“spirtually and passionately alive”
I posted this on Facebook and it sparked some interesting feedback. So I figured it would post it here as well:
The Content
National Park Portraits
by Teresa Barry
“We need wilderness,” claimed the America writer Edward Abbey, “whether or now we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there.”
On a wintry afternoon some years ago, I definitely needed to go there – or, more specifically, to get there. My family had driven hundreds of miles on unfamiliar highways, heading for a national park we’d long dreamed of visiting. On and on we pushed that final day, hour after hour, mountain after snowy mountain, looking for an open pass that would take us across the Sierra Nevada to Yosemite. After the third or fourth sign announcing yet another closed route, I began to doubt whether the park’s landscapes could possibly be so splendid as to make this trip worthwhile. Crossing the countless mountains just to reach a park with… more mountains? And then, in the warm light of the near-setting sun, we entered Yosemite Valley. I gasped at its matchless beauty. Each waterfall and pinnacle seemed more stunning thatn the las, and the snow, so worrisome on the journey, now enhanced the sparkle of this jewel of a park. Exquisite portraits form that day are forever imprinted in my mind.
Everyone lucky enough to have fallen in love wiht a national park can recall similar scenes. Whether caught on film or cherished in the “keep forever” recesses of memory…
“No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite,” wrote John Muir, the naturalist whose crusading led to the creation of Yosemite National Park in 1890. Although the park is almost the size of Rhode Island, many visitors see only the valley with views of Bridalveil Fall and El Capitan. (Derek Von Briesen)
The Feedback
Alex Pollitt: I love parking. One road trip I’ve been itching to do in recent years is a camping/photo trip to the Great Smoky Mountain NP in TN, in the fall. Camp, hike, shoot, for about a week or so.
I never trusted my old car to reliably get me there, and though I now have a good car, I missed this year’s colors by about a month & a half.
Angel Yanez: I have seen the beauty of the Smokies, Grand canyon, and others, but I just love the sights in Sedona, especially fresh from a rainfall.
Justin Mayfield: my aunt’s name is teresa barry. seriously. ok that’s the end of that thought. it’s interesting how so often we derive beauty from novelty. we can watch a beautiful scene in a movie, see a gorgeous painting, etc… but once we’ve seen that same thing a hundred or so times, there’s like a switch that flips on, and though we may continuously … See Moreappreciate them, they lose some of that beauty… it’s the specific things that we can put a name on that fade somewhat over time. but then there’s always things like peering out over a snow-encrusted valley for the first time… that’s novel. that’s beautiful because it totally challenges our sense of perception. it’s so new, and so different, that it has a heightened power. not to say that everything new is beautiful, but i think that things we have no prior experience with, always stand out a bit more than the run-of-the-mill stuff we encounter daily. i think we also gravitate toward vast things as being beautiful. it’s almost as though the smaller something makes us feel, the more respect we have for it, and that respect can be fed into the aesthetic beauty we derive from it. i know, for myself, when i look up at the stars, i don’t think “wow… those actual individual stars are pretty.” they’re just white dots on a black canvas… but there’s something much deeper than that that lies within their inherent overarching meaning. they are the heavens. they are the limitless bounds of our visual perception. you will never reach them. they are so much grander than you… that’s why parks are beautiful to me at least. they don’t have the rigid familiarity of a city street… and they’re so vast, that you can easily picture yourself getting lost in one. i remember standing in an evergreen forest once and thinking to myself… well we have these as our christmas trees…. this shouldn’t be so beautiful… but the fact is, i’ve never had a million christmas trees in my house at one point. the sheer volume was overwhelming. i was intrigued by how unfathomable the whole thing was. so there’s intrigue in just not knowing. mystery is beautiful.
Laura Rico: beautiful Justin! And on most accounts I absolutely agree. The vast is mysterious and mystery is beautiful!
However, you wrote: “i think that things we have no prior experience with, always stand out a bit more than the run-of-the-mill stuff we encounter daily.”
That is true for the most part, but, for us, they daily loses its luster not because they are daily and not “rare” so to speak. It’s simply the fact that we forget to really “look.” But I feel, that if we really do “look” we’ll always find that same sense of awe. No matter how many times we’ve seen it before or how many times it might appear in our “daily” life. There’s always more to discover, notice observe.
Example: I’ve seen ants I don’t know how many gazillion times in my life. But, one time, our house was having an ant problem. I didn’t want to kill them so I used organic dish soap to wreck their “scent trail” as a means of hopefully discouraging them from coming back. Some ants became encircled by the trail of soap though. And the next thing I knew… I saw them signaling too each other. I literally saw them wiggling their back torsos in a specific little wiggle. And they would use a front leg and raise it to their antennae, with a kind of wiping motion, over and over… i was fascinated! I watched them for a good half hour. These little ants! I have seen them all my life… but I had never really “looked!”
You also wrote: “i think we also gravitate toward vast things as being beautiful. it’s almost as though the smaller something makes us feel, the more respect we have for it, and that respect can be fed into the aesthetic beauty we derive from it.”
I absolutely agree. But I gravitate just as much to the finite. My mom loves to tell me this story of when I was a toddler. We were at the beach and it was my first time. My mom kept trying to get me look up and take in the vast beauty of the ocean. But I was too delighted and enthralled with a little insect making its away across what were mountains of sand to him. I kept pointing at it and laughing. Watching it and trailing it. I was totally enraptured with it even though the beauty of the vast ocean was before me. Now, I’ve had moments where I’ve been totally mesmerized by the ocean, the sky, a thick jungle that spreads beyond the horizon (just recently in Tikal!), volcanic giants fuming. Yet, I can still be as easily stopped in my tracks by the minuscule complexity and delicacy of the piston of a blooming flower, by the elegant curves and twirls in wood grain, by the fingernail thin veins of a leaf… by little tiny ants signaling with their legs and antennae.
Alex Pollitt: Forget wrestling cattle — somebody needs to go back to school & study entomology!
Justin Mayfield: haha. i agree. insect lover. you reminded me of an awesome Far Side cartoon that Gary Larson did… it’s just a guy lying on the floor with his legs and arms tucked in, and the caption is something along the lines of “death of an entomologist”… i always thought that was brilliant. but i also have to add that even insects can be vast… they represent this network that is trillions of times bigger than the human network… and i love the philosophy of insects. to them, it’s probably just their nature, but the sacrifice evident in the insect world for the greater good of the community is enviable. for instance… drone bees, to continue the colony, have to mate with the queen. it’s an airborne mating, and it requires the male bees genitalia to detach and rip out vital organs. so they mate, to continue the hive, and then while airborne, they commit sexual kamikaze and die. that’s serious sacrifice. i’m not saying we should follow that specific line of logic, but you know what i mean. and it’s also interesting how the very very minuscule can also make us feel small… i look at the quantum world, and it makes me realize that this interconnectedness renders any one individual tiny. that’s not to say that we can’t have great impact, but it’s completely depended on the other individuals. i dunno. just thinking out loud now… where are you these days laura?
Laura Rico: I think we should follow that logic… I nominate myself Queen Bee!! heheheheheehehehehehehe
thanks for sharing though… super interesting stuff
hey! interesting though! we should start a blog together… we seem to rebound off each other so well…
it could be a new trend. not just blogging… but dual blogging!!
i’m not THAT into bugs!!
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