Lichenography

A misty murky afternoon didn't promise to be blipworthy. Here's one I've been keeping in reserve for just such a day. It's another example of pareidolia like my blip of January 15th.

In the shapes formed by the lichen growth on the rock I see a white rabbit with flamboyant ears sitting in a lettuce bed munching on a mouthful of lettuce leaves. It's looking to the right and is surrounded by the salad rosettes. The image I see reminds me of Beatrix Potter's Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies in which a family of young rabbits raid a vegetable garden, stuff themselves silly on lettuces and fall asleep in the sunshine. The gardener spots them snoozing and drops them in a sack. Their fate seems sealed until their parents find them and release them, filling the sack with old vegetables instead.

Do you see what I see? Or something else? Or nothing at all except lichen?

The notion that people betray their unconscious preoccupations in the way they perceive random forms was the basis of the Rorschach test, invented by a Swiss psychiatrist of that name in 1921. He proposed that by inviting patients to interpret ink blots, their underlying psychopathology would be revealed. The method became a standard psychological test in the second half of the 20th century and is still widely used although not any longer regarded as diagnostic.

That said, I don't think I'm overly obsessed by rabbits.