There is beauty in desolation. There is, for me, a beauty in leafless trees, in cold, wind-swept landscapes, in the gathering of crows calling out into the evening air. Some people dislike the barrenness that comes at the ending of fall, but I take joy in the transition, in seeing the leaves blown across fields, the bare limbs reaching up into the sky like beseeching hands. It is a feeling that is hard to explain. While others see ugliness, the death of summer and decay, I see transition, the fuel for future life being laid down right before our eyes, if only we care to look.
We don't like the idea of time slipping away from us; we detest the sight of death and vigorously avoid dealing with the fact that we will all have to face it at one point. Yet continued life depends on the very death and decay we so avoid. This is an inevitable fact of our biosphere, of our cosmos in fact. The nutrients that are taken up in the trees come back to earth when the leaves fall; the tall grasses of summer die back along with the flowers, and thus the nutrients taken out of the earth return to it again. It is a process that can take a variety of forms, from the mundane to the fascinating. I remember an old tree fallen in the woods near our house when I was much younger, the edge sticking out just beyond the line of trees. My brothers and I would stand on the trunk and run back and forth, dodging mushrooms and errant patches of green moss. Over the course of a few years, shelf mushrooms broke down one end of it, the mycelium quietly infiltrating the log, until one day we found the entire end had fallen into pieces. It was absolutely fascinating, and it still is.
Crows to me are beautiful; I was delighted yesterday that a whole murder of crows was sitting on a tree near the library and calling out across the parking lot. These birds too have fascinated me for a long time, and they perform a useful function in the ecosystem as well by helping to make carrion disappear from our landscape. This is an essential part of life on earth. Without it, without a mechanism that allows nutrients to be recycled back into the system, life would not be able to exist for terribly long. We are all products of this.
On a far grander scale, our existence depends on the death of stars. In the early universe, massive stars died, and when they did the heavy elements that were created in the great internal furnaces that powered them were released into the universe. Without that, none of us would be here. This is, for me, one of the most meaningful conclusions of science thus far, that the molecules that make up our body were once part of enormous stars. That when we pass on, our bodies will be broken down and the molecules that we are made of will continue on, even though we will not. It is as close as we will come to realizing our fantasies of immortality.
These things, the decomposers and thoughts of early stars, remind me too that life isn't a destination, that instead everything is in a continual state of transition. It never really ends--at least not for several billion years more. For some, this thought may seem frightening, but for me this thought is liberating, a fact of stunning beauty. When everything is a transition, it takes away some of the fear inherent in transition and lets us enjoy life just a little bit more. And that is enough for me.
Comments
Post a Comment