Just Prose

I find myself, more often than I probably should, thinking about how to properly describe the earth's beauty—evident in the simple complexity of trees, the touch of spring wind on my cheeks, and the quiet uniformity in every squirrel that pauses to stare back. The temptation to borrow the language of scripture or invoke the greatness of some almighty is always knocking at my door. Yet, I'm not, in the slightest a follower of any established religion, largely because none has captured just how important nature is to me. I am the son of thousands of philosophers and poets who, I imagine, wrestled with this same question. How do I describe such beauty and feeling without language beyond the divine?

Or perhaps nature asks less than the praise and worship other texts demand, and instead calls for a kind of sustained attention I do not yet possess—one that sits somewhere between feeling and understanding. Perhaps it asks for fluency not only in language, but in the teleonomy of things; that to revere nature as fully as I wish to describe it, I must first learn to see it more completely. Only then might I explain it to myself.