Natural Beauty

The defining feature of natural beauty is that it is elegant at any resolution. For example, the skyline of a city may be beautiful, but zoom in and it is a disorganized mess. Alternatively, An unsullied seashore is perfect down to the smallest grain of sand. Every fallen leaf in the forest is an individual work of art. Freshly fallen undisturbed snow is an ocean frozen perfectly in an instant of time. The arching drifts are the currents and waves. In the desert the sparsity of the plant flora frames the landscape like a zen painting. We are so quick to force nature into rectangles. Rectangles are simple to mass produce, but they are uninspired. The process of ironing the wrinkles out of the natural to create our generic building blocks is wasteful at best. For every sharply angled structure produced, there is a pile of gnarled leftovers pushed off into a forgotten part of town. Perhaps we should take a lessons from the animal world. When a bird crafts a nest it simply uses whatever loose materials it finds. The bird doesn’t have to cut and plane the pieces it harvests into straight boards and there is no waste created. If we could use our intelligence to build with nature rather than against it would our experience in the world be more harmonious? I won’t pretend to know. I can however imagine the charming and majestic landscapes that it would create.