Is nature the canvas of some great artist?

The swell was prolific today as I walked along the windswept shoreline on the south coast of Africa. Waves pushed the water further up the beach than usual, and the flotsam and jetsam that spewed up on the beach included some rare items. Nature really showed us her enthusiastic side today.

Besides the usual, some mass of dead bluebottles also lay strewn all along the beach, probably dislodged by the heavy ocean swell and stormy conditions. Still the setting was epic and bristled with a dark foreboding, pregnant with potential. It’s a magical place sometimes, this planet, when you are able to catch nature in a rare flurry of organic fine art.

Beauty, like art, is in the eye of the beholder, and such scenes do of course depend on the subjective view of the person observing them. To others it may seem negative while to me the scene was like one out of a good movie. The set and setting were just epic.

I don’t have to do too much to get a great show here on this side of the planet. Nature does all the hard work to create a majestic scene of some sort and I simply observe the passing parade. The tide comes and goes, bringing with it climate shifts from one season to the next. And yet the setting remains epic and attractive throughout.

The sky is a canvas in places like this and the great artist in the sky simply splashes the clouds across the shiny blue monochrome backdrop. A whole new atmosphere emerges and clouds fly by like flights of fancy in the mind of the maker.

All this personification and "anthropomorphizing" by me regarding nature is obviously just mere poetic license, though ancient cultures and even some folks today like to animate their natural world with conscious beings or some sort of intelligence. I am all for that. I too find nature to be the work of some great architect, call it Lord Brahma or Lord Vishnu indirectly though his agencies, or perhaps also the goddess Durga, also known as Mother Earth.

From our worm’s eye view of the atmosphere and cosmos, it does look as if some god it at work above us. Yet all it happens to be is the flow of current from high pressure to low pressure. And yet I can’t help but feel as if there was some intelligence who churned up all the raw ingredients in the first place.

If it was just random chaotic mixing of elements in the cosmic bang, then I am surprised that conscious human life emerged from that inanimate soup. Yet, here we are – the apparent apex of nature’s creation. Or so we like to think. We can only wonder at what bigger picture exists that we are still unaware of in the grander scheme of things.

Such are the thoughts and unanswered questions sparked by today’s mighty display of elemental fury here on the south coast of Africa, in a little unknown stretch of paradise called the Garden Route, or also Eden municipality. I’ll let the name say it all.

(photos my own)