It may have been the country air, but I have been throwing around folksy expressions about the Highlands all week. It was just too pretty for words. You could trip and your camera would still take a pretty picture. I ain’t never seen that much green in my whole life. (I mean, I have, but it still surprises a body nonetheless.)
On the trip, though, I found myself repeating, “Ugh, nature,” over and over again, to the point that my friends could and did make fun of me for it. I said it in the same way that I say, “Why are there such lovely things in the world?”, which has the vocabulary of awe spoken with the tone reserved for “Someone puked in the Qdoba bathroom again.” I mean to convey exhaustion, resignation, and obligation. “Oh here it is, another beautiful waterfall. Guess I’ll take another gorgeous picture. Get it together, nature.”
If there seems to be an overabundance of italics in the previous paragraph, it’s because there is. I only ever intended to play these lines for a laugh, which meant hamming up the dialogue. Usually I use these phrases when I’m surprised by how nice nature is, when I’m out on a run or have stepped out of a building into the sunlight. But everything in the Highlands was a surprise. It was so genuinely lovely. I didn’t have words. I couldn’t find the right words. All I had was the cheap, knee-jerk response.
While my cheap, knee-jerk response is coated in layers of sarcasm and cynicism, I think other people have the same struggle with words in the face of beauty. We call things stunning, we talk about being speechless, but that’s all just a way to put a description on the indescribable. You have to be there, you have to see it, you have to be caught up in the rush of the wind on the top of the mountain or enveloped in the endless roiling smooth of the ocean.
I know this sounds like Marius in Les Miserables, when he starts off his song saying that there’s a grief that can’t be spoken and then goes on to speak about it for five minutes, but I feel like these words are a rainstorm— with enough time, they’ll weather down the mountain chain of beauty into a thing you can hold and understand, little pebbles that once meant might. I know that’s not true, but I feel like I have to try something. I do not do well with the incomprehensible, though I’m learning.
Anyway, if you want to experience the same of dumbness in the face of nature that I have, come visit me and we’ll take a trip! In lieu of that, here are some pictures!
Oh nature. Why you gotta be so nice?
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