Beholding
Where the world becomes art
Sometimes the most intricate, moving, unrepeatable piece of art is happening on the windscreen while I’m stuck in traffic.
Or I’m stood at the sink, hands soaped, just watching the sky rearrange itself through the window. Light shifting tone by tone.
Right now I’m in my study, finishing a day of work, and outside is a party… the branches moshing, the wind pounding, the jiggle of a gorse bush in wild abandon. And all these different browns celebrating the day: bark, soil, feather, fence.
When I moved to Cornwall I really missed art galleries. I missed time in galleries. I missed the symbolism of them: a place that held expression, experimentation, new thought. Of course there are galleries here, and artists everywhere. But the shape of my life means I don’t have access to it in the way I once did, or wanted to.
And yet here I am, staring at art. The beginning of time. The first ancestor of colour, texture, and bend. Everything we frame, hang, or create- came from this. The natural world.
And when I say the ocean is art, I mean every crashed wave is the end line from a Sylvia Plath poem. And a rock pool is the face of Tracey Emin, you put your hand in and pull out a heart. And the cliff edge is the architectural blueprint for each roof we have ever lifted toward heaven: our attempt to translate awe into shelter, to hold sky in structure, to make permanence out of all that will eventually crumble.
Art can be consumed, watched, flicked through, walked past. But this view asks for contemplation. Contemplation is intrinsic to it.
So in my study, I’ve been staring out the window for a minute or two… and shit, it’s hard to keep looking beyond that first moment of beauty. To stay after the initial nod at wonder. To stand and just watch. To let the wind move the trees without needing to move with it. To mother the quickening in my chest instead of soothing it with a different image. To push beyond the glance and be with the subtle, the bold, the shifting landscape. The stillness. The surrender.
Yet when I do, something steadies. Watching nature feels like appreciating the start of all creation; the soil, the air, the water I came from and will return to, now growing inside of me.
