Now I can't express it with the precision of a mathematician, or with the eloquence of a poet, but I have long been fascinated by fractals, especially those to be found in the natural world.
How glorious, to find the same patterns repeating over and over, at different scales and with ever-increasing complexity, capable of being expressed to infinity.
I suspect it helps to explain my love of Escher, and his use of graded tessellations.
A physicist I know tells me that they are reflections of chaos, and yet I see a profoundly beautiful order within them. Perhaps we are talking past one another?
The Stoic in me finds them to also be instances of how all things, parts and wholes, from the smallest to the largest, are joined together as one, no one piece really separable from any other.
I once listened to an astronomer and a biologist excitedly discussing the possibility that the network of neurons in the human brain and the network of galaxies in the Universe are remarkably similar. They turned to me and shouted out, "Wouldn't it be amazing if that's actually true?"
I couldn't help but say that it wouldn't surprise me at all, and that I would personally speak of such patterns as the immanent presence of God. We may describe it differently, but we are seeing the same thing.
12/2015
No comments:
Post a Comment