through the lenses

On Wednesday, I called up my mom to chat about an upcoming visit this weekend, and she told me about her evening. She left work an hour early, prompted by the summer-like heat wave, and decided that she wanted to enjoy the last throes of summer while she still could. She came home and walked down to the beach near her house, walked along the beach and swam about a mile down the beach with the current helping her along. She drifted, floated and watched the sun setting. As she turned and swam back in the opposite direction, she watched a big, fat, orange harvest moon swell over the water and rise high into the sky as she swam back. The colors, and the beauty of watching both the sun set and moon rise was an absolutely spiritual experience for her, and she yearned for her camera at the time so she could have showed me how beautiful it was.

Interestingly enough, the idea of trying to capture nature or a scene - but never being able to truly do so - was the topic of my Language of Nature discussions today. The Picturesque movement that I talked about before was simply that artists tried to "frame" nature within their canvas. They tried to capture (or sometimes create) the quintessential representation of the landscape, while not truly reflecting it in its entirety. The picture to the right is from a park on the seacoast... it is a metal sculpture of a painter with a frame with an empty middle, and standing in the right place, you can get the 'picture' of the landscape without fully absorbing it.

Every morning that I drive into Keene and every afternoon that I drive home I am struck with the same situation that my mom described. I have a camera, but despite the pictures I take, I can't really describe the whole picture, the whole beauty of my drive in a frame of sorts. It took me a few weeks, but I've stopped trying to capture the drive's beauty.

The chorus to John Mayer's song "3x5" says this well:

didn't have a camera by my side this time
hoping I would see the world from both my eyes
maybe I will tell you all about it
when I'm in the mood
to loose my way with words
but let me say
you should have seen that sunrise
with your own eyes
it brought me back to life...

To experience it, you'll just have to take the same route early in the morning sometime to feel it. Nature to me is not only for your eyes or for your camera to capture. Its about rolling my windows down while driving and smelling the pine trees, swamps, flowers and fallen leaves - its hearing the birds, locusts and rustling of trees in the wind... It is an experience that can never be captured in a picture alone - so I've given up trying, and have resolved to spend more time enjoying the journey instead of trying to photographically represent it.

From canvas to National Park

This morning, I decided to begin some of my homework in a relaxed way, and cross off what I could before getting into the intense and thick readings, or the papers that I will have to write. One of my pieces of homework from the Language of Nature was simply a link to a presentation about nature's relationship to art and God through history.

The first juxtaposition that I found interesting was that the woods were often portrayed in paintings as dark, scary, and unknown. God was not found in nature and to revere nature as beautiful was a competition to spirituality. Eventually, things changed and light began to represent God's presence in paintings. Forests eventually lightened their understories and shafts of light may illuminate something in particular, reminding you that God is present in that natural setting, and revering God's natural beauty that was created by him was acceptable and desirable.

I learned some fascinating things from the presentation about how art reflected the attitudes and ideas that man had about God and nature and changed with those shifting ideas. I was surprised to learn that the painters who painted real places were very much responsible for their eventual preservation.

Places like Yellowstone, Yosemite and Niagara Falls were not places that people were able to visit directly, but by painters highlighting their awe-inspiring beauty, people felt compelled to make sure that those landscapes were not ruined. The same was true for several animals, and the point was made that the turkey was almost made the United State's official bird - which would have certainly lead to the extinction of the eagle.

I have to say that I really want to visit some of the National Parks out west even more now...

Metamorphic meanderings...

Turned in my first observation paper today, and I felt pretty good about it. I am still struggling a bit with the tree and non-woody plant identification, though I expected that since I haven't had much practice. I am anxious to see what my Community Ecology teacher has to say about the paper. We had a lecture today on niches and factors in competition. It was hard for me to focus on and take notes because I feel like I already know what he's talking about from Ecology at UNH or just from being a real bio geek. You can't talk about anything going on at the shoreline without understanding competition, predation, coevolution, etc. I did learn that some plants have nasty chemicals in their leaves which, when they fall, inhibit the germination of other seeds anywhere near the base of the plant. Sneaky way to make sure that you are the only tree around...

This afternoon, though, in Earth Systems Science, we took a field trip to visit various road outcrops and actually an abandoned old pigmatite mine. Most of what we saw were metamorphic rocks, bent, melted, twisted and recrystallized into other rocks. As we learned more about what processes caused those types of formations, I realized that, collecting "rocks" as a kid, I never really connected fully with the overall processes like igneous intrusions, metamorphic rocks, etc, because the rocks I had were on such a small scale. It was great to have some familiarity with them (and the three different types of rocks in general) so that I could try to grasp the bigger picture things that were going on.

I got to see contact zones and intrusions and varying crystal structures based on the rate of cooling, erosional factors... throwing me back into the world of rocks. It was a great outing because we got to visit several different sites, and the pigmatite mines were VERY cool. There they have a specific kind of granite that is rare, and also contains huge pieces of mica (and even a little garnet).

The second site we went to was awesome, too, because there was a huge stone bridge built over a stream, and the builders left a huge jut of rock and used it as part of the bridge. It was beautiful to see the natural and the man-shaped structures side by side (all of the rocks used in the bridge were obviously local stones of the same types.

On the way home, in traffic, I caught myself observing the road cuts and looking at the different types of rocks there. I love my life!