Reflections On The Universal Design of Nature

A world within a world, we are but A dot a Spec - and yet we matter enough to Someone to keep us turning

“You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round... The Sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours... Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.”-Black Elk, Oglala

Welcome to my forest! If trees could speak they do. Nature continually speaks to us in their very way of just being. When we stop and listen with open eyes and hearts we can obtain lessons through the attributes of their life. I believe God, our Creator had more in Mind than just animate and inanimate objects when He created each living creature and being, on Mother Earth.

During the creation of these wood pieces, a question pervades: Whether by coincidence or design, why do we not find squares and rectangles; the tools for math, measurement and containment, in any part of nature? Excepting crystals whose life in computers, x-ray machines and clocks, predestine their use as a measurement and containment tool.

Searching this historical conundrum;“There is a universal design in Nature” Aristotle c. 384-322 BC., Teleology. And like Democritus,“Why.. one shape rather than another?” c. 460-370BC pondering the shape of atoms, or Karl Jaspers, Van Gogh; Philosophers and Artists who pondered this mystery for thousands of years, the Native Peoples have long understood, this mystery of the circular shape; the cycles in nature to be the Sacred Rhythms of Mother Earth and have applied this to their way of life in ceremony and tradition. Mother Earth has provided images that maintain a common denominator; that of organic shapes, fluid, curving, spherical like the atom, or DNA structure; a reiteration of the ebb and flow of life. And as life reflects life, an ongoing pattern restates itself, time and time again. From the energy of an Atom as the protons and neutrons circle the nucleus to the way a day becomes a night; Nature reveals a world within a world, repeating its mystery from the very small to the very vast. A world within a world, we are but A dot a Spec - and yet we matter enough to Someone to keep us turning.

And so, as I see clouds, sky, ripples of water, people, animals, feathers; many elements of nature reiterated in grains of wood, a question pervades; Are these reiterative images a conscious coincidence? A master plan? or The result of a very connected world that is based on common cells, that just can’t help but be repetitions born of relative form? Seeing subtle images in nature is intrinsic to my being, as a consequence of its creation AND mine, giving meaning to life and I, life to its meaning. A very real connection to the natural world becomes my metaphor in poetry and in my life experience.

Jacob Bronowski in his book "The Ascent of Man" traces our rise both as a species and as moulders of our own environment and future. From a historical and social context, he explores how we as human beings have expressed through our creations, a specific ability to understand nature: "Discovery is a double relation of analysis and synthesis together. As an analysis, it probes for what is there; but then, as a synthesis, it puts the parts together in a form by which the creative mind transcends the bare limits, the bare skeleton, that nature provides. And in another sense, what a man discovers is discovered by him; it would not take the same form in the hands of someone else -- neither the sculptured figure nor the law of nature would come out in identical copies when produced by two different minds in two different ages.”

What I perceive in what Mother Earth has given me, another person will see completely different. We are so small in this universe and so big in our minds eye, it is disturbing to see what damage has been done in the pursuit to biggness, through Big Corporations and "Developers". It is a misnomer to say that Developers develop, because they do not develop land but rather destroy it for profit. We are so small and we gain so much from Mother Earth not only physically, but emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. The richest people on earth surround themselves with acres and acres of untouched land, beautiful Mother Earth wilderness and yet most of them have had their hand in the biggest footprint taken from her. The irony is that they've benefitted from both ends depleting her for their profit and enjoying her in their special brand of a non-smoking section. But the special irony of all this is that we are all connected and neither the air nor water contain boundaries. If we continue to allow the few big ones to usurp more than what the only life giver we know can give, the damage will only come around full circle in their lifetime or their children's lifetime and the life giver will be a life taker. I want to be one that was not connected to that destruction. To say that my dot, my spec did not hurt any vastness of this Mother and that I was not one of those specs connected to the great damage that took her life, but rather the dot that fought to save her for future dots and specs to enjoy WITH respect. A world within a world, we are butA dot a Spec - and yet we matter enough to Someone to keep us turning.

LauraLee K. Harris Ojibwa, Sioux, Cree, Chipawyan, Montagnais: Manitoba/Saskatchewan - Wolf Clan, and French, Irish, English.