I Wonder?

Today I felt ‘on top of the world’, literally. I drove along Skyline Drive, in the Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, which climbs to over 4000ft. It was a beautiful trip and because there were so few other cars, it was also very relaxing. The sun shone brightly, it was warm, in fact hot in the afternoon but it often felt as though I was alone with nature and a couple of times deer appeared at the side of the road and were not at all afraid when I stopped to photograph them.

I felt so lucky and could not help wondering why we spend so much time as a species arguing and quarrelling with one another, when we could be learning from nature that it is so unnecessary. As Kahil Gibran said, “The elm grows not in the shadow of the oak…” And although most animals are territorial, they rarely go beyond frightening away rivals. They do not usually find it necessary to kill one another. Before visiting Skyline Drive I went to a wonderful cavern at a little town named Luray. The variety and enormous size of the stalactites and stalagmites is incredible. It takes around 200 years for a stalactite to grow one inch and some of these were seventy or eighty feet long and with a circumference rivalling giant redwood trees! What a lesson this gave me in patience and also about eternity! Such fantastic growths underground formed merely by water dripping through limestone for millions of years, made me marvel anew at the greatness and ingenuity of the power that many call God. I don’t know if you have ever noticed but everything produced in the natural world using natural forces seems to be beautiful: Symmetrical and beautiful.

We human beings on the other hand are either in too much of a hurry or too busy counting the cost to produce much that is really beautiful. Look at our buildings, particularly most public buildings built in the last sixty or seventy years. Compare them with the buildings built by the Greeks, the Romans or the Egyptians. Because we build these days for utility rather than appearance, we seem to believe it gives us the right to build ugly. Of course I generalise, there are some beautiful modern buildings but very few really. I firmly believe the buildings we design reflect ourselves to a large extent and certainly they influence the attitudes and thoughts of people living within or around them. It seems to me at the very least, difficult to have ugly thoughts when surrounded by beautiful architecture and vice-versa.

We should all spend more time among the works of nature. We should study them carefully, as did Leonardo Da Vinci the human anatomy. He sketched the body and its parts thousands of times before he was satisfied that he could draw human figures accurately. He knew the beauty inherent in all creation and on a different plane, so did Albert Einstein. The more he discovered about the universe, the more he marvelled at its symmetry and beauty. He believed each discovery of science was akin to a religious experience.