The romantic poets and writers believed that engaging with landscape helped them to form a discerning intelligence.
Today, I challenge you to look at a small detail in the landscape, perhaps at a single petal or the movement of water. Then describe it using words or watercolors. Try this as often as you can. Its easier with more practice.
“Nursed amidst the grandeur of mountain scenery,he has stooped to have a nearer view of the daisy under his feet or plucked a branch of white-thorn from the spray. And in describing it, his mind seems imbued with the majesty and solemnity of the objects around him.”
—William Hazlitt on William Wordsworth
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Wordsworth is fine, but I’ll take Keats’s Odes any day of the week. 😉
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Sitting beneath the mighty oak, she leaned against its bark as if a pillow, enjoying the sensations on her back as much as she did when having turned to face the tree, allowing the textured outer skin to join with her own. It was as if she and the tree felt one another’s pulse and flow of the fluidity of life within, reveling, each with the love that sense of union brings. Two dear friends, known to one another as quickly as they met.
While resting beneath the tree with a child’s delight at having met a fellow living creation the 30 year old had just closed her eyes to rest as to marvel when one dried leaf colored with the season landed lightly on her hand. Without opening a lid to look, she felt the softness of its center still very much alive. The veins were palpable to her discerning senses, though less definitively round the dried edges having transformed without the liquid that had kept this skin so buoyant in an earlier phase of its life. It was not so cool as the center there where life in another phase still held to its place and part in the outside world, not yet as ready return to the soil from whence it came and fed upon as its edges seemed to be.
In her hand was the beauty of life itself, pulsating more slowly, on a different scale with differing measure from the tree which parented this ambassador of life processes alite on and in the skin, body-mind-spirit, life holding it. In this leaf was life represented, a portrait of many phases of life ongoing. It was yellow, red, orange, brown, green.
The hues were but mere visuals of what a heart could feel in this gift reminding one of the gift she had been given since before her birth, now more appreciative of it all as is, in variant phases even as she experienced it in ongoing fashion united endlessly with a leaf, a piece of a greater being, a miracle in progress in this currently greeted guest invited though unexepected as a reflection of life en toto ever in motion through life-death-life…
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