Me, my Shadow and Fibonacci

It was early evening. The sun was behind me and my shadow stretched out in front of me on the footpath at the back of our house. It was a lovely shadow with perfect proportions. Had it been standing up rather than lying down, it would have been tall enough – not the three inches shorter than the four foot eleven and a half inches I had claimed to be in my younger days. It was slim enough – not a size zero by any means, but not excessively wide at any point. Even the shadow hair looked good. I smiled at my shadow and just for a moment or two wished I was it – the tall enough, the slim enough and with a nice hairdo.

I am reading a book “Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me” by Karen Swallow Prior. It’s not really a book I would have chosen to read, but I am a member of an online book club and it is someone else’s choice – but I am enjoying it. There’s not much Karen and I have in common apart from a love of reading. She has been reading a lot longer than I have and I‘ve not yet come to the chapter on Mills and Boon’s romances where I really cut my reading teeth! The quality of her books is way above mine. I have read a few classics but not that many.

A chapter a week, we are up to chapter 3 – “God of the Awkward, the Freckled and the Strange: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s "Pied Beauty". It’s about the people that don’t fit in – dogs too. There’s a pattern, a formula or a mould that the world uses to decide who fits in and who doesn’t. It’s not God’s formula – but we grow up in a world where people don’t necessarily listen to God but they do pay attention to the world.

I have spent a lot of time and energy, effort and money trying to fit in. I don’t fit the formula. I remember once, in university, a male friend commenting on my group of friends. None of them apparently fitted the formula – one was too thin, two were not thin enough and another too old. I, at the time, had all the right proportions but I was too short.

If I am on a diet right now, and I am, it’s not a fitting-in diet but a must-bring-my-sugar-levels-down diet. Just recently I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. I’m informed that I can backtrack a little with a low carb diet. I spent the morning trailing around the health shops looking for almond flour to bake low carb bread. Perhaps part of the weight loss contributed to the slim Mel shadow! I battle daily with my sweet tooth – and the tooth wins all too often.

The poem "Pied Beauty" picks up on the fickle and the freckled, the swift and the slow, the sweet and the sour, the dazzling and the dim – the things that are on the wrong side the formula fence. There’s a lot of alliteration throughout the poem that I like.

“Glory be to God” he begins, then lists all the oddities about nature and people. He ends with “Praise Him”. He says it’s all beautiful. The world might not say so but the world isn’t always right about these things.

I was reminded of a poem I wrote a few years ago.

1:1.62

Beauty has been plucked

from the eye of the beholder

and lies in mathematical formulae

proposed by

Fibonacci

The face carefully measured

Length and width

One divided by the other

1:1.62

The Golden ratio

The face in three acts

Hairline to eyes

Eyes to nose

Nose to chin

A trinity of equal numbers

Nature’s symmetry presented

Length of ear and length of nose

The same

Width of eye and distance between

The same

Luck would have it

Most faces

match the measurements

and for those that don’t

the right hairstyle disguises imperfections

Fibonacci has uncovered

the fingerprint of

the Maker

God sings creation into being

ofttimes flaunting the formulae

Beauty is never in

the eye of the beholder

or in the mathematics

of Fibonacci

but in the design of God

He looks

not for a Golden Ratio

but for a tender heart

God weighs the heart of Fibonacci

and He weighs the heart of me