My Nature

Here's something I've been trying to explain for years.  Friends have heard this in snippets but I finally sat down to compose my thoughts on it.  Here's the other thing about it.  Critical writing is not my strong point.  I don't venture into it much and I would say it's my weakest writing.  So forgive a little.

NATURE

Nature doesn't do it for me.  It's a nice excursion.  It's a change of pace.  But it's not my thing.

It doesn't relax me or make me a better person. I don't miss it when I'm not around it.  I don't want to rush right back into it when I leave it. I'm not a Romantic Poet who sits opining on some hillside absorbing the ether of knowledge and beauty.

Now I can appreciate beauty.  Natural forms.  The asymmetry of trees and mountains. The endlessness of water.  When it comes to nature, I prefer waterways, lakes, oceans.  If I had to live in it, I would choose to live on a lake in a deciduous forest.  That's the Michigan in me.  That feels like home.

But I'd rather be in a city.  I like built things.  I like to see the workmanship of hands.  Work of people that I can reach out and touch. I believe in God.  I believe in the beauty he's created.  But I can't create it.  And what I can't create doesn't interest me.  I have to learn the lesser forms before I can learn the higher.

This is not to take away from God.  Or that I appreciate God any less.  I'm in awe at the rock structures of Monument Valley.  At a beautiful lake surrounded by mountains in Glacier National Park.  I've seen the Northern Lights twice and it was deeply moving.  I'm speechless at the delicate knife's edge of balance that keeps this world together and us all living on it.

But at my core, I'm a creator.  (And I don't know God's core, but I know that he is a creator, too. Capital C, in fact.)  I don't have enough time on Planet Earth to do the things I want to do.  I don't have the time to make all the things I want to make.  So since I don't have time to learn how to create everything,  I just spend my time on a few things.  And that is what makes me, at my core, happy.  Creation.

So mountains, trees, the complexity of life, in a way, frustrate me.  They're beyond me.  It's like studying painting your whole life just to find out that compared to the master, you are a child.  A scribbler.  So I'd rather spend my time on forms I can understand.  The art of man.  Our constant and ceaseless tribute to the greatness of God.  Poetry, Comedy, Drama, Paint, Sculpture, Architecture, Sport, Film, Photography, Dance, Science, Mathematics.

I wouldn't call them lesser forms.  I believe they are God's form of art as well and that they were given to us.  And I don't think God is a jealous being that demands all of our art be representations of him.  That we spend all our time writing hymns and painting religious iconography.  I believe that all art, whatever is created, is a representation of him.  And I believe that pleases God.

So if I had my druthers, I prefer to spend my time here. In words.  In thought.  In constant exploration of the mystery around me.  I don't need to go to Nature to see it.  I already see it.  I'm deep in the woods of it.

I don't hate being outdoors though. So, please, ask me to go camping.  Please ask me to hike and to canoe and swim and fish. I love adventure.  Just know that my life is right at my fingertips.  This is the place I meet with God the most.