Beauty’s value shines not on us, but in us

AN almost full moon sweeps light across shadowed and white-spiked peaks, bringing into view an unbroken 100-mile-long mountain wall that spills down on either side to green plateaus, river valleys and sage-grasslands.

It’s early evening, and I’ve been walking through this ice-carved valley laced with oxbows, ospreys, willow thickets, mergansers and moose. I’m wondering how to live between what Thoreau called “matter and spirit,” between what I see are the real needs of the Earth and the undisciplined appetite of a single nation.

At the edge of the lake, a domed beaver’s den serves as a perch for a heron. A hatch of mosquitoes flies up, and a wriggling trout jumps into them. A meteor blazes and falls behind a hanging glacier. A grizzly eats a calf in a warm meadow.

The beauty of the natural world drives through us like weather. It is a kind of circulation — blood and air — that binds us to what is beyond us and within us, and as I walk, I wonder if beautiful things have a place in this world and whether beauty can be saved.

Ralph Waldo Emerson told us that beauty has no superfluous parts. In observing it, therefore, we cannot separate ourselves from it, or from nature. Our desire for it is built into our DNA. Looking out at it is also looking in. Scan the night sky, so full of stars, and we enter beauty and beauty enters us.

Everywhere in this world there are openings to what Emerson called “the original circumstances of life,” to the dynamism of fire and ice, bison and songbird, harebell and geyser, ash fall and meltwater, pronghorn and trout. When I walk through the Upper Green River Valley, all I see is liveliness — vivid and abundant in its raw offerings — reminding me that we too are wild and essential.

Yet too frequently we hide from the natural world. We build walls around ourselves; we park our cars in heated garages connected to our houses so that we don’t have to go outdoors, hear birds and coyotes or feel the weather. If we circumvent nature, we lose track of ourselves.

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‘Healing’ nature

ONCE I walked down into a valley below Mt. Haguro, a sacred mountain in northern Japan, and froze in my steps before a scene so serene I felt my face had been slapped. A stand of old growth cedars stood on either side of a sparkling stream, with a red bridge arched over it. A statue of Kannon, the goddess of compassion, stood by the side of the trail.

There was a stone basin filled with water and a bamboo dipper. To drink of those waters was to open oneself to the empty nature of all things, to invoke compassion, to stop what Emerson called “the un-united, biting and tearing self.”

Now every time I lean down to water, every time my foot curves over a rock in the trail, I’m reminded that we humans do not “save beauty”; rather, beauty saves us.

Beauty drinks us in and allows us to bear the burden of human consciousness. It heals us by entering our eyes; it orders the chaotic neural impulses of the world into a narrative that is recognized and understood. It joins us with what is other.

Such concepts are not unprecedented. Thoreau defined the concept of the “healing wilderness,” and the writings of John Muir embodied the virtue of natural beauty. The Navajo Beauty Chants sing health into the body by restoring harmony. It is the restorative element in beauty that we crave.

One morning last spring, I watched mist rise from hundreds of ice-carved kettle ponds. In a saucer-shaped meadow, a pronghorn antelope had just given birth to two fawns. They stood on wobbly legs to suck as a coyote watched from the rim of a low hill, but by the end of the day, the twins had learned to follow their mother at a run.

As we seek and perceive beauty, what we are really doing is learning to live in harmony with an elemental quality of reality. The circuit that binds air to water to river to mountain to human to bear to bird to river otter flows through us.

To understand beauty on these terms is, at first, terrifying. It is a form of love and once we’re susceptible we know we can’t live without it. Its cultivation requires us to learn how to see: to shut off the monologues in our heads, to cut through delusions of self-importance, to give ourselves over to the larger global circulation of raw nature and jump in.

In his essay, “Solitude,” Thoreau described a “delicious” evening, “when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore.”

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‘Calm so deep’

BEAUTY drives us toward life. It propels us forward to Wallace Stevens’ “palm at the end of the mind,” to Matsuo Basho’s oku, the “deep north” inside us, and to the intrinsic divinity in all things. When John Muir visited Yellowstone Park in 1898, he wrote: “Here is calm so deep, grasses cease waving,” and later, “The sun shines not on us, but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us.”

Just north of my cabin on a pond hidden in an aspen grove, I have watched how a Barrow’s goldeneye protects her five tiny ducklings, black and white ovals of fuzz sliding into water from a rock that still holds the warmth of afternoon sun.

And I have listened to the wolves that howl each winter night at the edge of the forest and then with the lengthening days, retreat deeper into the Wind River Range to have their pups.

The natural world is a matrix, and our response to it can be so ardent that we are often compelled to give something back. We re-create beauty in other forms — music, paintings, sculpture, architecture, writing — and these, in turn, put beauty back into circulation.

Beauty is part of the cosmic principle of order and chaos. When looking at an equation, Einstein asked, “Is it beautiful?” Principles of natural order are linked vitally to the harmony of social, political, economic and environmental affairs. When we lose our connection to the natural order, we can no longer nurture our environment or ourselves.

As I near the end of my walk, I consider these mountains, once covered by a continuous icecap that ran the length of the range, pierced only by the high peaks of the Continental Divide. Outlet glaciers dropped ice from between granite flanks and meltwater fell from the edges of faulted plateaus. The landscape smoothed into wide meadows and undulating moraines, is a place where ice has left the memory of movement on the land.

Changes surround us. To live fully in this world as it is should be our common aspiration, not to dominate and improve but to be co-residents.

Here, in the mountains, we might learn to read the sacramental text of landscape, to knock our busy heads against the clarity of ice and swim the rivers’ oxbows and rapids where beauty and the unconditioned mind form a sacred alignment with those original circumstances of life — with all that is alive.

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Gretel Ehrlich is the author of numerous books, including “The Solace of Open Spaces.”