Beautifully Broken Issue #16: Control: Humanity vs Nature
Beautifully Broken Issue #16: Control: Humanity vs Nature
IDEAS, ART & WISDOM TO REPAIR YOUR BEAUTIFUL WORLD
Happy Saturday! Welcome to the new, compact format of Beautifully Broken.
IDEAS FROM ME: Controlling Our Environment: Humanity vs Nature
Control over our immediate environment is a strange concept, perhaps even a modern concept. When we have less conveniences and live in less technologically able societies we are at the mercy of nature. It is the overwhelming force within which we exist and must survive. In the modern East and West, this was the lived reality of our ancestors, and in other parts of the world this kind of relationship still continues. In this relationship we don't imagine we can control our immediate environment because existence is always a compromise with nature. Will nature send me game to hunt? Fish to catch? Will the weather allow the crops that I need to survive to grow this year?
But as we become more and more able to distance ourselves from nature, to be less dependant upon it due to technological and societal convenience, the idea of the right of control appears.
Society and its survival model takes the place of nature and becomes the overwhelming force that we must negotiate with if we want to survive and advance (Will I get a promotion at work? Am I correctly obeying the laws of my country? Will my investments increase or decrease? Can I afford the rent needed to live in a home close to conveniences?).
Within the grand and powerful context of nature the idea of personal control over our lives is an obvious illusion. No matter how well we hunt or plough, nature is always the most powerful and unpredictable force in the equation. Humans inside human systems however, begin to imagine that we might indeed be eligible for some share of nature's god-like power.
If I am successful and wealthy I am given more conveniences (a better house, car, medical care, etc.) and so it's easy to imagine that I have more control over my life than others in the same system, and certainly more than the human who is at the mercy of nature. Or perhaps not.
It's certainly true that wealth and status can grant us a temporary control over our man-made environment but there’s a hubris that must unravel in the end, for no one exists outside the sphere of nature, we are part of nature.
Perhaps, the more one feels in control in the artificial systems we create for ourselves, the less in control (or more detached) one is from the deep self that is connected to nature?
The more we invest in our replacement for nature, the further we drift from the happiness, connection and enlightenment due every animal on earth that lives and dies by nature's hand?
Exploring whether this idea is true or not is easy: give up the illusion of control, spend more time in nature. Make yourself happily small, tiny, the correct scale of a human being to nature's vast body. Reopen the relationship with nature and perhaps you will rediscover a part of yourself that’s been smothered and silenced by layers of man-made artifice, a part of you that’s truly alive.
HEADLINE FICTION #3: Exam Dreams Can Fly
Here's a new format for short fiction that I've invented. It's a 70-word story in three panels with a pattern of 7-16-47 words, where the first 7 words form a headline style title, the 16 serve to fill out the headline information a little more and the final 47 contain the meat of the story and resolution. I think I'll call it "headline fiction". These micro stories of mine are based on dreams (and nightmares!) :)
ART TO MEDITATE UPON
Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci: Painting, 1503–1506, Oil on poplar panel
The Mona Lisa (Italian: Gioconda or Monna Lisa; French: Joconde) is a half-length portrait painting by Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. Considered an archetypal masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, it has been described as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, and the most parodied work of art in the world". The painting's novel qualities include the subject's enigmatic expression, monumentality of the composition, the subtle modelling of forms, and the atmospheric illusionism.
The painting has been traditionally considered to depict the Italian noblewoman Lisa del Giocondo. It is painted in oil on a white Lombardy poplar panel. Leonardo never gave the painting to the Giocondo family
Meditations: A great deal has been said about the Mona Lisa. I've seen it in person in The Louvre in France three times, most memorably in the period after the Covid lockdowns when Paris and The Lourvre, were virtually empty. I could sit with the painting and some of Leonardo's other works, undisturbed.
Mona Lisa's hands captured my interest and immediately reminded me of the hands of John The Baptist in another Leonardo painting.
The hands of both figures are fat with life, warm and smooth, like a baby's hands—no lines or wrinkles. The faces somehow glow, radiating an inner warmth.
I wonder if Leonardo is not drawing people, but rather angels, or at least an idealised, perfected image of humanity. Humans that are enlightened, aglow, connected to The Creation.
Both figures seem to carry a secret within that's hinted at with a smile, it's a secret they want to share. I wonder what it is?
WISDOM OF OTHERS: Excerpt from The Monastery of the Jade Mountain by Peter Goullart (1961)
PHOTO HAIKU
This warm home inside,
shelters my soul from harsh wind —
wings around the world.
Ideas To Live By In The Coming Week:
Stop trying. Spend time in nature. Re-establish the correct scale: your small body existing upon and as part of nature's vast body.
See the divine in everyone you meet. The perfected, radiant being inside each person (and yourself).
Find peace and security within, let it radiate outwards to heal the world.
All the best,
Morgan ,
15th June, 2024