Sky Trapped In Shadow

A Short Thought On Beauty

Spotting the forget-me-nots on the road as I drive through the second-growth redwoods of West Marin is like looking at bits of the sky, somehow stuck under the shadow of trees. The color of nasturtiums and sometimes California poppies are almost unknowably orange, their edges made too sharp in contrast to the world to be real. My sibling, telling us about irises, said they were flamboyant. There are a million different metaphors or similes one can give to all the flowers. There are so many ways of describing that which we observe, especially those we find shocking or unknowably beautiful. 

But really we could just describe them as they are: forget-me-nots are bright sky blue, and often grow in clumps; poppies are somewhere between orange and red and often grow in green fields which may take on bluish hues, a near perfect contrast to their color; irises are a deep violet and white, often wavy and falling from the apex of their stem. 

It’s rare to describe flowers, or much of anything that we ogle at, in this way. Unless you're taking a botany class or are yourself a botanist. And yet, you describe their intimacies in that way because of your own adoration. But I’m not really trying to psychoanalyze botanists. 

What I am trying to describe is how our imagination, when faced with beautiful or confounding things, is so often unable to feel satisfied by describing them just as pretty, and blue. We need to go further. Something in what we are seeing provokes us to marvel at reality in a new way. It’s almost like these flowers, birds, people, water, buildings, paintings, are tricking us out of the empirical, reminding us that, somehow, we are conscious, observing creatures. That we are alive. At least, for me, that urge to over glamorize a description makes me feel all the more alive. I want to give whatever it is I’m looking at even more words, more beauty if I can because its magic is unknowable.

The first time I saw a western tanager in Oregon was like watching an Astro Pop take flight from the shadow of an oak forest. Finally spotting a lazuli bunting on Skinner Butte in Oregon on my twentieth birthday was the greatest gift I could have received that day. And the world gave it to me then, as it does everyday, in small ways I sometimes forget to recognize. Sometimes I forget to sit in wonder that to be alive, in some sense, makes absolutely no sense. Look at your hand right now and tell me it is not completely amazing that we get to have consciousness, even for the few decades that we are here. Maybe it’s its own kind of magic. Who knows, maybe it is magic.