Simple beauty

MOON. WATER. GREEN.

I want to talk about simple beauty, but first: Local Economy. That’s a community (resilience/building) space that my wife, Sarah Rich, and I are opening in North Oakland this fall. You can sign up for updates or read a little more about it in the Chronicle.

Significant for this crew: Oakland Garden Club will finally have IRL meetups (and merch!) at LE. Still mulling the exact formats, but I guarantee serious plant nerds will attend. What do you want to learn / teach? Say hi@thelocaleconomy.com, if you got ideas. E.g. There’s an empty lot across the street. Won’t life find a way into its crevices, perhaps with some help from friends?

OK.

Lo, moon.

I saw the moon rise a couple days ago. Big, almost-orange yellow, full. The only thing I could think was: MOON. What else needs be said? MOON. You know where it is.

My neighbor Pamela told me she planted petunias and they are doing great. Purple. Platonic purple. It is hard to scrub the 1950s off of them, but petunias are beautiful. Forget the name and really look at them again: the texture of those petals, velvet, the intricacy of the veins, the wheel of colors and patterns that breeders have co-created over the years. Beautiful. 

When something is accessible—easy to find, easy to grow, easy to see—it can be devalued. California poppies. Oak trees. A whorl of fog curling over a ridge… MOON. The Bay. 

I saw The Bay from several angles this week. It never looks the same as you circle its margins, higher or lower up the ancient valley. There are infinite bays. Metaphor? Sure. But also simple fact.

Why is water beautiful?

I have been thinking too much about water. I have been going on very long runs in hot places and struggling with dehydration, and let me tell you: there are few animal drives as compelling as WATER when you are really, genuinely thirsty. I might argue no sensation is better than quenching your thirst when your body needs it. How gorgeous that our bodies could relish, luxuriate, appreciate, even love the ultimate basic function of taking in fresh water.

So: Maybe the appreciation of beauty, which is to say beauty, begins at a cellular level. Perhaps this beauty is the name we give for what we stack atop the need for WATER across all the scales of our bodies. Trillions of cells rectifying their water content, the management of the plasma in our blood. The muscles burning glycogen, throwing off water in the process. Water as input and output. Physiological alarm and satiation and organ-level processing of waste. The primordial pleasure of the body in water, the sensations of submergence, and the mammalian affinity for watering hole, stream, river, lake, Bay, ocean, and the abstraction we lay over the light on the water, the sound of molecules flowing over rocks down a mountain canyon, this water on my lips and that water at the shoreline. Beauty, inseparable from need, from metabolism, from body, from mind, from environment.

This is, I suppose, an evolutionary suggestion, but I’m not trying to prove it.

In Rob MacFarlane’s book Is A River Alive? there’s a gorgeous prologue in which these lines appear: “Water-worship floods the wider land. Springs and streams become sacred places, where water speaks in voices that cannot be understood or denied,” he writes. “In this age, rivers are seen and named plainly as gods: Dana (later the Danube); Deva (the Dee); Tamesa (the Thames); Sinnann (the Shannon).”

Maybe the word I have been looking for isn’t beauty, but holiness, so close to wholeness. All of it, us included. All of it, interconnected.

On a recent run in far Northern California, I crossed a dirt road a couple times that had a muddy trickle of a stream running across it. And both times, as I approached, I saw what looked like tiny blades of color perched on all the wet rocks. Both times, when I skipped over the water’s chosen path, the color rose shimmering around me, blue butterflies and their friends. For a second they ran with me in the wake of the disturbed air, swirling. And then I was alone again on the dry road.

On Sunday, I was moving up Strawberry Canyon, distracted but trying to be grateful for being a living being on a cool morning, when a big fat drop of water fell on my head. I looked up.

Far above me on the trail, on an incline facing northwest, some trees were capturing the fog and dripping it right down onto me, onto us, into the earth. From what I understand, the needles have channels, and those grooves act like a miniature watershed, pairing drop with drop, merging microtrickles into a tiny river made of fog. Which I suppose meant I was at the bottom of a miniature waterfall. Actually, they were all around me, wetting a stripe across the whole fire road.

I followed the stripe of moisture to my left and it led to a bay laurel, maybe a few of them, tucked right into that niche. Watered and gardened by creation itself, there the branches were, covered with the tenderest, electric green leaves, platonic GREEN, set against the darker maturity of yestermonth.

What beauty could be simpler than green leaves on a common tree on a well-trodden path.