Letters to Nature

To A Deserted Lakeside Park

We stopped by a beautiful picturesque lake surrounded by luscious flowering planes and rolling mountains. There were a number of horse carriages along the wide desolate road. It all felt stagnant and melancholic with the atmospheric limbo of an abandoned dream. This area was meant to be a bustling tourist location, built with expansive parking lots and pathways, but now it’s a deserted frontier town reclaimed by the elements. There was a visitor’s center that housed a collection of exhibits explaining the local wildlife composition. It was a small and dimly lit room used for displaying taxidermic animals and a murky tank filled with what seemed to be a large number of baby salmon. Out on the gravel walkways, a white horse trotting across the field ahead of me caught my eye. It was a strange place to have horses as this location was plopped in the middle of a countryside highway. How did they get there? Did someone march a parade of horses hundreds of kilometres from civilization to pester the occasional lost tourist that stumbled upon this deadbeat place to a mediocre ride around a gravel parking lot? What a meaningful venture. Anyway, I digress. It was the only horse that was not saddled and it roamed free. The workers said that it was a “problem”. The other domesticated horses in the area were lifeless robots that simply received and followed. They were submissive and docile when being pet, expressing no pleasure or displeasure. They passively went along with the tug of their leashes. This white stallion vagabond, on the other hand, was reactive, bold, and had a distinct character. It was capable of refusing, discontent, and aggression. It ran. It moved purposely. And it was deemed a problem. I was completely enchanted by this creature. It wasn’t completely wild, as it wandered on the outskirts of the area occupied by its lobotomized kin, but it was still involved and interactive with society. As such, it was able to be an individual because it had boundaries to define its character against. The grandiosity of true wilderness is so overwhelming that it dissolves personality, encompassing all in a singularity.

To A Flowering Field by the Aegean Sea

Slight ripples of the Aegean Sea line waver above the dark imprints of great reef structures below. The movement of the distant ocean calmed and became one with the sky along the horizon. Yellow, white, red, and purple flowers splattered the green hills in large swaths of masquerading colours. It was truly an impression, a multilayered composition of the celebration of life. A Monet painting. I could not bring myself to capture that moment through photography, its beauty lies in its transience. However, that fleeting serenity will stay in my memory forever.

To the Mountains and Cliffs

In the midst of nature’s majesty, the titanic mountain ranges, and the terrifying heights of the calderas, how is it possible for one not to believe in a divine presence and attribute a holy sanctity to everything in one’s surroundings? This religious impulse is our attempt to engage in a relationship with that which is infinitely more immense, unmeasurable, and eternal than anything we may breathe life into. We create rituals, and customs, and make sacrifices to the personification of natural forces to curry favour, bargain, and repent. Are these practices just an initial step towards the realization that what we are really trying to conquer is ourselves? Nothing is inherently wrong or scary in nature. It is our biological and social programming that injects meaning into objective phenomena. The attempt to conquer the external world is simultaneously an exploration and process of mastery over the nature within us.

To Sunsets

Sunsets are the climax of the day, the happy ending. I don’t believe in happy endings. There is always an after, the show doesn’t end until it does and the true ending is never happy, or sad, it’s just over. There’s no subject to inject meaning upon the ending or else there is no end. The baton of narrative is passed on as long as the story is alive in someone’s mind. Beauty should never be definitive or conclusive. It shouldn’t be paparazzi’d by a parade of tourists scrambling together like a can of sardines to look, not at the sunset itself, but at a pixelized refraction through the lens of their cameras. At dusk, the darkening sky descends upon the surface and envelops it in its dark luminescence. The cotton candy band that stretches across the horizon melts into darkness over time. It’s not a majestic finale like a sunset, it’s more muted, contemplative, and beautiful nevertheless. I guess you can think of it as the post-nut clarity of the day! And at daybreak, the sun cuts across the cracks of this union of the sky, sea, and land as the sun’s radiance releases the natural brilliance of the earth.