Posted by
Sam Heath on Friday, March 07, 2008 11:28:26 AM
When the perps aren’t driving police squad cars into the lake it is nice to remember the Kern River Valley is host to a wide variety of butterflies and birds, so much so that our area is called the butterfly “Mecca” of California and birders throughout the world come here every year to view our feathered friends. Living here over so many years it is easy to take such things for granted, but I know we shouldn’t; such grandeur our valley offers should never be taken for granted.
Unfortunately, crime is increasing as per the recent episode of the squad car winding up in the lake. The picture in the papers shows the car very clearly; but a good friend told me only the antennae of the car could be seen at first but this made it easy to spot, hastening the retrieval. I thought a picture showing only the antennae would be a nice touch.
Beauty is no joke, and those who appreciate beauty don’t make jokes about it. It is one of the reasons I have never liked sexual “humor,” most often directed at women as objects rather than persons. There are few things so dehumanizing as making women, or men for that matter, the target of jokes relating to sex. If you think about it, no politician could survive being made an object of jokes, which easily lap over into outright ridicule. So why would people be given to jokes that ridicule women and beauty?
Walt Kelly had it we joke about things we don’t understand; death for example. But there is no joking about beauty; like life itself it just is, and wherever we find beauty there is mystery as well, which while fascinating is no joking matter.
As I recently shared with a very dear friend, many of the mysteries that I am compelled to study and turn over in my mind appear as though I were viewing them through a kaleidoscope, and though often very beautiful don’t really make much sense. Still, like the butterflies and marvelously colored birds hereabouts some of the mysteries I am compelled to examine and study can be appreciated for their beauty. The major flaw with all beauty is that of too close inspection; you do not appreciate a great work of art for example by viewing it through a microscope. Yet, there are things of such minute structure their real beauty can only be appreciated by using a microscope to examine them.
Fresh, green leaves are beautiful. But when I was a boy and got my first microscope one of the things I examined was a fresh leaf from a grapevine. To my amazement I could actually see fluid pulsing through the veins of that leaf! It was then the full realization dawned on me that plants were indeed living things, and the inner beauty of that leaf came actually alive through my microscope. But it was a form of beauty not to be appreciated in the same manner as some manmade work of art; this was beauty of an entirely different sort, the beauty of the Creator no matter the attempts of religion to claim or define such a Creator for themselves, as though beauty and definitions of beauty belonged to any one individual or group of individuals.
But it often occurs to me that not everyone appreciates beauty; in fact there are too many dedicated to the destruction of beauty, that will deface it at every opportunity. Some out of ignorance or envy, some maliciously out of real hatred for beauty. So, I count my blessings that I live in an area with an abundance of natural beauty, but increasingly this beauty is marred by those that will drive a police squad car into the lake because they seem never to have learned, or don’t care to know we humans are responsible for beauty and are its caretakers.
Sure, there are those who will fault the cops for such a thing to happen; some will even get a chuckle out of the event. But in the broader view, here is where the kaleidoscope comes into play attempting to make sense of the picture as you turn the device around, enjoying the beautiful display of colored patterns emerging all the while knowing there are those that are the enemies of beauty, but also knowing there is a purposeful design to all things beautiful whether we appreciate the designs and their Creator or not.