I have a superpower I did not always know how to name. Pattern recognition. The ability to move through different worlds, art, science, business, community, and see what they share beneath the surface. What connects them. What they are quietly saying to each other across what we assume are very different languages.
I believe this is what artists and scientists have in common, though neither group tends to say it out loud. We are both, at our core, pattern seekers. We notice when something begins to repeat. We grow curious when a shape starts to form. We watch the one become two, and the two become many, and we ask: what is this trying to tell us?
Nature has always known this. The rising tide follows its pattern without apology. The bird sings the same call across centuries. The wind moving through a forest creates a rhythm that the body recognizes before the mind has a chance to name it. There is a mathematics to all of it, vibrational, cellular, ancient, and when we slow down enough to feel it, something in us wants to come into tune.
This is not metaphor. The golden ratio, the Fibonacci sequence, the fractal geometry of a coastline or a fern or the branching of your own veins, these are not decorations. They are the architecture of existence. The universe building itself according to a logic that predates every language we have invented to describe it. And artists have always felt this, even when we did not have the vocabulary for it. Every gesture made with a pen, every beat that finds its echo, every color that insists on being placed next to another. We are following a pattern that is already there, waiting to be seen.
For me, this shows up most honestly in my SketchPoetic practice. There is nothing happening on paper that isn’t already happening in my life. The marks I make, the shapes that insist on forming, the lines my hand follows before my mind has issued any instruction. These are not choices so much as recognitions. The pen finds the pattern. And in following it, I find something true about where I am.
This is the surrender I have learned to trust. Not because it is always comfortable, but because it is always honest. When I stop trying to manufacture what the page should look like and instead allow what wants to emerge, something shifts. I become less rigid. More curious. More willing to be in the presence of what is actually arising rather than what I had planned.
This is what pattern recognition gives us, whether we are artists or scientists or simply people paying attention. When we learn to see patterns, we stop fighting what is. We begin to understand what holds us and what is asking to evolve. We see how our relationships form and why. We notice the repetitions in our own thinking, the rhythms in our own becoming. We understand, at a cellular level, that we were born into pattern. The womb is a place of sacred geometry. And the body’s departure from this world is equally precise, equally patterned, equally part of a larger design.
We are not here to be defined by our patterns. We are here to recognize them. To ask which ones are holding us in place and which ones are asking to carry us forward. Because in that question lives real freedom. Not freedom from nature, but freedom within it.
The artist and the scientist both know this. And perhaps the greatest pattern of all is the one that keeps reminding us: we are far more alike than we have been willing to see.
Love the way you articulated this, Shelia! I have been thinking about patterns too and the ways in which I sense inertia in my own body, as a felt sense for various patterning.