, because somewhere along the lines of identity we were told that we can control nature. Funny now that I actually stand here and think about it from the lens of humanity and what we were taught to believe.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself,
we find it hitched to everything else.” —John Muir

And what’s essential to this conversation is understanding that if a storm comes through there is a hierarchy of what is going to happen. The manmade structure on the land will go first, the tree second, and the land third. We are on top of the thing that was already here, and we are not even rooted into it the same way a tree is.

Here are some principles I started unfurling:

Nature does not build a brand new solution every time it hits a problem. It finds a way that it will flow and avoid having to rebuild. Actually, there is no “real problem” that nature runs into, because it is set up to operate in a multifaceted and dimensional approach where one challenge actually creates a new solution. It also runs the same kind of move everywhere it goes. So I started looking at what the Natural Laws might be about how nature works, and from that I got 10 principles that always hold.

This is not new news, and it has been wildly studied by many brilliant minds. My own mind has been working on this since I was 3, so 42 years. But experts like D’Arcy Thompson saw it in 1917, that a shell and a horn and a wave are all answering the same piece of math. Mandelbrot named the geometry, the fractal, the same branching at every scale. Janine Benyus built a whole field on it and called it biomimicry, which is really just an extraordinary and fancy word for finally asking nature nicely, “Hi, friend, how do you do that? And can I try too?” Instead of the alternative approach of just laying out a road and paving over beautiful, fresh soil. Or Fibonacci’s spiral, which continuously and relentlessly shows us the mathematics of how all of nature works. That we start connected and outwardly express ourselves.

Here’s the part I actually care about:

I tried to take it all apart, and I think I got as close as I could on my own. This is my life’s work, and there are ten of these patterns on repeat, and together they interlock to make the Pattern Atlas. They are how nature stays alive, and they are how you stay alive, and the second you can name them you can walk into anything, a body, a business, a family, a field, and read what it is doing and where it is hurting.

I realized in my development of this that there is actually only one blueprint to all of life, earth and humanity, animal, plant, all of it, and if we could start to look at it, we could start to see everything from symptom to solution get uncovered, clearing the pathways to the most limitless expression of vitality possible.

It came to me fairly seamlessly over the last 6 years. I wasn’t really looking for something, but I noticed first the various cycles and seasons that would happen near me, and over time it started to feel uncomfortable in NYC, which is where I worked. I would go home and breathe deeply, fully, and realize that something had to be wrong with what we were doing. I started to look at the math of industry and the math of Earth and realized we were not seeing it correctly. The inversion was here, but it was really only there because of our linear thinking process, and it started and ended with how we see. The 5 senses were missing the 6th, of dimensional reality and of these higher energetic forces that were all around us. Being a tantra practitioner for 18 years has helped, and then becoming a Kundalini Instructor and working on my Reiki Master helped me see more.

But then when my kids were finally shifting out of school last year, and I was out of industry for the first time in my life, it all became a lot clearer. We were just working in the wrong direction to nature, and we were all sick because of it. Actually, the second I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. Everything in our life is a series of these twists and turns that carry us out wide and bring us back home again.

This is the map, so settle in.

The ten are not a vocabulary test, and they are not a ladder. They live in your Sorce Code, all ten, and the rest of this work is learning to read which one is running clean and which one is breaking.

Invitation to Pay Attention

Before the next piece, catch one pattern repeating in your own week. Write it down. As soon as you do, you will have released it. You will likely see a new pattern immediately following.

The Ten Patterns

1. Fractal Branching and Symbiotic Networks. Everything alive is built on connection, from a single cell to a whole forest. A tree branches the same way your lungs do and the same way a river does, and under the forest floor the roots are trading food and messages through fungal lines nobody sees. In you, this is your people, your web, the visible bonds and the quiet ones holding you up. When this one goes, you feel cut off even in a full room, starved by a network that was meant to feed you.