As a marine biologist who has worked in the US and Mexico for 25 years, I am a student of nature, a teacher, a researcher, and a nature photographer. Through my work, I have acquired an ever growing passion for nature and an appreciation of how everything is connected. Today, I work with talented youth in Mexico. I also travel extensively contemplating, writing, and photographing patterns in nature.

FreshVista was created some 10 years ago as a repository for my work. It was designed to be accessible primarily to students and teachers of the environmental sciences. In the course of writing a text on the subject of patterns in nature, it became apparent to me that everything in the universe is composed of dynamic patterns that are interrelated with other dynamic patterns. This idea was counter to what I had been trained to think as a scientist with a Western world view. To Western science, everything can be described as mathematical "laws". But, I grew to realize that this wasn't true. Complex systems, like the world's ecosystems, could only be described in terms of their organizing principles and how they relate to other complex dynamic systems.

I also grew to appreciate that nature and its patterns could speak to us in three different ways -- sometimes simultaneously. It could appeal to our perceptual senses. It could call upon our spiritual centers. And, nature could speak to us in factual terms that could sometimes be analyzed. These ideas brought about a profound change in my thinking about how nature exists. And certainly, these ideas were far different than those expressed in any book I had read on patterns in nature.

So, I changed the focus of FreshVista to express this change in my worldview. My writings, including my new text and essays, now expressed the aesthetic, the spiritual, and the analytic aspects of patterns in nature. My photography began to emphasize the contemplative joy of nature's abstract patterns as well as the connectivity and dynamic tension that are part of these patterns.

Through FreshVista, I offer my perspectives on patterns in nature through my blog, my photo gallery, and a growing list of eBooks including the text that originally solidified my thinking.

Your thoughts, ideas, and comments are appreciated. You are welcome to contact me .

--- Bill Graham