32. It reminds me of the Fibonacci Series.
33. That is, the Golden Spiral around which everything's created.
Odd, I know, but here's the story: Last year, these 40 Ways were created as Twitter posts, and you know all about the 140 characters, right? Well, it doesn't make sense to make two separate devotionals out of these two, so we'll have 39 Lenten devotionals, and one for Easter!
The Fibonacci Series, for those who don't know, is a series of numbers beginning with 0, 1, and from then on each number is the sum of the last two. So: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21. . . etc. It's named after a man named Leonardo of Pisa, who was also known as Fibonacci. He was the one who introduced the concept to western mathematics, in 1202, although it had already been described even earlier than that, in Indian mathematics.
If you plot these numbers on a graph, they create an enlarging spiral that will look very familiar to you. Perhaps you'll know why--"Hey! That looks like a chambered nautilus!" Or perhaps you'll just think vaguely, "That looks familiar. I wonder where I've seen it before?" The answer is, Everywhere! Just now when I put "Fibonacci" into Google, the third website on the list was titled, "The Fibonacci Numbers and Golden Section in Nature," and included hundreds of ways you can see these patterns. www.maths.surrey.ac.uk/hosted-sites/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fibnat.htm The Golden Section is also called the Golden Mean, the Golden Ratio, and Divine Proportion. You could call it a visual representation of the Fibonacci Series (or Numbers, or Sequence.) And it's literally found all over the natural world, from the spiral of hairs in your cowlick to the seeds of a sunflower to the end of a pine cone. Put any of the above words into Google Images and you'll see hundreds of astounding things.
I think the Divine Proportion is truly divine. I think it's the fingerprint of the Creator. My labyrinth reminds me of it. And in the midst of all the chaos of seemingly random and senseless events that fill our lives (like alopecia in someone who, therefore, has no cowlick, a diseased sunflower that doesn't produce seeds at all, or a stunted pine cone) it's comforting to think there's some kind of underlying pattern, whether it's always visible or not.
Life, right down to its DNA, seems to move in endless spirals, growing outward, larger and larger, from the spinning of atoms to the spinning of galaxies. So do the seasons roll, and so does my life, and yours, come around again and give us a kind of second chances. In Elizabeth Goudge's book The Scent of Water, a character reassures another that life is like beads on a string, and the loving acts you didn't succeed in performing for someone earlier in your life (and now you live in regret) will come around again, and you'll get a chance to try again, to be loving not to the same person, but to another brother or sister in the circle of life.
But there is a center. There is an end to the path. Today might be the last chance you get to love, so grab it. Add together the amount of love you could give yesterday and the amount you could give today, and give that much tomorrow.
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