Art/Nature/Environment Thoughts

Celebrating our Nation's Independence

I've been thinking about what the arts to which we are attracted say about us as individuals. I was viewing a television program featuring paintings of Monet the French painter, who is among my favorites. I like the attention Monet gives to water, reflections, light on many of his canvases.

Then, I was reminded that another famous artist to whom I have long been attracted is Debussy. He, too, focuses on water in some of his work, but with music.

I long ago became aware that whenever I use visual imagery for relaxation, the scenes my mind often conjures are mental pictures of water. Often I'm sitting alone in a boat gracefully resting on the calm clear blue waters of a small lake that in turn is surrounded by a narrow sandy beach leading to green forests of tall majestic trees.

Since I started writing here and subsequently in a writing class, I have sometimes used metaphors to describe my feelings. I have noted the emergence of the language of water, including references to streams, creeks, rivers, lakes, oceans, waves, storms, rain and its variations.

Our natural environment and nature is such a part of life for so many of us. We value those park and wilderness areas around us. We attempt to bring some part of that nature to our homes. Some of us delight in carefully designed and planted garden areas -- a specific place for certain plants and flowers, all planned much as certain types of artists organize the color in their paintings.

Others prefer plants, flowers in random placement much as they would appear in nature. Some have a combination of both approaches. I have lived with the structured design that clearly conveys to me the desire, or need, to exercise control over one more aspect of life.

What I know is that I prefer and feel most comfortable in the setting where the randomness of nature prevails, where nature is permitted to exercise some freedom, too. Just as I do not want to overwhelm and impose myself upon nature, I do not want nature's plants, vegetation, flowers to do the same to me, and so we reach agreement with each other.