Fives
Fingers, toes, flower petals and sand dollars
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Three words
Anarchy
Rhythm
Resolution
Anarchy
Leave room in your life for a little anarchy. Don’t let the word scare you.
Let there be a time when rules don’t matter, when you unbridle your thoughts and emotions. Just be. Just be free. Let your breath catch in your throat.
You can check in later. Just now, for a few minutes, an hour, be the barefoot child, the carefree beachcomber, the shiftless vagabond.
Make a mess. Be unapologetic. Ignore a should or two. Eat a piece of forbidden pie.
Dance with the Universe. The music never stops.
Rhythm
The music spools on. Our lives have rhythm, even if we deny it. From the morning routine with a walk in nature to dinner in front of the television, we mingle the good and the bad.
Sometimes, often, the rhythm of the day sets itself. We feel we have no control. Possibly we don’t. Sometimes all our actions are reactions, giving in to the demands of the hour. We are in thrall to our “shoulds”.
There’s a lovely 1950s term for this: rat race.
We fall hard and we can’t get up. It’s so difficult, so frustrating, scrabbling to escape the maze of our circumstances.
Still. There may be a way out. Not easy. Not evident.
Resolution
Resolution can mean two things in our rat racy life: the resolve to change the routine. Or moving entirely to another plane, another place, where the air is clear and easy to breathe after the stifling closeness of our ordinary life.
If only we could snap our figures: Shazam! We’re better! Livelier! Healthier!
Magic works in some circumstances, but probably not here. Clearing the path to resolution will take all our resolve.
Time to pull out our mental machetes and get to work hacking on that undergrowth.
Clear a new place, let the sunlight wash in. Feel its warmth for at least a short time, until the jungle of our cares grows back.
Hope
What’s left is hope. The intimation that maybe we can hack away more jungle than will grow back. That we can have a little anarchy in our lives, standing like willful children and demanding everything now! Now is what we want.
We want to be. To be here. To be here now.
First lines
I’m reading, or trying to read, two books set along the Gulf Coast, one in Louisiana and the other in Mississippi. You can probably guess which one I’m looking forward more to reading.
In The Boys From Biloxi by John Grisham, a veteran writer calls on the formula that has sold millions of books. Too bad it’s so tepid.
A hundred years ago, Biloxi was a bustling resort and fishing community on the Gulf Coast.
I have to read this book if I want to participate in this month’s book club here at Rose Schnitzer Manor.
Contrast this first sentence, from Heaven’s Prisoners by James Lee Burke. It’s the second in a series of 21 books featuring former New Orleans homicide detective Dave Robicheaux. So he has a winning formula, too.
I was just off Southwest Pass, between Pecan and Marsh islands, with the green, whitecapping water of the gulf stream to the south, and the long, flat expense of the Louisiana coastline behind me—which is really not a coastline at all but instead a huge wetlands area of sawgrass, dead cypress strung with wisps of moss, and a maze of canals and bayous that are choked with Japanese water lilies whose purple flowers audibly pop in the morning, and whose root systems can wind around your propeller shaft like cable wire.
That sentence is 92 words long. But what choice words they are!
Synchronistic runner-up
And one more, this from the first lines of the preface to Everyday Holiness by Alan Morinis. I just happened to pick it up, and synchronicity delivered words that speak to my seeking soul:
Spiritual truths are not so much learned as recalled. Some ideas that we encounter, even if for the first time, don't strike us as new information but more like memories being reawakened within us. It is as if our hearts innately possess these truths and so we don't need lessons, only reminders of wisdom that we already know.
Fives
Starting with sand dollars
I was invited recently to study a sand dollar. I’d seen and admired them before, ever since I moved to the West Coast in 1966. But I’d forgotten how special they are, with a delicate five-fingered pattern on one side and mysterious squiggles on the other.
Sand dollars aren’t white in nature; they’re dark maroon or purple when they are living beneath the surf.
They live six to ten years, lying on the sand or burrowing into it, using tiny spines covered with silky cilia. This short video from Monterey Bay Aquarium in California shows sand dollars burying themselves in the sand. They live in dense colonies, hundreds together.
Sand dollars are related to starfish and sea anemones, all of them having a structure that is based on fives, and that is reflected by the outer pattern on the calcified sand dollar. The little dots are pores that allow the exchange of seawater through the sand dollar’s hard covering. Its mouth is in the center of the pattern. Sand dollars feed on microscopic algae and bacteria on the ocean’s floor.
