My Life, A Love Letter

WORDS CHARIS LEE

Creation cries out, crafting our experience of wonder. Its design a reflection of a Creator’s heart. The enigmas of nature, evidence of a greater purpose.

People often take the wonders of life for granted, reducing beauty to scientific phenomena and whittling the observable world down into artificiality. The attempt to fill voids of inquiry and confine the sense of awe to man’s limited understanding becomes an endless struggle. The very breath we breathe considered an automatic expectation of science rather than a function of intelligent design. Humanity clings to the mindset that we deserve it all, when all of life — our hearts that beat and the steps we take — is a gift. A fully intentional and wholeheartedly given, gift.

The Roman philosopher Lucretius understood atoms like dust in the sunlight — only seen in specific conditions and ever so slightly swerving on their own, a glimpse of a world that appears when light peers through window shutters. Though a firm believer in a wholly materialistic world, Lucretius was right to wonder about creation, to wonder about the composer and the composites of the earth.

Grasping the wonder towards nature is an age-old tension for philosophers and scientists alike. Curiosity for life spurs curiosity for its beginnings. Yet, in the ambition to understand the very atoms that make up living things, it’s easy to lose the wonder of nature by offering an explanation. Perhaps, we lose sight of the beauty of mere existence, the presence of a tender-hearted, loving voice that whispers through the dandelion blooming through a sidewalk crack, a fighting life in the booming chaos of the city.

It is not always in the busyness that we find answers to our deepest questions. It is in the silence. The serene simplicity that offers the healing so desperately yearned for. In this peace we find refuge.

As we soak in the wonders of nature, we recognize our limitations but find comfort in the grandness of creation. And while tempted to grasp every intricacy, we don’t always need the answers — only to observe the world around us with an appreciative heart. Beauty can’t be confined to a defined explanation, just as the experience of getting lost in rippling, sunlit twinkles on ocean waters is never fully reproduced by a camera lens.

This isn’t to say we should not question. We are meant to question, meant to doubt, meant to use our freely given lives to make a choice. The difficulty lies in the balance between appreciation and explanation. What happens when the conceptions of creation point to a non-empirical exposition? Who, or what, do we thank for all of this overwhelming beauty?

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I live my life in response to a sacrifice. I place my best foot forward to honor a name above my own, and to enjoy what has been so freely given. I am a love letter to someone dear to me, a teacher, a father, a friend. My creator.

Thank you.

Charis is a second-year English major who enjoys stopping to blow on dandelions she finds on sidewalks.