Cape Cod Reflections © Bill Guild

My work is about reflection. Holding up a mirror to clients. Reflecting on what we see.

This photo, showing reflections in moving water, is a reminder of how reality works. Engagement with the world requires living in an engineered universe of human creations: smartphones, data, video, cities, buildings, cars. Underlying all that – underlying everything – is the universe not created by humankind. Nature predates us, governs us, and will survive us.

Nature is at once self-revealing and obscure, like the imagery in this photo. We cannot appreciate it in its totality unless we engage with what we do not understand. Chaos theory can help. Nature certainly is unpredictable, but its patterns are evident and recur consistently across scales, like fractals. In his superb book, Chaos, James Gleick offers this definition: “the harmonious arrangement of order and disorder as it occurs in natural objects, in clouds, trees, mountain ranges or snow crystals.”

Order and disorder.

Craving the security that comes with comprehensive understanding, we tend to ignore the chaotic aspect of life. But without engagement with the unpredictable and obscure, we cannot understand human nature, the strange workings of life, or ourselves.