I just got back from Muir Beach with my friend Elizabeth (see more here). We found all these incredible 'designer' mussel shells with markings like butterflies! Do you see the teal spot in the upper portions of both shells? 
Anyway, these shells have got me thinking about patterns, communication, and written language. I'm hardly a 'scholar' in any of these areas, but I've always felt a certain fascination with the patterns in nature, and the fact that both the ancient europeans and the ancient chinese thought you could see words (messages) in the shape of a twig (runes) or the way a few sticks crossed each other and a leaf (characters). Wallace Stevens, my favorite poet as you know if you've been paying attention, felt that nature communicates with us. See a great comment on this by 'Sammy' on my Dao of Wallace Stevens blog.
I got started on this fixation when I was around twelve, when an older friend gave me a book on the history of the alphabet, and I saw that the letter A was derived from the shape of the head of an ox. Later I fell in love with art, and even with the tarot cards because I found the pictures were so mysterious and evocative. Now I'm a film junky for the same reason.
When I studied oriental medicine, prior to my licensing as an acupuncturist, I fell in love with the pictures in the chinese characters I was learning, mostly for the names of the herbs. I've decided I'm going to add the characters that are currently fascinating me to my blog, placing them here and there as the mood takes me. 
So far I only have two to share: Huang, 'yellow', which consists, from top down of the radical for cao, 'grass or grain', the character for field (which looks like four boxes), and at the bottom the radical for 'eight', ba, which also means 'many.' So the charcter for yellow is basically a picture of endless fields of grain, something that can be seen in Pennsylvania, and Illinois and Nebraska! 'Yellow,' I suppose like 'gold' has overtones of 'prosperity, abundance,' to it, perhaps because it is the color of the sun. So many of our forebears were sun-worshippers. I've tinted this one just a little bit green, to get that color of new grass, that yellow-green shade.
The other character I'm prepared to share right now is 'Ren,' which is translated as Love in Chinese Characters, by Dr. L. Wieger, S.J. The Jesuits have a long and interesting relationship with China, strangely enough. I can't help but wonder if he colors everything he writes with christian connotations. Anyway, he writes that 'Ren', which consists of the radical for 'man' (on the left) and the radical for 'two' (the double dashes, like an equal-sign) is "the fundamental virtue of confuciansim, which the Shou Wen defines as to love each other. The benevolance that must link each man to his neighbor; two, mutual, reciprocal." (p.28)
More mussel shells:
Clear colors:
Iridescence
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