it’s often expressed that pictures are worth a thousand words. right now, i disagree.
the last couple of weeks have filled my eyes with landscapes that cannot be captured in photographs, at least not by me. words, however, offer something that i can move, push, touch, alter, and understand. pictures can capture a moment, words a feeling.
and such a grand variety too:
driving over the plains, through the southwest, in the foothills of the rockies, past scrub brush and desert, past rock and cliff, i was left with a bizarre impression. i was moving through landscapes not familiar, through places that i have only ever known through pictures or in past (faded) memory. they existed as paintings and sculptures, as massive artistic projects brought forth by someone with a mind-numbing eye for detail.
the rock outcrop sticking up from the waving tan grasses was a mold, formed in the manner of the giant model train constructions i saw occasionally as a child. the metemorphic lines in a cliff face? an abstract painting i last viewed in a dark room during an art history lecture. the cattle on the distant grassland? small plastic figurines, placed carefully in a natural manner. trees edging the mountain tops at the treeline? glued together using small twigs and lichen. the sky shimmering over the desert? a massive canvas dripping in vibrant blues.
all of it construction, all of it art, none of it reality.
and it hasn’t changed yet.
i saw my first sequoia a couple of days ago as we hiked to our worksite. sitting on a mountainside at 7000 feet, catching my sea-level breath, i was astounded at the size of the tree i faced. it was all i could do to wrap my mind around its upper branches, soaring 200 feet above, or its trunk, some five or six feet wide. the tree easily dwarfed the largest i have ever seen previously, made the largest pines in minnesota look like twigs. what really took me for a loop, however, was that i was staring at a pine. the sequoia behind it was something alien, something different entirely.
orange, ochre, and red brushstrokes plied their way toward the sky, clammoring toward branches that began a hundred feet up, the top dwarfing the pine in front. the tree stood on its own, an open space surrounding if for tens of feet, leaving little to judge its width by. i walked down, to try to understand, and found that it was three times wider than i am tall. it was master of this forest, and it had withstood a burn that took others like it and smaller down - had reduced them to the dark silence of charcoal.
and this sequoia was a small one…
i’ve since seen larger ones, and seen pictures of sequoias nearly thirty feet in diameter. seen images, seen paintings, seen sculptures, but not yet reality.
my mind is still working over-time to understand this scale, the scope of these entities, their age (nearly 2000 years old or more), their simple existance. i don’t have anything to compare them to but art; words, paintings, and sculpture - which they are, of an infinitely perfect and overwhelming variety.
i’ve tried to take pictures, but i can’t do them justice. i’ve tried to write about them, but i feel i’m not even coming close to conveying what they are, what these mountains and forests carry or will allow me to see by the end of the summer.
it is that which exists in the same mysteries of love and friendship - the deep and abiding understanding beyond and above words - something far more simple and warm that our attempts to interperet it can match.
i’ve been blessed to know this warmth in many ways and many forms - it’s an easy feeling to forget though, to miss in the attempts to understand it in the forward reaches of our brains. it’s out there though, and i’m off to bask in it for a summer, for a lifetime.