Scale of Beauty (Entry 4)

 After reading the passage by Thoreau entitled "Walking," I felt almost obligated to spend time going on a walk of my own lest he start to roll in his grave in protest of his lessons falling upon deaf ears. I spent a good while walking down the main path and enjoying the vivid scenery that was placed around me on the trails such as the small gardens placed around sparsely distributed benches and bright flowers randomly placed along the edge of the course, but I was constantly nagged by Thoreau's stated belief that even the most unattractive organization of life found in nature was superior to any area whose form was decided by humans. With this in mind, I moved my focus away from the unnatural landscapes and shifted it toward finding the raw beauty that was sure to exist around me in hopes of better understanding Thoreau's position. 

It did not take long for me to come across a plant that would have previously been much too simple to catch my eye when viewed around the human decorations that surrounded it. The leaves of this plant were nothing special at all: they drooped sadly under no weight at all, and their color was a drab green with brown hints that can be described most flatteringly as faded and lifeless. Still, I could not help but fixate my gaze upon the stunning red color that comprised the exterior of many small bundles of berries. Despite the plant's hideous leaves and thin, unseemly branch structure, its ability to produce these red fruit was enough to stop me in my tracks for several minutes.

After recognizing the well-hidden appeal of this seemingly typical plant, I tried my best to connect such qualities to the motivating force that guided me to its discovery, namely Thoreau's disdain for human intervention in nature. The result: an understanding that even if there are man-made arrangements of nature that are much more appealing to my human senses through structure and order, these arrangements are artificial and thus lack a great deal of the natural beauty that is available to me in the vast wilderness. These anthropogenic designs are meant to please us, and they often do a great job in doing so and bringing us peace, but they teach us no truths about the inherent beauty of nature. For a true lesson on that topic, we have to stray from thinking about beauty as a measure of aesthetics and move to an understanding that all of nature is beautiful regardless of our biased estimations of its particular exterior parts. This meant that I had to move past my own initial judgment of the plant before me. 

Rather than seeing the leaves and the branches as unsightly, superfluous additions to the berries that graced their presence, I had to understand that the plant as a whole was analogous to nature as a whole and that even its less attractive components are examples of the true beauty that exists all around us.