Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

The Cliffs of Moher. West Coast of Ireland. Photo by Douglas Pinson, Sept 2003.

A music, an art, a phi­los­o­phy, a reli­gion that inspires us to look at nature and rejoice in our amaz­ing luck. Being there. A lit­er­a­ture, a poetry, a choir that lifts us above the smoggy every­day to hold that part of nature in our eyes that is wet, windy, and free.

Everything com­bined to form the song of the earth, the book of nature, the maxim of the sea. Everything pulled together to make us never for­get our place here, our one and only home. Now and forever.

Henry David Thoreau said:

As a sin­gle foot­step will not make a path on the earth, so a sin­gle thought will not make a path­way in the mind. To make a deep phys­i­cal path, we walk again and again. To make a deep men­tal path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dom­i­nate our lives.

 

When I walk along the beach and look at the ocean, I see some­thing beyond myself in a way I can’t fathom, as deep as the ocean is to me. I can’t fathom that depth, and not under­stand­ing it, I know myself bet­ter for a moment, am hap­pier for being here, alive, breath­ing in the salt air. Breathing out thank­ful­ness. I know myself bet­ter, am filled with won­der at the depths of this mys­tery shoot­ing out toward the hori­zon, shoot­ing out, spread­ing out to my left and to my right, as if I am the cen­ter of all things, know­ing I am not.

Blaise Pascal said:

Nature is an infi­nite sphere of which the cen­ter is every­where and the cir­cum­fer­ence nowhere.

Katsushika Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa. 1829. Japan.

 

Mountains, cliffs, jour­neys beyond the plain, don’t just lift the spirit, they lift the eyes. Looking up at them, slowly, we are hum­bled. Looking down from their heights into the val­leys below, brings a sweet laugh­ter we can use when we return to them. I want a drama of dif­fer­ence – sud­den, lyri­cal dif­fer­ence. I want baroque land­scapes, days and nights!

Rachel Carson said:

Those who dwell, as sci­en­tists or lay­men, among the beau­ties and mys­ter­ies of the earth are never alone or weary of life

 

That said, there is work to be done. We can not be aes­thetes alone. Though our souls may yearn for the food that gaz­ing brings. The gaze that brings us to the brink of satiety.

There is work to be done. And there are many ways to do that work and many ways for us to find our way. There is a cross­road for each gen­er­a­tion, a point at which we should say, no more! A point in which we grab hold of the earth, the sands, stand firmly, shout out in rebel­lion, we will not let you take the oceans from us, or the skies, or the moun­tain tops!

Echo, by Theodor Kittelsen. 1888. Norway.

Anton Chekhov said:

Man has been endowed with rea­son, with the power to cre­ate, so that he can add to what he’s been given. But up to now he hasn’t been a cre­ator, only a destroyer. Forests keep dis­ap­pear­ing, rivers dry up, wild life’s become extinct, the climate’s ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day [Uncle Vanya, 1897].

Thoreau said:

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in dan­ger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a spec­u­la­tor, shear­ing off those woods and mak­ing the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an indus­tri­ous and enter­pris­ing citizen.

 

Love of Nature sur­passes love of coun­try. It engulfs and sur­rounds it. Takes it over. Makes it seem too small, not good enough, too easy. Preserving, pro­tect­ing and cher­ish­ing Her includes love of coun­try, of all coun­tries, kills many birds with one stone. Well, let me rephrase that .…

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