Sunsets and Seaspray
I have a guilty pleasure. I like to stand on my balcony and look out over the sea on the windy days. After a shower, I stand there, letting the wind whip through my hair. I bring a book, sometimes, and other times, I draw – hard to do, in the wind.
I never regret it after (though it’s inconvenient). My hair comes out knotted and ratty, and my homework comes out undone. I stare over the water with my eyes closed, hands ghosted over the balcony. The wind whistles in the trees, pulls playfully at my clothes. When I stand there, I am the only person in the whole world, and the wind rushes past the waves and me alone. Sadly enough, in the words of T. S. Eliot, “human voices wake us, and we drown” (137). My mother calls me for dinner, and I walk back inside. Coal dust stains my feet, because it drifts over from the terminals, but I never remember to wear shoes. Soon, I’ll be leaving this balcony for good – fifteen months left, I believe. When I go off to a college dorm, I won’t have the wind beside me in my lonely afternoons.
I’ve never taken advantage of nature as I ought. I’ve never appreciated the access to beautiful things I enjoy. In all honesty, I sneeze less indoors. And sunburns hurt. Is that an excuse? Or a symptom of a more pervasive apathy?
I always wake up with the sun. He filters through the shades and leans across my face, whispering in my ear at around 8:30 in the morning. It doesn’t annoy me overmuch. If I wake up after noon, I stay sleepy all day. The first time I stayed awake through the night, I was sitting with my best friend, talking about nonsense I don’t remember now. We watched, astonished, as the sun glowed out the window, breaking the illusory endlessness of night, “as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another” (Hawthorne 106). The dawn that day felt like the beginning and the end of summer, the close of a conversation and the introduction to another. We were watching something strange and secret but, at the same time, mundane in the life of the world.
Nature and I… well, it’s complicated. I like being pale, which puts a damper on our relationship. Although I am an accomplished surfer (of the Internet), I’ve never surfed on actual water and I may have gone jogging once in my life. While I don’t appreciate the outdoors like a so-called outdoorsman, I do find something deep and powerful in nature that doesn’t seem to be available anywhere else.
When I look out over the sunset, my fingers itch to pick up my watercolors. Even though I know I can never capture the true figure of the scene, I long to interpret it, allow it to inspire something new and similar. Every so often, driving down the highway, I’ll trace the clouds with my eyes and I find myself overcome with awe for God’s creation. How could I not? “God, in creation, uses precisely the same tools and rules as an artist; he works with the beauty of matter; the reality of things; the discoveries of the senses, all five of them” (L’Engle 44). Nature connects two of my dearest passions: art and the Lord. (He’s last but not least, for the record.) I always fail to comprehend the vastness of God’s achievements. Sometimes I wonder if I have enough room in my mind forthem. Regardless of how much time I neglect the world around me, the beauty of it remains, ready to comfort and inspire. So, when I look out over the sunset, I see paint on a canvas. And I only have one question. What kind of brushes does God use?
