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“lively nature”
Bachelard argued that an experience of the sublime is more commonly found in mountain peaks, deep sea (and the desert) than in populated human environments (Bachelard, 1964). Notions of the Sublime helped the Romantics elicit a sense of mystery in our connection to the natural world. nature can evoke deep emotional reactions. Perhaps we cannot live in harmony with nature without this reaction. Can our relationship with the natural world
Be transformed if we allow Notions of the Sublime ?
Maybe it is time to re-embrace our love for and fear of the Sublime, and thus finding deeper ways to love the world around us?
The human desire for immersion within and/or mastery over nature bears similarities to a romantic relationship, although not of the human kind. The inanimate as well as animate aspects of nature hold a capacity to expose humans, poetically and imaginatively, to other ways of being in the world.
I enjoy nature’s liveliness, the sounds of waves, the touch of water, views down a valley, and the feel of a rock on my skin. I value wilderness more than the civilised.
A couple of nights ago was a full moon. So I went “moon hunting”- trying to capture my experiences, my feelings on video.
I felt interconnected and ‘dissolved’ into a shared experience with the night, the moonlight, the clouds, although I was aware of the boundaries between the environment and me.
Our sensory perceptions make us part of a vast, interpenetrating webwork of sensations borne out of our surroundings. —we are not just by ourselves, but by cold streams running down the mountains, by the silky softness of a dark night, by the sound of owl, and by the unseen touch of the wind.
“Landscape is the world as it is known to those who dwell therein, who inhabit its place and its journey along the paths connecting them” (Ingold, 2000)