a confused interwoven mass

What's that? (meaning the title of this post)

In this morning's Gardian crossword that was the clue to the word TANGLE - and is exactly how I thought of  tangles in the past.
But who am I to dispute the new use of the word as a synonym for pattern - when a tangle is linguistically the opposite of a pattern. After all, we have buses in PCs and it follows a long line of English language tradition to borrow simple, practical words and use them as required. In computing they hit the ceiling with that method of describing something quite new (in those days).
At which point I have to voice my annoyance that the German language has borrowed the word 'handy' to mean cell/mobile phone. I can't bring myself to use that without cringing inside.

To get back to the real point of this comment, let's tangle, and hopefully we do mean orderly, methodical use of the patterns available to use when drawing in any given style, including zen of course.

Language, especially the English language, is fickle! Zen is not normally a word or part of a word used to describe drawing anything. It's again a borrowed plume, but  to repeat the old saying: if the cap fits, wear it!
One more bit of trivia: Did you know that the word 'zen' is not in the official Scrabble dictionary? Silly that, considering how few words there are starting with Z that would fit in a scrabble game. And even sillier that there is a watchdog hanging over scrabble boards, checking that no disallowed words are used to solve linguistic tangles! 

Challenge 164  is to reflect on the Earth. A nice idea that will take us on long journeys and reflect some of our love of the world we live in. The choice of tangle patterns is endless - anything goes, really, and I think I'm going to use the centre of a large drawing I'm working on at the moment. Here's the bit I mean:

earth matters - detail of line drawing for ch164

I might print this part as a 10x10 drawing to achieve a 10x10cm format. I think it would work. The A3 drawing will be the final one in a presentation book of oversized drawings. I was ambitious about drawing on such a scale, but now I'm hooked and have already bought a second folder to store the 40 as yet undrawn abstract doodles I hope to make in the coming months. Today's task is to finish this one - or at least the part shown here.

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