In the New England Woods

Nature loves the beauty of simplicity.

I knew this dictum by Newton, its adoption by Ockham, and its pursuit by Einstein. This morning, while walking the woods with my dog before sunrise, it occurred to me that while the fall colors and fallen leaves of New England’s woods often meant nature for me, walking in the dark gave them a different meaning. They were just woods now, with brittle leaves and brushwood under my feet. These woods became a new context, within which I could hear my dog walk without seeing him. Yet I knew he always kept the same distance from me, perhaps worried that I may leave him in the wilderness and go back to my warm bed.

I kept repeating that sentence throughout my walk. I do not know why, possibly a parietal lobe short-circuiting resulting from my desire for a cup of strong coffee.  A simple sentence, yet an assemblage of the three most potent words that have shaped my passage through the past half century: love, beauty, and simplicity.

And I walked through the New England woods, which I knew were of that fall color splendor. But it was dark now, all around me was black, and sunrise was an hour away. My dog picked up a scent and started running in circles. Or ellipses. Or just randomly. But he kept the safe distance from me.

So, there we were:  a man and his dog. Or is it a dog and his man? No leash.  Both of us were free in our own way, but still dependent. He was chasing the scent of a red fox, and I was pursuing a new line of thought.

… One has to start with beauty, I thought. I wondered what single word would define beauty for me, in the New England woods, before sunrise. I slowed down hoping that I could think of that word easier. I shut out the sounds around me, and wondered: what would that word be?

And the answer was there, in front of me, in the dark. Beauty, at that moment, was symmetry! I felt curious; I wanted more. Was symmetry a shape, or was it a state of being? Was I thinking of form and optical reflections that are ultimately symmetrical? Or symmetry was the gate to something more fundamental? I stopped and looked at the sky—full of stars, a few of which I knew. But there was no symmetry in what I guessed beyond the sky. The stars seemed stationary, nothing was collapsing. And I saw beauty.

Then it occurred to me: beauty is harmony.

The next word to tackle was love. I listened to my dog chase that scent and thought of him sleeping at the end of the bed. Snoring like a sailor’s dog snores. And I thought how love has been central to my interaction with people, with food, with photography, with poetry, and with medicine. Yet, I could not define it in a word. Why try when humanity had tried since our ancestors felt a feeling that they did not know what to do with! But I pushed myself, and love became a two-word definition: curiosity of discovery.

And now, simplicity, the distillate of all things complex and seemingly incongruous. Simplicity was easy for me to define. It was the sound a running dog made, at almost sunrise, in the New England woods now exhaling their morning breath of colors in gold, rust, yellow, red, and rotting trees fallen without a sound. Simplicity was, unexpectedly, both beauty and symphony, which to my caffeine deprived brain was sym-phony, the harmony of sounds. It was not about parsimony as defined by Ockham, but the reaching of a meaningful coexistence without the superfluous.

… I could hear my dog’s heavy breathing and now could see his smiling face.  When dogs pant, it makes them smile. At least to us humans who wonder about love, beauty and simplicity while walking upon bristle twigs in the New England woods.

I was about to tackle the joint-identity of the beauty of simplicity when we returned to our cabin in the mountain. It was sunrise now, glorious upon a cold fall morning. My dog had food in mind, and I had coffee as my only desire for the moment.

So, I postponed all thoughts about the beauty of simplicity for another walk in the woods, before sunrise or at midnight. For sure before the first snow.

October 16, 2013

(Picture taken with a Yashica 12 medium format camera)

© Vahé Kazandjian, 2013