This blog was inspired by bees.

During my recent Mark Intensive course in September, a woman came up to me with her I-Pad to show me a video she had taken outside her home. She told me that she was drawn to go outside because of the buzzing roar “like an engine,” where she saw a darkened sky and “millions of bees” swarming over her farmhouse. She used her I-Pad to catch the video of their movement.

When she showed me a close up of the video… I saw something so astonishing that my jaw-dropped. Again and again, in different areas of the sky and in split second moments, the random movement of the bees CLEARLY formed itself into hexagons… the 6-sided shape of the honeycomb! Are the individual bees following some grand geometric pattern that imprints even their ‘random’ movement? Is the hexagon the geometry that governs bees?

Then I wondered if other species.. in their ‘random’ movement, also exhibit beautiful geometries. The answer is a glorious YES!” The murmuration of starlings (it was a new word for me too) shows gorgeous wave patterns made up of thousands and thousand of starlings dancing to an unseen pattern. Do take 2 minutes to see this video, as the dance of the starlings surprised two young women who were canoeing.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRNqhi2ka9k. If you want to watch 3.5 spell-binding minutes shot by a professional cameraman watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eakKfY5aHmY  Then of course fish swarm in beautiful circular patterns, see  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIgHEhziUxU

The next logical questions I had … are we 7 billion humans also following some sort of big-picture geometric pattern? If so, what would it be? My vote is the pattern of the ‘flower of life.” It appears in ancient temples all over the world, in crop circle and in orbs. It is beautiful, structurally solid, infinite… I am deeply at ease contemplating that in all our chaos we just might be moving in beautiful and magical patterns!