Twisted and leaning toward the backseat car window, I gaze at the magnificent cloudscape. Human voices chatter inside the car, but the sky’s silence calls me to leave the voices behind, and I strain against my seatbelt. The jet-puffed clouds break in places and the sun’s beams pass through. The sky’s grey blanket ends abruptly just above the horizon; it is fringed with a stripe of gold, this sky’s particular magnificence. It’s one of those afternoons that host a low flat body of clouds like another plane that extends for miles above the earth. The horizon is flat and wide and hugely distant from our vehicle speeding down 290. Why do the clouds call me to leave my backseat? I feel nostalgic. Does nature make me feel so, or am I drawn to the sky by my persistent longing for the home I have left? It is the Sunday after Thanksgiving and God is still preaching gratitude. He is preaching to the Christians an “aesthetic Christianity,” and God’s painters and poets, who are not all Christians, say, “We give you ‘beauty as a means to God’ (635).”
Beauty is large. When I am tense and contracted, beauty reminds me of this fact. I am small. I can’t explain away nature’s pull on both people who have always lived in bucolic areas and people who are enveloped by the concrete jungle. During high school, especially junior and senior year, I had a really difficult time being inside an overly air conditioned building with no windows and no connection to wind or sun or trees. I would often be late to my English class after lunch because I could not make myself leave the fresh air, even if it was confined by a rigid wrought iron fence. “Rural scene, a rural scene,” how I longed for a “Sweet especial rural scene” (635). My art became a medium through which I could contact the earth. I worked outside in the courtyard for three hours everyday, toying with one of my various unproductive processes – grinding stone, tearing paper, drawing parallel line after line after line. Maybe because I felt so confined by myself, trapped in a body and a mind I wish I weren’t. But for some reason, the fresh empty space beyond corners and ceiling tiles and plaster walls liberated me. “As a child walks and runs up and down the bed of a creek he is no more than dimly aware of the lure to which he is responding” (751). Do we really become more aware of the creek’s allure as we grow older? Do we identify the creek’s current appeal with our memory of the appeal the creek use to have?
I seem to remember a tender young Wiley, hopping from stone to stone, skipping rocks – bounce to bounce, swatting at minnows. I look down at the minnows – much farther down than I did ten years ago – and laugh, “Oh, if I were ten years ago, I’d be down on my hands and knees, and you’d be panicked, darting into the mucky aquatic foliage to escape my grasp.” My sight is colored by sights from my past. Every year adds another layer of tint to my vision until someday, I imagine, all I will be able to say is, “Oh, I remember… back when I was young, back when kids respected their elders, before a hooligan was only rowdy in cyberspace… we used to… those were the good ole days.” I suppose that it will be nice to, as Professor Bump says, “meet new people everyday,” but I don’t want to have enjoy things by remembering the pleasure they used to give me. So it is not necessarily nostalgia with which nature beckons us. What is it?
Sometimes people think that nature needs to be taken care of. I suppose if we don’t chain ourselves to trees then no one will. But who put nature in our nursery and demanded that we watch over it? Streams and winds and flower petals may be ephemeral, but this is one of nature’s greatest strengths. “Country is so tender / To touch, her being so slender” (635), yet we cannot destroy her. The natural world, the physiosphere as Ken Wilber would call it, it our foundation, the base blocks of our living pyramid. If we knocked even one foundation block loose, we at the top of the stop would surely topple. I wholeheartedly believe that we should care for the world which we inhabit, that we should be conscientious of our interactions with nature. But we should not separate caring for nature from caring for ourselves and for all that exists. “The Creek is an ever-visible manifestation of continuity, of life” (750), of which we are a part. Hurting our environment is hurting ourselves. I think this perspective can make our preservation efforts that much more passionate and real and effective. If life is to continue to possess beauty, and I believe it always will, nature must be a part of it.
I love not knowing why the clouds have such power over me.
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