A message in a fortune cookie plants itself right next to another idea much older and already growing...

"Your love of gardening will take on new meaning in your life." Who writes these fortune cookies? This might have been the best one yet. What incredible coincidence that I got to open this one... especially since I have recently been discovering that some of my drawings really are like... growing entities. Their "creation" works from the ground up, not from an overarching, predetermined composition... I mean there are healthy constrains, of course; the drawing is not very likely to end up on my hand or the table, the tiny elements in the drawings are certainly part of my program. But I do not compose most of them. They just grow out of very simple rules; sometimes even less than that. A little piece of information manages to convince me to finally be put onto paper. It mutates into something that actually makes it to paper. Then this piece of information, now outside of me, becomes a word in a dialogue I end up having with the piece. The system needs a lot of steady energy to end up as something that looks like a finished piece to me... but actually... is there a plan?... There are no sketches... And the thoughts are often just slowly counted numbers. One, three, five, seven, three, five... eleven?... and different times and speeds... short, short, loooong... and long and back and long... Our brains are pleased with systems, patterns, programs. Our brains are most pleased with harmonies that are patterns, predictable, recognizable... some easily, some not so... happiness itself often appears nothing more than a riddle that finds its desired solution... happiness rarely comes as a surprise... maybe?... is happiness the answer to a harmonious hope? A pattern? ... but between every two patterns there is an infinite number of the other. Not less bad, just unpredicted, somehow, in some ways... there are universes of non-patterns, or growing things that are overlapping textures of often multidimensional patterns... Ripples in thought and time and yes, space... And it all happens one little tiny mutation at a time... or at a place, or at an idea... And it is a bit like gardening, because we all are gardeners, aren't we? Trying to control what would otherwise be just a wild flow of the universe through us. We are groomed and grooming. We bonsai-train the world around us and ourselves in the world. We turn ourselves it into something we can comprehend and even harvest... I am not sure why, but today feels as if the growth had reached some bizarre critical mass. It feels as if I were standing in an imaginary garden and it is just the beginning of things, the very early morning of a giant push out of the imaginary soil... But it feels as if it is going to make much more sense now... And so that message in the fortune cookie is a good firefly on a warm evening... and it is one of the rare things that makes me smile today. It could also be some strange fluke of a thought that lost its right path and is simply passing through my head....