Healer, storyteller and wandering mystic Ari Lazer sees the world in shapes. Also a teacher, he wants to share this knowledge with Bow Valley keen beans eager to learn more about sacred geometry. — Highline
Space opens up for me in the mountains.
Always.
As I rest to take a breath, and listen to the world around me — the wind in the trees and the snow gently settling on the branches — space is there to greet me. I have journeyed to and through the Rockies since I was young, but the space that opens up for me in this air is different now, transformed by what I’ve come to learn about my world. Ever since picking up a drawing compass years ago, shape has been my constant companion: the simple, intricate and harmonious shapes that unfurl themselves from a circle fill the space around this mountain peak. My mind marvels at the intricate and exquisite harmonies that lie beneath my feet and stretch above my head. Like it or not, my world is devoted to these shapes.
Shape is my world, and now, also my profession as an artist, and a teacher, devoted to the practice of sacred geometry.
Pine cone spiral.
As improbable as it may seem, the world around us is comprised of a handful of elegant and mysteriously simple relationships – all of which can be described by a handful of geometric forms we first came to know as kids – the triangle, the square, the pentagon and the hexagon. Sacred geometry is the study of these harmonic proportions, and the ways they relate to compose the natural world.
So now, years after I first set foot in these mountains I look on all that lies around me completely transformed. I pick a pinecone off the ground, and stare at its delicate spiral, the branching of its seed pods nested in the one particular ratio required to pack the greatest number of seeds into the smallest space. I take great joy in knowing that the spiral I see in the tiniest microcosm of this pinecone is the same spiral that makes itself known in the branching limbs of the Milky Way Galaxy. The beautiful spiral is informed by an exquisite ratio, that all life seems to tend towards and recreate within itself – 1:1.618… the Golden Ratio, represented by the greek letter Phi (for those keeping score at home). I lie down on my back and stare up the trunk the tree the pinecone came from, watching the delicate dance of the branches as they stretch to the sky and recognize the same spiral in its limbs.
The view along axis courtesy of Dr. R. Langridge.
Miraculously, or at least very satisfyingly, I muse, this is same spiral pattern that structures the braiding of the DNA that creates the pine tree, my eyes that take it in, and the jovial thrush who builds her nest high up in its branches, long coils of pentagons and hexagons joined together in an intricate dance.
In this space out here above the mountains, I am no longer surprised that I see these proportions everywhere in the natural world. The real surprise hits me on a daily basis, when I journey down out of the hills, into the warmth of my studio, and pullout my compass. With a few twists of a circle, I find myself staring at the same pattern again. Elegant and simple — a pattern drawing me back to nature — and the form contained with in each atom, within each point on a piece of paper, in each breath of the artist.
Ari Lazer is an artist, and teacher specializing in sacred geometry. He runs the Traveling Alchemists’ Outreach Society, and is coming to Canmore April 11-14th to teach a Sacred Shape and Space: a workshop on the art, philosophy and practice of geometry in our world. For more information, visit www.travelingalchemists.com.
