Atmospheric Perspective

I shall always love recounting first falling.  I love basking in those early feelings of your overwhelming presence. My eyes blurred with the rose-colored light of your shocking, radiant beauty.  Ten thousand tiny sparks, drawing me in closer, each one a unique and clear artifact waiting to be discovered, to be seen.  The grand vision of really knowing you was ungraspable then, and still, I know you will fascinate my curiosity until my last breath.  As if through a window I gazed upon you, a guarded interior built around me, mediating the exterior knowing of your ways.  And how shall I know you? How shall I learn every chamber of your heart, your loves, your needs, your desires?  

Ecologists and psychiatrists chase objectivity as a way of knowing, but how can understanding ever be complete without this messy subjectivity of feelings, of culture, of beauty? Without this hazy perspective of falling in love?  What if art and science linked arms to bring into focus, to melt away this dialectic of inside and outside, to nurture the depth of our relationship into a symbiotic place of deeper knowing?

Your beauty is undeniable. Serene.  Graceful.  Powerful. Your subtle shifting moods, plush verdant fertility, your grandeur, your hidden ways waiting to be discovered stir in me a thirst, a longing, a dream to be close to you.  Even the smallest details of you are sublime, like the succulent droplets on my window, each one a crystal ball containing and reflecting your whole self and myself contained within you.  And the wonders of what cannot be seen!  

The profound mystery of your inner-workings, your minutia draws me to you like Cupid’s arrow to its bullseye. How my mind works and turns, studies, and seeks your transcendence.  Not even one can deny your splendor; all are arrested by your beauty.  Does your idyllic nature have some fundamental, some universal essence to it? Surely not only I who adore you. Certainly, the “idyllic” must be a mutable notion, the western canon only painting a narrow picture of your many beautiful faces. And what is this notion of the ideal? A space uninterrupted, undisturbed? One of Homeostasis? Homogeny? Diversity? Balance? Reciprocity? Is there some sort of fundamental way that I belong to you, inside of you, not to exploit your rich resources, but to help steward them?   Your appeal is so deep and broad I need only ask another, to listen and to learn what it is that moves them, to in turn discover new ways of living to love you.  

Even as I have adored you, I must confess I have not always cared for you thusly.  I have filled you with a foreign light unlike the sun as you long for rest. I have made you run dry and exacerbated the storms of your fury like a lover scorned. As I have studied your essence at my feet or… 

…the expanse of your wonder, you filter through my own impediments and interruptions.

Your uncontained wildness contained in the grid of my own understanding, my own existence, my own convenience, my own gain and profit. I have compartmentalized and dissected and neglected and interrupted.  I have oriented you to myself, until there is hardly a scrap of space left for you in my design. I can feel your absence as my presence grows; you are relegated like some impossibly perfect portrait, a relic on my desk of your younger, more beautiful years past.  I have not tended you as the part of my own soul that you are, even when you have fed me and held all of my flourishing. You have never stopped loving me, despite my unfaithfulness.  Forgive me, my beloved.

I long for our restoration. To live in dissonance with you is a heartbreak I cannot bear.  I first conceived of this love letter at 30,000 feet from within a fraught metal torpedo hurling through your incredible space.  Alas, love is never uncomplicated. These images capture how it feels when I am above you, your crystalline wonder, sharp and uninhabitable, receding in hazy perspective stretched before me, a more magnificent creation than I can fathom. And I am small. And I wonder, how can I listen and learn to speak your language, to nurture ideals around preservation, caretaking, and mutual flourishing?  I must find small ways to return to gratitude. Small efforts to create fertile ground from my own refuse. Small ways to humbly connect myself back into your essence, to rekindle, to bloom with affection.

I’m longing for the day when the fine wrinkles across your forms appear to me like the holy shimmering of gold leaf, clinging like the very skin of heaven.  A day when memories of the care I have taken to preserve and conserve and celebrate your beauty–to recognize with gratitude your Creator–collect like the small tender threads of a precious cross stitch . fine translucent layers of fog, a slow accumulation of effort and love over time. A day when I have patiently come to know you deeply and from that knowing have learned how to care for you.  A day when these many questions have perhaps not found answers, but have left legacies of love for our children and children's children.