What’s already there…
The humble Field Maple
Finding the ZIGGATI…
The School Run
It was a Tuesday, and I was walking my daughter to school.
That's the honest start of most of my best patterns — not a dramatic one. I was walking down a narrow lane through toward a small bridge, half-thinking about all my jobs, when the low morning sun hit this cluster of field maple covered in morning dew…or in this case more likely snail trails.
Veiny green leaves, in that maple shaped leaf I hold so dear, layered over each other in varying shades of green.
I stopped. A car approached behind me, there wasn’t room for us both, I didn't care. I had my phone out and I was crouched down, getting the angle right, before I'd fully worked out why it mattered.
The Field Maple mirrored once
Not Knowing Why, Yet
That's usually how it starts — not with a plan, but with a small, wordless stop. Something in the shape or the light or the repetition catches before the thinking does. I didn't know, standing there, whether that photo would ever become anything. I just knew I wasn't ready to walk past it.
I dropped the little one off. I went home. The photo sat in a folder for 5 weeks or so.
The Slow Part
I opened it again on a rainy Sunday, more out of habit than inspiration — I'll often flick back through unsorted photos whilst trying to find a specific photo be it for a birthday card, a celebratory collage or a simple memory, mostly of my dearest Ziggy as grief is ever-present in my soul. Most days, nothing happens. That Sunday, something did.
I dropped the field maple photograph into my usual editing process and started folding it — mirroring one section against itself, rotating, repeating and layering. For a while it just looked messy. Then, on maybe the sixth or seventh attempt, one quarter-turn locked into place and the leaves became rhythmic. A structure I hadn't seen in the original photo — hadn't even suspected was there — suddenly organised the whole thing. That's always the moment. Not clever engineering on my part. More like uncovering something that had been folded into the image all along, waiting for me to find the right crease.
Field Maple Mandala
What the Field Maple brought me
I used to think I needed to go somewhere — a coastline, a forest, a place with an obvious claim to beauty — to find pattern material. That walk to school cured me of that. The lesson wasn't really about the big nature showdown or light and shadows. It was about paying attention before I know something is worth attention. The school run isn't a detour from the creative work. Increasingly, it is the creative work — or at least the first and least visible stage of it.
Nature and the everyday world don't ration their patterns for special occasions. A school run at 8:30am on a Tuesday holds exactly as much geometry, light, and rhythm as it's ever going to. The only variable is whether I'm walking through it half-asleep, or actually there.
Most days, I try and stay focused on that second part. But I got my kid to school. And I got the pattern. Some days, that's enough.