The Sublime beauty of the everyday landscape where we live
There is a magnitude to the wonder of our surroundings, whether city or country, vast or close, magnificent or humble
Hey all, today I’m continuing a thread to trace and touch upon some ideas of the Sublime, in ways that sort of question the distance of the historical sublime to uncover threads of connectivity between humans and a sense of awe and wonder the sublime is meant to provide. This week I touch on beauty, something the historical sublime is supposed to separate itself from but something I believe we need to reconnect to as an incredibly potent piece of the human experience and therefore inseparable from what brings us a deep sense of profound mystery and magnificence.
Lately, when I think about the beauty of the sublime, I wonder if what people are now feeling when they view these old 18th and19th century landscapes is a deep wistfulness or yearning for what once was. This is how we perceive landscape in the 21st century; of believing the landscapes we see illustrated, this planet our ancestors knew, is lost. If it’s not perceived as lost, it’s regarded as vanishing. Our planet is a changed place, no doubt, and that change is existential. I won't diminish or soften that fact. But I question the prescription of its death and dying. Our Earth is not yet gone. Neither are we.
The truth is, humans need to realize—remember, feel, and know—that the beauty of the landscape is in part found through the understanding that we are part of the landscape itself, that it is closer to us than we could possibly imagine. So close in fact that it is within us and we should see ourselves placed within it, and not set apart. We share minerals, metals, atoms, and molecules; air, earth, water, and flesh. Creation stories all over the world say humans were formed out of the clay of the earth. If we believe the landscape is lost, vanishing, or vanished; then where then does that leave humanity?
If part of the purpose of the sublime was to induce a kind of angst, this carries over into our time in these ways. This is the angst of loss, the angst of severance, the angst of enclosure, the angst of our impact on the land; the angst of helplessness and fear of impending death is now not inspired by our insignificance and inability to conquer nature but as a direct result of corporate and governmental capitalist ventures that do so, explicitly. We are forgetting to see the power and the potency and the beauty of the land because we are in terror of the extraction, exploitation, displacement, extinction events, and greed inflicted upon the land—and upon us—by the powers that be, the powers that need not be.
But I insist on the beauty that remains. I insist on seeing and existing within and alongside and in league with the beauty that remains.
I am broken open by the sublime beauty of the world. I am left rapt, in awe, of the infinite and the infinitely interconnected. These feelings don't come from a sense of safety at a distance, but from the intimacy of having my hands in the dirt on the land where I live, from listening to the 30 different calls of the Steller's Jay, from observing the daily changing angle of the light across the seasons, from hearing the whisper of pine needles and the soft murmur of crickets, from smelling the pungent aroma of salt from the Salish Sea on the wind, from tasting the bright flavor of salmonberries in spring, from perceiving the shape of the mountains even through the clouds on overcast days. I am deeply in love with the devotion of hummingbirds' flight in early dawn and late dusk, the rippling creek that meanders from spring through forest to lake, the flood of brilliant sweet peas across the field, the crowd of nootka roses on the trails, the river's rise and fall and calm and torrent, black walnut's majestic stature and dance through the seasons, and madrone's blossoms, bark, and berries. Here, time collapses, the self collapses, and all seasons exist at once; the moon in all their phases, the sun traces an infinity loop across an ever changing sky, the stars reveal their great wheel. Forests, rivers, seas, and mountains rise and fall. How much more sublime can our experience of the world possibly get, than this? Humans have been and are here throughout it all.
This is the Sublime of the land where I live. The beauty, our relationship, and our proximity is everything. If I were to see it from a distance I wouldn't feel this love, this awe that can only come from a deep sense of knowing this place. I would miss all of the things that make it so important, meaningful, and brimming over with life and living. My presence here is in relationship to everyone around me, my role and my part in this place is one of responsibility and of being a good neighbor and resident.
We can look at these paintings and say, oh, how beautiful our world was. But I think it's more powerful to look around us and feel how beautiful our world still is, and to seek a connection to it in seeing ourselves amongst that beauty, that vastness. Maybe we believe this is harder in a city or a suburb where concrete reigns supreme. But that's why I'm saying, let us place ourselves within the picture plane, listen more carefully, pay attention to what's around us. If we seek the sublime to experience awe, to be reminded of our humanity and our place amongst all others who are placed in the cosmos, of the power and the potency of our planet and that tug of something deep within us that knows we are not the center but certainly a part of something profoundly mysterious and wonderful; then the sublime as an intimacy with the beauty of the world doesn't require the grandeur of vast vistas. It only requires us to acknowledge the world we're in, where we are right now, a world we can see and touch and smell and hear and feel and know.
As always, let’s talk here and/or in the Discord! I would so love to know where you have encountered the Sublime, what it felt like, where it left you!