Life travels through a series of revolving and repeating courses. Every new path we take comes back to where we began and continues through into every subsequent experience. The habitual nature of the way we live can be broken down into pieces, fragments, all capable of being taken apart and put back together in such a way that, despite the rearrangement, the pattern will continue.

The monotony of the typical “everyday” becomes such that the how and why are dictated by subconscious processes. Life's beauty becomes mundane. It is when we dismantle these patterns and processes and put them back together that we are able to notice anomalies. Without these happenstance moments, our interest in contemplating the apparent consistency of everyday life becomes absent. These small instances are imperative in memorializing the beauty within a world in constant flux.

I am utilizing individual elements that allow for the creation of repeating patterns. Each successive recreation produces a variation from the original, simulating the differences between recalled accounts of the life within that pattern. Life is notional. Nature's continual regeneration creates a pattern that reflects our memory; an idealized image imprinted in our mind that changes slightly every time we think on it.

"We are perhaps nearing an understanding of the meaning of chance in art. It would, of course, be unbearable if our intentions were regularly frustrated. Yet there is something terribly arid, not to say mechanistic, in the idea of a world where all our purposes results in predictable consequences, where we are completely transparent to ourselves and where intentions always result in expected actions. We value the degree of interference and human intentional activity offered by the unconscious, by language, by the apparatus of the camera or computer, by the instruction performed 'blind.' In short we desire to see what will happen.

p. 25 "Chance. Documents if Contemporary Art."

"Wabi sabi embodies the Zeb nihilist cosmic view and seeks beauty in the imperfections found as all things, in a constant state of flux, evolve from nothing and devolve back to nothing. Within this perpetual movement nature leaves arbitrary tracks for us to contemplate, and it is in these random flaws and irregularities that offer a model for the modest and humble wabi sabi expression of beauty."

wabi sabi: the Japanese art of impermanence
Andrew Juniper

I've been thinking a lot about the cycles and processes that drive our everyday lives-but it wasn't until the middle of last night when I realized that it isn't the cycle itself that is important, it's the moments that disrupt the cycle that are. After three hours of being unable to fall into a restful sleep, I propped myself up on my elbows and squinted out my window. The moonlight was shining brightly through the trees up the hill. Without my glasses to focus everything, the trees became lovely, fuzzy silhouettes surrounded by the gray light of the moon. Nothing moved out in the cold. It was in this moment that it became clear to me (as clear as things can be without glasses...) that we don't go through our lives living for the monotony of all the cycles that make up our daily existence, it is for these interruptions. While they may seem unwanted and unnecessary at times, we have to look deeper into what made them happen. I guess in simple terms it would be looking for the good side in something negative that happens, but it's so much more than that.
Some of these interruptions seem to haunt a cycle altogether, but also start a new cycle.

Interruptions off the top of my head (though I look at most of these as more obvious than others, and it is the smaller overlooked ones I am more interested in)
-a hurricane or tsunami, disrupting the flow of the ocean
-a sleepless night
-traffic jams/accidents
-being fired from work
-death (being the end of that person's life, and an interruption in a family members)
-birth
-illness
-moving
-marriage
-a cold shower
-the dog disappearing

One of my favorite passages from a beautiful book...

"So on a summer's day waves collect, over balance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole works seems to be saying "that is all" more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun in the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, and lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking."

From The Hours
Virginia Woolf

After having to focus on having a solid conceptual idea for Thesis, and the pressure to continue this at Chautauqua, I took the liberty to just make and not over think while at the Tileworks. This decision was one of the best I could make. Yes, I still had all the same thoughts along with new ones hanging in the background, but I didn't let them hold me back during my making process.
Since I haven't narrowed down one streamlined idea yet, I plan to keep an updated list of what I'm thinking about, how these thoughts work together, in hopes of coming up with something coherent along the way...

-Pattern, repetition, cycles- within the everyday, within a lifetime, in nature, in the manmade 
-Contrasting elements-surfaces, colors, materials, ideas
-How we view life and death
    positively and open
    negatively and with distain
-The idea of beauty in the everyday
   conversely, the ugly in the everyday
-Why we feel the need to point out the ugly, isn't it a mere deviation from beauty?
-The subjectiveness that surrounds us
-Realizing my truth within this
-Energy
      it is everything we are, what we do, how we think and move
      the ability to channel this energy
-Memory
      the methods we use to remember and hold on to a moment in time
      how we look back on these times