User:Ballenagris

As a Marine Biologist who has worked in the US and Mexico for 25 years, I am a student of Nature, a teacher, a researcher, and a nature photographer. Through my work, I have acquired an ever growing passion for Nature and an appreciation of how everything is connected. Today, I travel extensively contemplating about, writing about, and photographing patterns in Nature. I also work with talented youth in Mexico.

In the course of writing a text on the subject of patterns in Nature, it became clear to me that everything in the universe is composed of dynamic patterns that are interrelated with other dynamic patterns. This idea was counter to what I had been trained to think as a scientist with a Western world view. To Western science, everything can be described with mathematical “laws”. But, I grew to realize that this was incomplete. Complex systems, such as the world’s ecosystems, are best described in terms of their organizing principles and how they relate to other complex dynamic systems.

I also grew to appreciate that Nature and its patterns can speak to us in three different ways — sometimes simultaneously. Nature can appeal to our perceptual senses. Nature can call upon our spiritual centers. And, Nature speaks to us in factual terms that can be sometimes be analyzed. These ideas have brought about a profound change in my thinking about how nature exists. And certainly, these ideas seem to be different than those expressed in any book I have read on patterns in Nature.

So, I changed the focus of my work to express this change in my worldview. My writings, including my new text and essays, now express the aesthetic, the spiritual, and the analytic aspects of patterns in Nature. My photography emphasizes the contemplative joy of Nature’s abstract patterns as well as the connectivity and dynamic tension that are part of these patterns.