Let’s consider the beauty of randomly eroded rocks. [Photographic evidence provided.]

We’ve discussed why flowers are so excessively beautiful.  The answer seems to be intuitively obvious  --- “There they are,  you just have to look at them” --- and yet not fully rational, objectively understood. But Darwinianism is involved because it’s biology; e.g. eyeballs. Got it? ;--)

But the mystery of beauty deepens significantly when we try to critically understand the incredible beauty of many square miles of randomly eroded rock.  Rock! Randomly eroded!

[Actually, I don't know for sure why the Whole Thing is so beautiful. But let’s just take one step at a time. This time we’re doing randomly eroded rock beauty.]

Colorado Plateau in Utah

A few years ago we were driving from point-A to point-B through the Colorado Plateau in Utah. We came up over a rise and were suddenly exposed to so much beauty it literally took our breath away [proving that that's not just a saying, but can really happen]. What was there?... just an enormous landscape of randomly eroded rock, a lot of it sort of a burnt orange. [They like to call it “red rock”.  For a good time Google “Utah Red Rock”]

Random Erosion vs Darwinianism

By motivated extrapolation we can argue that Flowers are so excessively beautiful based on Darwinianism, and leave it at that.  But how’s that explain why randomly eroded rock is so grandly, expansively, excessively beautiful? Using the example above, we had never seen that Utah Red Rock scene before, yet we immediately perceived and were awed by its incredible beauty.

Sorry, I don’t have any photos from that specific example.  So I’ll borrow from lesser snapshots of the Grand Canyon and hope you can extrapolate from them.

   

 

Stumbled upon while Flying

A similar experience with randomly eroded rock beauty happened to me while solo flying in a single engine plane from Cody, Wyoming to Las Vegas, Nevada. My flight planning had been dominated by weather concerns, so I hadn’t paid much attention to the possibly interesting underlying terrain as I thought more about dodging weather threats and finding alternative airports, etc.; i.e. I was more concerned about an ugly emergency than a pretty sight.

Rain, low ceilings, high terrain

Low ceilings, high terrain

Towards the end of that flight, as the weather opened up, on a direct path to Las Vegas, I “stumbled” on the most beautiful sight I’ve ever experienced while flying a plane. 

I’d “stumbled” upon Zion National Park. 

The only camera I had with me was a video camera with a 1.1 megapixel still image capability, so please forgive the image quality not matching the scene below my plane.

 

 

 

The English Countryside

And for another example, just look at the inland countryside of England.  It’s exquisite.  And yet it’s almost all re-shaped by the hands of the natives scratching away at it for millennia, pushing all the stones from where they had rested naturally into miles of stone walls tracing beautiful forms and patterns, and erecting picture-perfect little home site vignettes and castle ruins in just right picture-perfect compositions. And all this beauty by a people whose world conquests are unrivaled by the Huns and Vikings. Give me a break! [Sorry, no snapshots.]

And then there’s cosmic beauty. Where does beauty end? [For a good time Google “eye of god nebula”.]

Beauty requires 3 things existing together as a system of irreducible complexity:

• The thing itself creates, fulfills, and presents beauty
• Individuals endowed with the private, personal capacity to recognize and appreciate beauty
• And we have to agree between ourselves that beautiful is real and not insanity

Beauty seems to have something foundational to say about the Meaning of it All, and flowers and randomly eroded rocks are communicating that in poetry if not prose.

The mystery of beauty continues, and I’ll leave it at that.  And anyway it’s not my #1 focus photographically.  I’m more curious about exposing and developing transcendence.  Hmmm, “transcendence”…..

Onward, Kurt