Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Rocks























I grew up in the Seattle area. It is beautiful there. It is green. It has 300 foot tall trees next to the freeway. It is an hour or so from great hiking, all with trees and underbrush. Gardens are lush, even if you don't have a green thumb. Anything grows. Even cactus, although you have to take it inside and ignore it.

Rocks (40 years ago) had slightly more aesthetic value than asphalt.

I got a job in Eastern Washington, in semi-arid country. (that means it isn't a desert. yet.) My Seattle friends said "How can you live there? There aren't any trees!" I replied "In town, you don't notice." But the objection stayed in my head. And bothered me. Basically, it said that their idea of beauty (at least for greens) is limited to kelly and pine green, occasionally mint. Having no choice in the matter (at least for the foreseeable future), I decided to like sage green, gray green, light tan and even gray. And all the other colors that don’t seem to make it big over the mountains. (Fortunately for me, orange was not a big player.) Even sparse vegetation has an attraction.

And so I developed this philosophy: Here on this side of the state, we are proud of our rocks. We don't cover them with extraneous vegetation.

1 Comments:

At 2:07 PM, Anonymous Denise Slauson said...

The Lord created all sorts of beauty. It's intrinsically there, but we need the eyes to see it. You've grown those eyes. Endless wheat fields are sort of like that. Took a while to appreciate them, until I watched green wheat blowing in the wind and it reminded me of sea waves. Seemingly endless snow and long, dark winters have much the same effect. There are lovely things, if we can look past what we initially find objectionable. But boy, am I ever glad when spring rolls around each year. ;)

 

Post a Comment

<< Home