Sundays with William Blake: There Is No Natural Religion, Meditations on Fantasy in Christian Life and Talking Honestly with God

I think that the hardest aspect of my Christian identity is bringing my feelings honestly to God.

Chaotic oscillators can be very much like haikus or koans.  In written form they are often very short.  They can be just a small system of three ordinary differential equations.  Chaotic oscillators are both predictable and not predictable.  A small difference in initial conditions can lead to profoundly different results.  And yet, as long as those initial conditions are within what is often a very wide range, the widely variable results all stay within certain bounds, as if tied by an unknown string...

Happy Earth Day & Sundays with William Blake

Happy Earth Day!

Because of family parties, I actually had to garden yesterday rather than today.

The spiral of a sunflower follows a very specific pattern known as the Golden Ratio, which is the limit of the ratio of the Fibonacci numbers as you approach infinity.  Not everything that people claim follows the Golden Ratio actually does - nautilus shells, for example, do not.  But sunflowers really do.  To see how the sunflower's pattern relates to the Golden Ratio, check out this tool called "Turn, then Grow."

Sundays with William Blake: The Clod and the Pebble

Lovely Blake poem which I feel is true at many levels - hence the fractal below.

Fractals are self-similar objects, which means that as you zoom in and out the pattern, while not identical, remains extremely similar.  Their eerie beauty has given them the nickname "the thumbprint of God."

Sundays with William Blake: Christ, Guanyin and the Divine Image

Who are we worshiping?

Guanyin, Bodhisattva of compassion, China, 12th Century