Books by Dale Harris

Books by Dale Harris
A Feast of Epiphanies

Though I Walk, A Novel

Daytime Moons and Other Celestial Anomalies, a book of poems

Second Wind

Second Wind
An album of songs both old and new. Recorded in 2021, a year of major transition for me, these songs explore the many vicissitudes of the spiritual life,. It's about the mountaintop moments and the Holy Saturday sunrises, the doors He opens that no one can close, and those doors He's closed that will never open again. You can click the image above to give it a listen.

The Song Became a Child

The Song Became a Child
A collection of Christmas songs I wrote and recorded during the early days of the pandemic lockdown in the spring of 2020. Click the image to listen.

There's a Trick of the Light I'm Learning to Do

There's a Trick of the Light I'm Learning to Do
This is a collection of songs I wrote and recorded in January - March, 2020 while on sabbatical from ministry. They each deal with a different aspect or expression of the Gospel. Click on the image above to listen.

Three Hands Clapping

Three Hands Clapping
This is my latest recording project (released May 27, 2019). It is a double album of 22 songs, which very roughly track the story of my life... a sort of musical autobiography, so to speak. Click the album image to listen.

Ghost Notes

Ghost Notes
A collections of original songs I wrote in 2015, and recorded with the FreeWay Musical Collective. Click the album image to listen.

inversions

inversions
Recorded in 2014, these songs are sort of a chronicle of my journey through a pastoral burn-out last winter. They deal with themes of mental-health, spiritual burn-out and depression, but also with the inexorable presence of God in the midst of darkness. Click the album art to download.

soundings

soundings
click image to download
"soundings" is a collection of songs I recorded in September/October of 2013. Dealing with themes of hope, ache, trust and spiritual loss, the songs on this album express various facets of my journey with God.

bridges

bridges
Click to download.
"Bridges" is a collection of original songs I wrote in the summer of 2011, during a soul-searching trip I took out to Alberta; a sort of long twilight in the dark night of the soul. I share it here in hopes these musical reflections on my own spiritual journey might be an encouragement to others: the sun does rise, blood-red but beautiful.

echoes

echoes
Prayers, poems and songs (2005-2009). Click to download
"echoes" is a collection of songs I wrote during my time studying at Briercrest Seminary (2004-2009). It's called "echoes" partly because these songs are "echoes" of times spent with God from my songwriting past, but also because there are musical "echoes" of hymns, songs or poems sprinkled throughout the album. Listen closely and you'll hear them.

Accidentals

Accidentals
This collection of mostly blues/rock/folk inspired songs was recorded in the spring and summer of 2015. I call it "accidentals" because all of the songs on this project were tunes I have had kicking around in my notebooks for many years but had never found a "home" for on previous albums. You can click the image to download the whole album.

Random Reads

The Number of Beauty

Still thinking about the spirituality of math.

Consider the golden ratio, for instance. Two quantities are said to be in the golden ratio ( φ ) if the ratio between the larger and the smaller quantities is equal to the ratio between the sum of the quantities and the larger one. Put differently: the following two line segments (a and b) are in the golden ratio because the ratio between a and b is the same as the ratio between (a + b) and a.

We can represent this mathematically as:


If we rewrite the right side of the equation as a=bφ, we can substitute bφ for a, giving us:

Canceling b give us:

Multiplying both sides by φ and rearranging the terms gives us a quadratic equation:




Now we can solve for φ by completing the square:

















The golden ratio, then, is 1: 1.6180339887...

The line segments of a star shape are in the golden ratio (the green to the red, the purple to the blue); a spiral that gets wider by a factor of φ for every quarter turn it makes is called a golden spiral.



Now for the profound so what: Human beings tend to find designs that follow the golden ratio aesthetically pleasing. Their proportions strike us intuitively as balanced, harmonious, elegant. It's a beautiful number. Leonardo Da Vinci knew this. So did the ancient architects who designed the Parthenon.



But here's the really mysterious thing: these artists didn't invent this as an aesthetic principle. It's more like they discovered it. For some reason, the golden ratio actually occurs all over God's world: from the spiral arms of galaxies to the star-shaped seed pod of an apple. Many flowers have a petal-to-pod ratio of 1.618... spiral sea shells expand in the golden ratio ... so do the spiral formations of sunflower seeds... and pine cones. 1.6180339887... , it seems, is one of the beautiful numbers that the all-wise artist of the universe used in designing his beautiful creation.



Balanced. Harmonious. Elegant. Not that the Psalmist had this in mind when he sang, but the beautiful math of the creation surely charges his exulting cry with new wonder: ""How many are your works, O Lord; in wisdom you made them all!"

 

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