[at-l] One Love Note

[Sloetoe]

"Nature" sticks around -- "nature" doesn't care what
you're wearing -- "nature" doesn't care what school
you attended or what car you drive. Screw up, and
"nature" will eat you; be prepared, and "nature" will
give you a bounty of profound beauty and timeless
truths.

I just made a realization about nature and aethetics
and such a week or so ago, answering the question "As
a Quaker, all is God's creation, all is as God
intended, all is good and right. Then why is the bear
gnawing at my leg 'bad', while the bear loping through
the meadow below is 'beauty'? Why is a damp grey
morning 'bad', while a soft blanket of sneaux is
'beauty'? Why is a winter hardwood forest -- a study
in barren grey and brown -- 'bad', while the same
forest with a lush green canopy is 'beauty'? Or the
same beautiful lush green forest, now at night, is
then also 'bad'?"

Pound for pound, almost everything biotic on this
little skin over the Fe/Ni ball called "Earth" is
dead, dying, decayed, or dust. Entropy rules. Yet we
seem hopelessly captured by the 1/1000th portion
that's yet hopping and popping, engaged in futal
enthalpy. Why are we so driven to call it "beauty"
when one small part of it grows green coverage? The
answer is "Darwin" -- "natural selection" -- or, as I
ended up phrasing it -- "Beauty feeds."

What we find beautiful comes from comfort, what we
find comfortable comes from safety and foodstuffs. The
bear is pretty when it's far away, the bunny is pretty
when it's close up; the leafy forest is pretty, the
barren one is not. Even the barren forest is pretty on
a sunny day, but so much less so in a cold rain. Thick
sneauxs represent warm "blankets"; icey summits make
us shiver. Beauty feeds us, so we seek it out (or come
out of our caves), and survive to spawn a new
generation. (And those who thought otherwise left the
cave in the sleeting night to pet the bear and, half
hypothermic, couldn't get away fast enough when the
bear objected. Ha!)

Anyway, I was increasingly bothered by the fact that
although I have done some pretty "all-weather" things
{insert various stories of wet, windblown summits,
maybe night coming fast and no bedsite in sight,
blahblahblah}, I still preferred mornings, sunshine,
warmth and green, to the other choices. Mr. Mountain
Man was squishy at the core. How could that be?

It wasn't always so. When I throughhiked, I remember
running through the forests to get back into the teeth
of some simply *terrible* weather -- barechested, the
rain *hurt*. I loved it. When the boys and I hiked for
6 weeks in '04, we met Stumpknocker at an isolated
mountaintop leanto where 6 of us huddled in to fix an
early dinner. But Stumpknocker, conditioned and
comfortable, donned his baseball cap after eating and
said "Well, I'm off!" There was still another hour
before dark, he said, and he expected to hike another
hour after that. My first reaction was to say
"Excellent!" and join him, regardless of his going
southbound and us going northbound. Then I recoiled --
"Ick!" Rain, I'm slightly chilled, there's rain, the
mud, and I'm slightly chilled, oh and it's raining.

To be comfortable and prepared on a rainy hike can
feel a powerful thing -- and I was prepared, and hell,
experienced. Knowing this, why then would I shrink
back from leaving a leanto over mere water droplets?

It took me a couple of years (sometimes the hiking is
hard to come by) just to frame the question right, but
the answer came to me in a split second just last
week. And a terribly simple, even elegant (how Quaker
of me) answer it is, don't you think?

Beauty feeds.

And so on other occassions, the boys and I did indeed
leave leantos in the rain, and one instance in
particular, it was just like this one. And it was
scary. And it was GREAT.

"And do you care what’s happening around you? 
Do your senses know the changes when they come? 
Can you see yourself reflected in the seasons? 
Can you understand the need to carry on?

And oh, I love the life within me,
I feel a part of ev’rything I see.
And oh, I love the life around me, 
a part of ev’rything is here in me,
a part of ev’rything is here in me, 
a part of ev’rything is here in me."

Obviously, this is for Shane.
Where is that boy?

onelovetoe


Spatior! Nitor! Nitor! Tempero!
   Pro Pondera Et Meliora.