Entirely foreign?

The above photo of Wedge island, which is just off the southern end of Windgrove, conveys nature as a multiple of dualisms: beautiful and sinister, foreboding and enticing, stormy and calm. There is no one description of nature that fits. The flip side of today’s description will be tomorrow’s reality. Similar, I suppose (if memory serves me correct), to what Tom Robbins wrote about in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues when he said: Everything is beautiful; nothing is sacred. Everything is sacred; nothing is beautiful.

The only issue subject to debate with any of the several qualities of nature is their relative weighting or frequency of occurrence.

I say this because of a comment by an art critic who, in his review last year of an “ephemeral” art exhibition of site specific sculpture, wrote:

Anyone who has watched a David Attenborough documentary will know that peace, tranquility and spiritual renewal are entirely foreign to the natural world. Tennyson’s nature red in tooth and claw is much closer to reality.

Peace, tranquility and spiritual renewal – entirely foreign to the natural world? Give me a break.

My immediate response is to say that the reviewer has been watching too much TV and that he should leave the city and try living surrounded by nature for a period of time. If so, he would come to know that the operative word for nature is “benign”; that, if action and drama are to be filmed, hours of waiting are the norm. Certainly, there is a violent aspect surrounding territorial squabbles and the acquisition of food, but after 15 years of watching the eagles float endlessly for hours at a time, I have only seen an eagle red in tooth and claw twice.

When I encounter a snake along a Windgrove path, I always manage to levitate higher than I can when meditating, but these encounters are a sum total of 15 seconds per year. Compare this with the countless hours of walking I do on these paths and my point is made: if drama is what one is after, then be prepared to wait. Peace and tranquility are the rule rather than the exception.

Capturing Wedge Island in the right light has taken years.

The storms that bend and shape the trees happen only infrequently.