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The aesthetic, the spiritual, and the analytical are the three voices of Nature that guide us in perceiving her patterns. In the synergy of this partnership that takes place in the human mind and soul, they effect the beholding of nature and her patterns in ways that one or two voices could not do alone.

A human’s first encounter with a pattern in Nature is almost always accompanied by an emotion of awe, surprise, or delight coming from our visual, auditory, olfactory, or kinesthetic senses. According to Peter Saint-Andre: “it can inspire, enlighten, send shivers up the spine, delight, anger, frighten; it can make one think, feel, shake one's head in astonishment, cry, laugh out loud; it can evoke feelings of triumph, melancholy, light-heartedness, serenity, excitement, boredom, rightness, anxiety, joy, sorrow.”

Seeing a majestic mountain peak, hearing the beautiful song of a bird, the smell of fresh rain, or feeling a rush of wind are all experiences of beauty provided to us by nature. These aesthetic perceptions are typically in the form of mental images and metaphors. They are an important prelude to hearing Nature's spiritual and logical voices.

Nature’s aesthetic voice imposes Nature's patterns onto human experience. The aesthetic enjoyment comes from the recognition of a pattern. The reason is that human beings are conceptual pattern recognition organisms. Vladimir Nabokov describes his joy in recognizing a pattern as:

"The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things...When a certain moth resembles a certain wasp in shape and color, it also walks and moves its antennae in a aspish, unmothlike manner. When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but  markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in... I discovered in nature the non-utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.”

For humans, engaging beauty is a right brain activity while analyzing nature takes place in the left hemisphere of the human brain. Both sides of this brain are at work processing the same information in two different ways. The aesthetic right hemisphere uses leaps of insight. It is creative, intuitive, subjective, relational, holistic, time-free, perceptual, whole-pattern, and spatial . The logical left hemisphere addresses the verbal and the analytical. It analyzes over time. The right hemisphere synthesizes over space.

Art, according to Ayn Rand, is a human abstraction of reality. When extended to the beholding of Nature's patterns, the "artist" is Nature itself. Human involvement comes in the beholding. In "The Romantic Manifesto", Rand goes on to say that "Art brings man's concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were precepts".

According to Peter Saint-Andre, the purpose of art is to expand the range of man's consciousness, or his knowledge, beyond the perceptual level . It brings things into the realm of the humanly knowable and converts concepts into the equivalent of concretes.

Aesthetic perception of Nature requires a very different point of view than that required by the science of analyzing patterns in nature. Where science seeks abstraction above all, the aesthetic world revels in the particular at the same time that it presents an image or vision of some aspect of Nature. Aesthetic perception offers the power of deep focus. For example, when one focuses the right brain through sketching or photography, one sees patterns and relationships that are otherwise overlooked.

According to Alan Lightman:

The aesthetic voice is perception because Nature doesn't connect to our soul until it is first perceived. Perception inspires, enlightens, makes one think, and evokes feelings of all kinds. Perception can be a prelude or a pathway to the analytical. But, when one walks into a forest, picks up a seashell, or gasps with wonder at a rainbow, it is highly unlikely that the immediate  action will be to grab a calculator and compute something from what is seen. Instead, that first encounter with a pattern in Nature is accompanied by the emotion of a happening, a connection. No matter what might happen later, that first response is aesthetic. It is not analytical. And, that aesthetic response can result in a spiritual experience where one connects to nature within one's soul.

Aesthetic perception can raise questions. But, there are questions with answers and questions without. Scientists work on questions with answers. Although science is constantly revising itself in response to new ideas and data, at any moment each scientist is working on what is called a ‘well-posed problem’ — that is, a problem of such a kind and stated with such clarity that it is certain to have a definite answer. That answer may take ten years to find, or a hundred, but an answer exists. By contrast, in the world of aesthetics, the question is often more interesting than the answer, and often an answer doesn’t exist. How does one answer a question such as “What is love?” or “Would we be happier if we lived to be 1,000 years old?” In Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet he says:

“We should try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.”

We humans have the gift of expressing our feelings and ideas through many media including art, photography, poetry, and essays. Here is a growing list of aesthetic expressions about patterns in nature.

• The Web a wonderful poem about connectivity and relationships in nature by Alison Hawthorne Deming
• Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, used nature as a metaphor to express his spirituality. Here are some excerpts from his writings.
• South Georgia Island - Crown Jewel of the Southern Ocean an essay by William C Graham
• The Patterns That Connect -- A poem by Gwen Meyer
• Thoreau's chapter on solitude in Walden
• Lynn White's powerful essay condemning Judeo-Christian theology for destroying our ecosystem and proposing St. Francis of Assisi as the patron saint of ecology.
• An incredibly beautiful video visualization of Nature By Numbers -- Fibonnaci and others.
• Nature photography links
  William Graham
  Ken Conger
  Keith Bauer
  Miguel Lasa
  Florian Schultz
  Scott Hotaling
  Art Wolfe
• Sights And Sounds Of The Southern Ocean -- A nine minute video of animals and birds at the Falkland Islands and South Georgia Island.