Going outside and experiencing nature once a week has really changed my outlook on some things that I never really thought about. Really my perception; these weekly trips to Blunn Creek forced me to take the time to think, and from that overall my thoughts are much clearer. It’s relations like those that you have when you are taking a shower, or letting time pass. This empty space for me has lost its mindlessness.
This being said, the biggest and most pronounced word in our word cloud this semester is “beautiful”; I know we are supposed to get away from using such general words into the more scientific, but is beautiful really general? What is beautiful? This is the biggest revelation that I had from going into Blunn Creek for all those hours. Seeing beautiful in a new light has really changed my self esteem and whole outlook on life.
To be beautiful is to be “pleasing the senses or mind aesthetically”(dictionary.com) but what does that mean? And who decides when something is beautiful or not?
Lets come down to earth for a little bit. Wildflowers have taken over Blunn Creek. I mean completely, the cacti have flowers embedded in them, there are patches of rainbows, it is impossible to not be happy when you see them. Rows of eye catching Firewheel, Gaillardia pulchella lead the way to blunn creek from my dorm. Common Yarrow, achillea millefolium, which this whole time I had mistaken for Babies Breath, my own lack of knowledge there, provided a welcome contrast and a very fragrant smell to the walk there. To me this smells like summer. Inside Blunn Creek, i was greeted with evening primrose, Oenothera speciosa, which made me very homesick, because in my hometown evening primrose was more prevalent than bluebonnets. Sandwort, Minuartia Drummondii, lead the way to the actual creek, its white petals shining the way through the darkness created by the trees. Our invader as always, the ever beautiful Japanese Honeysuckle, Lonicera japonica, which grows beautifully throughout Blunn Creek brings me to a somewhat unrelated point.
When a species is invasive, is it not normally our fault? It is not the plant’s fault that we brought it here and it happens to thrive in our landscape. I understand the concept that the land should be reclaimed for native species, but there has to be a better way than ripping the plant out of the ground. It didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t have answers to this issue, only raise a flag in hopes that someone can think of something. Furthermore, when does an invasive species become a native one? Watching the Japanese Honeysuckle, I can not help but think that it belongs there. At some point, aren’t all species invasive. Who judges what belongs somewhere and what doesn’t? This brings me back to the concept of beauty.
On my way into Blunn Creek, I realized that the grass was abnormally high. I mean all around dorm, the path to the Creek, everything was over grown. But why? As to not disturb the flowers? Thi is what really made me question beauty.
In the dead of September, the lazy hot last dog days of summer, the grass around the dorm and surrounding areas was cut regularly. Probably because it is a fire hazard, but still. What makes the grass with flowers spread throughout it so much different than the same grass with no flowers?
In the past, I’ve known people who regarded wildflowers as weeds. Where is the distinction? Is grass by itself not beautiful? Does it not provide oxygen to the atmosphere at keep the topsoil in place? Does it not deserve to be there. I know that is sort of a jaded argument, there’s probably snakes and stuff in the grass, but that’ a mute point because there is snakes and stuff it it while it has flowers.
And who decided that wildflowers were beautiful, I mean don’t get me wrong, I think they are beautiful, but does that make them better than the grass.
I mean grass is pretty pleasing to the senses. It feels good on my feet when I run through it barefoot, it smells clean to me. So it meets the qualifications of being beautiful, but is not regarded that way.
Why?
I think our friend Aldo Leopold explained it the best in his quote “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.” (126) Pretty is arbitrary. The wildflowers of the summer are only pretty while the are giving off their seeds, then they die off and join the “ugliness” that fills the rest of our world. The average human does not understand beauty unless they change their perception. They understand pretty. Flashy, colorful, pleasant scent, etc. And then disregard everything else.
Beautiful as a word is general, it is filler for any greater information to be added. In essence it means nothing. Beautiful as a concept is much, much different. In my time going back and forth to Blunn Creek, I realized that everything is beautiful. The fact that cells start from nothing and make a fully functional being, capable of thinking and feeling, is beautiful. The Japanese Honeysuckle, whether it is invasive or not, is beautiful. The grass, flowering or not, is beautiful. And there is much beauty in this realization.
This is the most important thing I have learned from our nature blogs, but words can not really capture the awe we feel when we are surrounded by nature. The feeling that we are much smaller than the world we tried to capture with our technology will always reclaim us, which is why we are so susceptible to change. If we wised up, and look pass pretty, then we would see things as they actually are. Then we can become one with nature, and form a sustainable society that can progress instead of digress. Then we could finally fulfill Leopold’s message on land ethic that
“We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.”