The Beauty of Nature

At times, this evening, I am dazzled by the beauty of nature. I’m captivated, speechless as nature’s display, free to all and to me, invades my eyes and moves on to my mind. It is the close of a beautiful day. Soft and puffy white clouds dot the sky. The sun’s light, photons, let loose eight minutes before they reach my eyes, find so many paths through the clouds. They fall on the tree line in my backyard and reflect back a medley of tints, tones and shades of green - changing each minute as the sun sinks lower in the western sky.

I know the physics. As the sun sinks lower its rays must penetrate an ever-increasing depth of atmosphere which filters out different wavelengths and paints the earth with different colors of the rainbow – different wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum. This knowledge once destroyed for me the mystery of nature. There was no mystery – I knew what caused these beautiful and changing displays. Optics explains all.

 But then, in spite of my book learned knowledge of visual events, I realized – as I did this evening- that loss of mystery took nothing away from the appreciation of nature’s dazzling events. There is in us, in me, an a priori recognition of nature’s beauty  - be it displayed in sight, sound, touch, smell or intellectual appeal. There is a symmetry, a proportion, an arrangement in nature that strikes a responsive chord in us all – call it appreciation or enjoyment. Nobody taught this to us. Nobody said to me “This is pretty, this is enjoyable, and this is not.” We just know. A beautiful scene, a beautiful woman, a musical masterpiece, geometry’s theorems, the setting sun in my back yard – we just know these are beautiful and timeless things.

 Where did this appreciation come from? I’m willing to say that God, nature’s master, placed it in us. It is a sign that God’s creation is beautiful, magnificent, and waiting for us to fully enjoy it in eternity.