Landscape Study

COLIN BAUMGARTNER | VERMONT

What if we viewed others the way we viewed the natural world? If we began each day expecting, generally, a gentle shift from dark to light and light to dark, stillness shifting to animation and then stillness once more, and otherwise left ourselves curiously open to everything between? Might we then learn to handle the storms & thunder by settling comfortably in & waiting for them to pass? Delighting in the intensity and fervor of these times? And might we then cherish the moment the sun, following swiftly on the furtive scurrying clouds, catches the sodden meadows so that the world glistens impossibly beautiful because of that very storm? How might we view the blanketing mists, the obscuring fogs of life?

Might it be possible to view that veiling, that distance, as a painter does? As something alluring, something heightening desire —not quelling it? Something we might lose ourselves in? & be surrounded by?

What if we could accept that we cannot control, cannot entirely comprehend, and certainly cannot possess? And instead, accepted things just as they were— In all their beauty & their untamed disarray?