THE GOLDEN SPIRAL

Sunflower Golden Spiral, Greensboro, NC

Beauty is a mystery in its knowing, but yet we know it when we see it. It exhibits itself in the golden spirals of a sunflower’s seed arrangement, the florets of a daisy, the bracts of a pine cone and the branches of a tree. These Fibonacci numbering sequences are nature’s mathematical order in the universe all around us. Mathematical proportions that are pleasing to the human eye were discovered ages ago by the Greeks and Egyptians in the form of the Golden Means, the Golden Sections, the Golden Proportion and the Golden Ratio. They are subliminally evident in our observations of the Greek Parthenon, Leonardo Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” and “Mona Lisa” and the pyramids.

Fibonacci numbers have been called the Fingerprint of God that is hidden throughout nature and man’s creations. They certainly belie randomness. In fact, the Golden Ratio is seen in the proportions of the sections of a human finger. We have 8 fingers in total, 5 digits on each hand, 3 bones in each finger, 2 bones in a thumb and 1 thumb on each hand. The ratio between the forearm and the hand is the Golden Ratio. There is a beautiful Golden Proportion related to the width of the white in our eyes and the distance between our eyes.

It’s been said that if you look into the face of a flower, you look into the face of God. And it would seem that when you look into the face of a sunflower, you look into the beautifully patterned order of all creation that shows the way into the Language of God in the form of spiraling DNA double helix strands.