How To Be One With Nature

Music, paintings, mother earth, the universe, art, the past, present, and future all have something in common, something that is not to be expected of things so varied, of things so varied and complex in their own nature that I’ve yet to understand how they manage to exist in the same universe, let alone share similarities. Well… what is it you ask? What is it that makes them allllllllllll associates in this pursuit for the truth you’ve so unexpectedly been thrown into? Well, I’ll pull your strings a bit more. It involves a language, a language known to some, if not many…. if not all; arguably the only universal language, a language that can connect any intelligent species to any other intelligent species, (drum roll please… oh wait… this is all in my head… I don’t… I don’t need to say please…) well, it’s the language of math. Buttt, (yep, more pulling of the strings) it’s not a maths that you’ve studied, surely, because you don’t study numbers, you study letters! (As do I).

I’ll avoid the details since I’m sure it’ll put some, if not most… if not all, to sleep. Formulaically it is known as xₙ = xₙ-1 + xₙ-2. Now, I know what you’re thinking (don’t I always?), “Willia… I mean Richard, you’ve somehow managed to say absolutely nothing in the last 200 words,” welllll, it gets better! (also, isn’t this why I study letters?). Now, from numbers to letters, this impossibly complicated formula is better understood as a series of numbers where a number is found by summing the two numbers that precede it.

In other words, starting with 0 and 1, the sequence goes 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc.

This impossibly complicated math is (in part) known as the Fibonacci ratio (or Fibonacci sequence for now). With that out of the box, let’s get into the fun part. Why should anyone care about the Fibonacci ratio? Because through some more math it brings about the quotient 1.618. And. This. Is. Where. It. Really. Gets. Fun. The 1.618 is where the “ratio” comes in. It’s associated with something called the golden ratio. And the golden ratio… well, the golden ratio is everywhere. On a side note, this (the two photos with tiling down there) is what the ratio looks in spiral form, also called, Fibonacci spiral (it’ll help with the gallery to come). And on a further side note, Fibonacci ratio and golden ratio are often times interchangeable, so feel free to think of them as the same.