Sunrise has Shadows

Whether it’s in spite of or because of the fact that humans have become urban creatures maintaining a distanced relationship with nature, we seem to put on a pedestal that in nature which pleases our most utilized sense: the eye. We send postcards with sky-cut, golden-dipped mountain peaks, violet wildflowers, or blue-pebbled streams captured in just the right lighting. It’s the wilderness with botox. Those of us who live in cities put digital wallpapers of vivid boreal forests on computers and stage plants on cupboards to substitute the hikes we don’t have time for.

I just love the beauty of nature. I just love the tranquility of nature. I just love the peace of nature. Everything works in harmony.

Will I ever forget that scene--"shot from far above and narrated by the British man who valued a blood-real vision of nature--"of a yak and a wolf trio fighting to the death, neither gaining the upper hand, the screen panning outward as if the helicopter were cringing away from life killing itself in dominance for life?

No, I won’t.

Neglecting to enter into a viscous, if you will, relationship with nature, we uphold an idealistic view of it while simultaneously never sensorially or cognitively knowing its textures, details, and centers within centers. Missouri Prairie Foundation director Carol Davit has stated that her Missouri prairie, that beige swath of tufted grass we drive by with but a bored glance, has seven times more species in ¼-meter square than that same size of Missouri forest. Aldo Leopold included the Draba, a small flower that “subsists on the leavings of unwanted time and space” and “plucks no heartstrings”, in a masterpiece book otherwise filled with vivid anecdotes, rare species, deep mysteries of the deep wilderness, and magnificent scenes of mountain and valley. That which is ugly or unimpressive is, I conclude, the first to be bypassed when we visit in body or mind an ecosystem.

“There are woods that are plain to look at, but not to look into,” Leopold said.

“There are those who are willing to be herded in droves through ‘scenic’ places; who find mountains grand if they be proper mountains,” Leopold asserted.

“If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts?” Leopold asked.

He’s dead now. Children are less likely to pick up his books when they are tempted by the glamour of high-speed ready-made entertainment. We need the ugly things, not just for their role but for the ugliness itself. A counterargument to social media’s airbrushed expectations, these underwhelming lifeforms are in fact a reminder that the homeliness of ourselves need not be hidden. It is fact. Flaws, general, societal, or personal, are as important to study with an open and curious heart as the river’s stick-bugs and silt.

In high school, I found myself in combat with a slippery perfectionism. Tasks at which I couldn’t see myself excelling completely in, well, I avoided them like muddy swamps. This included social interaction, a keystone of all species might I add. She’s smart, and I, I smiled at this as I kicked my legs desperately underwater. It was school, dance, home. In my head too, always school, dance, home. I’ll tell you what felt good: a crisp 4 at the start of my GPA and the slim black-leotard body I saw in the ballet mirror. I wasn’t in-tune with my own nature as the turtles are towards home. I made sure to stay on the surface, but I was too deep, far too deep, for experience to reach me. 

Human.

Homo sapien.

Omnivore. Mammal.

Primate. Biped. Diurnal.

Heart racing. Palms sweating.

Our hearts and palms and bladders believe we are still held in the network of nature. They are the faithful. We can’t fight or flee the fight-or-flight. What would happen if we viewed the world with the same stubborn passion for each little fear, fault, or triumph that our bodies do? What would happen if we didn’t allow in lies of the great-out-there and ourselves--avoiding Mother Nature’s and our own imperfections, looking at a clean face, human or coneflower, at all times--the way our endocrine doesn’t cower from the truth?

At the beginning of our trip to Montana, I excused each pause on the trail with, “Wait, Dad, I have to go to the bathroom.” Only a few days in, society’s euphemisms still had a hold on me. The more I used this line before locating a thick conifer trunk, the more contemplative I became. What bathroom? Where was I looking to “go”? That phrase, it had an air of sophistication to it, much like the essays I slaved over in AP Language & Composition class. That pride for the product, the output, the face, was there. But when I squatted a few feet from Devil’s club, the flies boxing at my a*s, I thought to study the unbecoming soil. It was as if I were a child again, without a sense of self to protect. When I urinated amongst the handsy ferns and bopping gnats and bloated roots, actually, I thought of mostly nothing at all.

Beauty is beauty. That which astounds and attracts us, even if subjective, shouldn’t be disregarded in a kind of equity to its duller neighbors. I would eat the view from Siyeh Pass everyday if I could. I, too, consider a blue jay lovelier than a pigeon. Maybe it’s about saying: “Ok, I recognize the appeal in this object before me, and it’s here to stay. So, because it won’t leave me, I will now diverge to seek the details of the forgotten fauna and flora, knowing I can return.”

Writing on “the truth of nature” is a bluff in itself. A joke, it seeks to give something to the reader they must experience first-hand. Writing holds bias, even it’s it’s unintentional. I make you believe something. At the very least, I make you reject something. But you must know a place beyond its stereotype or quintessential part. If you write your own story not through another’s letters but through personal bottom-up processing, you’ll discover how to appreciate the rawness of your experience. That’s the smell of fox dung, moss, morning dew. Those are the big black flies near the algae-dotted pond. That’s the jumble of rocks that give the knees a challenge near the lagoon. It’s sticky and muggy and unpredictable and sensational and euphoric and nothing and everything all at once.

Things just are. Things just are in ourselves, too, if we approach without a flight to squash the flowerless stalks of worry we don’t understand.

The truth? Truth is beauty. I just love the beauty of nature, Aldo Leopold said not once in the near-300 pages of A Sand County Almanac. Too busy, he was looking, not seeing, touching, not trimming, and listening, not appraising. Too busy, that is, to be on the circumference, when touchable and tingling knowledge lay at the radius’s point.

So, view, touch, listen.

Splash, splash in the stream. Let your lungs recoil at the sharp cold.

Don’t leave your pedestal on the shore for when you get out; take it for a dive with you.

Reviews

[Carlos Lorenzo Estrada]

I have a love hate relationship with nature. I enjoy walking within it, but I will be damned if I ever use it as my own personal toilet. Call me prude but I'm not gonna squat down and pinch a loaf against a great redwood no matter how majestic it looks. If it ain't toilet paper I ain't squatting. People now a days are stupid and too damn ignorant to enjoy the beauty in nature. Case in point, once on a hike with friends one of my dumb a*s associates turned to me and said with the most stupid grin on his face, "if a bear s***s in the woods would you hear it?" In which I in vain replied, "You mean if a tree fell..." to which he replied "oh yeah and that too." This is us as a society, oblivious to everything around us unless it permeates our own personal space. We would rather look at nature on our phones, laptops, or tablets then actually go out an experience it. To us nature is defined by which Kardashian sister has had less plastic surgery then the others. It's just wrong. We are not just living the end times but also living Idiocracy the movie. Thank you for your short writing it was an enjoyable read and sad as well because it speaks of what we are destroying in real time.

[Olivia R.H.]

Thank you; I appreciate your review. I agree: air-conditioned bathrooms with pristine white toilet seats are pretty hard to beat (especially in really nice hotels with the background jazz music). However, I think there's something humbling about being forced to, on a 10-mile hike for example, relieve oneself in the woods. It's a sense of being only human, which, at its core, is animal. I couldn't agree more about people's ignorance these days about the full depth of nature. It's so important to get out there and experience something first-hand!