The first tropical storm of the season is moving toward the Florida coast.  Pictured above, to mark the occasion:  a hurricane pendant from Florida's Sanibel Island Goldsmith.

Storms have long loomed large in spiritual imagery.  Even today, people link hurricanes to the wrath of God or Nature on our sins (whatever they may be).  In fact, the appearance of God in the storm goes back as far as the Garden of Eden.

After Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, they hear the voice of God l'ruach hayyom--in ancient Hebrew, "in the wind of the storm." The image in this passage is of God thundering out of a raging wind; no longer will Adam and Eve converse with their creator as of old, in the calm of an Eden at peace.  (Wanna impress your friends with your knowledge of linguistic arcana?  Tell them you, unlike the King James Bible translators, recognize that "yom" in context here is not "day," but an archaic cognate of the Akkadian umu, or "storm.")

The association of God with swirling storms points to an even deeper resonance between our perception of the divine and recurring patterns in nature.  Benoit Mandelbrot, for example, has described how the topology of turbulence can be explained using fractal geometry, an analysis that has shaped how meteorologists predict the course of storms.  We won't go into the math here--yet!  For now, here's another look at our old fractal friend, the spiral, itself a common image in spiritual adornment.  On the left, a spiral galaxy, and on the right, a hurricane--and for an accessible look at the underlying science, click the pic to visit [censored].