Microcosmic

On Monday I went for my patch walk on the dullest, muddiest, coldest day - seemingly uninspiring, dreary and wildlife-free. I thought it seemed SO uninspiring that I'd try, as an exercise, to elevate it into something less mundane, simply by making the effort to turn it into something creative. So here is my poem... Mud and Magic Slanted sleat threads white as it dwindles earthwards The weakling fuit of a drab sky The mudded rivulet of a track rises gently raising my steps Quag and ruck swap places with mire and bog I climb the spine of a buried giant, the Back​filled landfill, now grassy ridge on former midden As a bullfinch schoolboy-whistles A kestrel is animated by my approach, turning it from Standing sentinel still to flightly air-snipping shears Faint shapes of distant Pennine foothill are mist masked A Guassian blur applied to the mast on Winter Hill A bramble scraped attrition of mud-sticky path takes me to the Moss bearded wall at the entrance to R

Take part of a fern, zoom in - it looks like the whole fern. Take a part of that, zoom in again - it still looks like a fern. It displays 'self-similarity' - a part looks like a miniature version of the whole. Welcome to wonderful world of fractals. As a small child I remember seeing a small twig lying on the ground. I held it up to the sky and squinted a bit. "I'm a giant", I thought, “I'm holding up a tree.” I'd seen my first example "self-similarity" After that, I didn't give it a lot of thought - until now. Objects are  self-similar - if a part looks like a  miniature version the whole. It’s something that occurs a lot in nature – ferns, trees, clouds, rocks, crystals, coastlines, rivers, blood vessels. Copies of the whole repeated at a smaller and smaller scale. These are a kind of fractal and it's something I’ve been looking out for on the patch (not that I’ve seen a lot of coastlines!). You could call fractals the