June 19th 2010    Tim Candler

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_spiral  

    Some of us are getting excited about Summer Solstice.  The old me might have looked to spirals in his search for self centered description.  The new me chases saintliness  by observing the circle in the way ancient minds might have done in their consideration of that dimension we live in.

     I picture these ancients contemplating spheres in their understanding of a circle.  Those with reasonable eyesight might have looked into the sky and seen the moon as it is.  Which today only sometimes when I stare at it looks like a disk, because I have been told men have walked upon it.   Yet Generations ago a straight line which the third dimension of a disk implies would have been harder to have imagined because nowhere did straight lines exist.   So a third dimension might have been easy for the ancients to describe as a sphere when observing their moon as it moved rather than as a disk. 

    The spiral has a beginning and an end.  Circles and spheres do not.   Yet both are patterns that emerge from imagination and from mathematics.  Spirals produce yin and yang,  a complexity of line that turns in upon itself in a most selfish way by representing two opposites connected and thus an idea of forgiveness.  Or at least an explanation of our nature that can shrug off malfeasance as part of a whole.  Circles, on the other hand, contain no such tolerance.

     I can hear the hunter denigrating the farmer, and I can hear the wild wind call.   So where will I stand to describe a circle on Summer Solstice?  And with what should I make the circle?    I could hunt and gather.  I could collect.   But that makes me think of spirals of Pelicans and Cormorants with oil in their feathers and the new me is a saint with a halo to polish.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:God_the_Geometer.jpg

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