The etching on the back of this particular sand dollar reminds me of Kokopelli, the Hopi fertility god, a hunchbacked figure usually shown playing a flute. Here is a petroglyph from Embody, N.M.
Five-fingered flowers
In a 2012 edition of the International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics, Yutaka Nishiyama of Japan’s Osaka University of Economics notes that flowers with five petals are the most common in nature. Often, the petals are different sizes, as with these pansies.
Fruits like apples and quince have five-petaled flowers, and the result is a five pattern in the mature fruit.
Other food with five-pointed shapes are okra, pineapple, and carambola (star fruit).
On a walk in the woods, I found many other examples of five patterns.
Certain maples, including Norway and Japanese.
English ivy.
The leaf clusters of blackberry brambles.
Douglas fir cones have a spiral shape, but each spiral appears to have five scales.
In music
Our ear for Western music, our rhythm, is used to 3/4 time (waltz) or 4/4 time (march). But the most popular jazz tune of all time, written by Paul Desmond and famously recorded by the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1959, is in 5/4 time. “Take Five” sounds unusual and intriguing, yet it is eminently easy to listen to.
I remember introducing my daughter Lyza to this standard and her being astounded that it had been written more than 50 years before. It sounds so fresh.
Try keeping time as you listen. There really are five beats to a measure.
Final fives
A final thought about fives from John Lienhard of the University of Houston:
Fivefold symmetry is shot through tile making, architecture, basket weaving, fortifications, and Christian, Islamic, and Egyptian iconography. Fives seem to rise like mist out of our subconscious sense of balance. They're almost never in our mental forefront. Rather, the imagery of fives is one of those odd driving forces within us— and one it might pay to be more aware of.
We also force five-fold symmetry on many things. The Greeks spoke of five Platonic solids: cubes, octahedrons, tetrahedrons, icosahedrons, and dodecahedrons. The first four (formed from triangles or squares) stood for earth, air, fire, and water. But the fifth, the dodecahedron (made from pentagons) was the symbol for pure celestial matter. That's where the movie The Fifth Element gets its title.
Fives
Starfish, sand dollar, Leaves and petals. My hands, Leonardo’s wheel man, The mystic pentagram. Five fingers each hand Ten toes total Not four, not six— Celebrate odd things. Three card monte, three Fates to play, Five card stud, the five and dime. Seven virtues, Seven sisters, Seven sins. But for counting we rely On five fingers each hand Ten toes total. And secrets . . . The secret five tucked away In the Fibonacci spiral. The secret five lurking In the base of the mystic pentagram.
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More synchronicity
I was wondering what to write about this week, and of course I needn’t have worried. The Universe drops ideas in my lap all the time, unbidden.
One of them was the sand dollar.
Here’s anything one, courtesy of The Littlefork Times, a newspaper from a tiny town in Northern Minnesota. I receive it by mail because it’s not published online.
Why Littlefork? Why not? It’s in Koochiching County, for one thing, where the county seat is International Falls, my home town.
Plus, it’s an island of sanity in a country that rapidly going off the rails. (Pardon me while I mix metaphors.)
A sleepy little meeting
The Littlefork City Council met on Sept. 21 to conduct routine, mundane business. No one got up to rant about books in the school library, or to demand defunding the police, or to demand more funding for police, or to otherwise demand ways to burn up or burn down the government.
No, the council very calmly said the Pledge of Allegiance, heard about replacing some fire hydrants, learned that a park will get a new sign, and discussed a date for Snow Fun Days, possibly Presidents’ Day weekend.
Straightforward. Sane.
I had been considering canceling my subscription because, well, not much happens in Littlefork, Minn. But! That is the point! It’s a little dose of sanity in my mailbox every week.
It gives me hope.
—30—
From the anarchy to the sand dollar to the fives ... and poem... I enjoyed reading this, Fran. That’s a lush James Lee Burke opening example, too.
Beautiful. I too was always enchanted by sand dollars, but the video of them moving around filled me with delight. Elegant little roombas vacuuming the ocean floor. And Take Five. Bless YOU! Finished with the Universe as well as a theory of good interior design, grouping decor objects in odd numbers. One more three is the storytelling/joke rhythm: the set up, the repeat, and the punch line. Such a gift this morning is your article.