The Inexhaustibility Of Things, As They Are In Themselves
I don’t know if there is a word that would more accurately capture this sentiment, but every time I find myself in moments of solitude out in the natural world, whether on a long hike or while sitting for hours on a beach, I’m often overwhelmed with a peculiar kind of nostalgia, mixed with melancholy, and with an overall emotional vertigo … at the realization that the objects I encounter, however they happen to be constituted, exist here and now … but have also existed long before me and will continue to exist long after I am gone. Their capacity for renewal and re-formation renders them inexhaustible and bestows them with a bearing of immortality.
Moreover, it feels as if these objects have fully developed lives of their own … a kind of existential sovereignty … even though, most of the time, we’re talking not just about actually living things like birds and trees and flowers, but also about water, rocks, mountains, sand, streams, and a vast arrays of other such inanimate natural forms. It’s as if they simply carry on with their quiet existence, apart and away from the cacophony of humanity. … All of this is worthy of contemplaion.
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