Naturalist Perspectives Challenge: AWEsomeness

Location: Wendell St and Oxford St
Date: 5/2/2017
Time: 4:30 PM
Weather: Sunny and nice. 57℉.


Most of the time when people talk about awe, they talk about things that are either extremely big or extremely small. Sometimes, though, it can happen with color.

I came across this person's backyard while I was wandering around and talking to my cousin on the phone. She is an art student and we had just been talking about her final, which involved mixing paints, and led to a discussion about the perception of color. In the midst of that discussion, I walked past this garden, and it was a literal blaze of color. This picture does not even do it justice. there were even more plants in the area off to the left. My brain felt saturated with color, in a way that does not usually happen. I stopped talking midsentence and just stared. The plants are obviously natural, in the sense that no one came by, Alice in Wonderland style to put paint on them, but they are also obviously unnatural in that they have been genetically modified to be this vibrant. In Cambridge, among all of the greens and browns, they look out of place, yet in a place like Hawaii, the colors would be normal and the flower shape would be peculiar.

The article Why Do We Feel Awe? suggests that awe pushes individuals to redefine themselves in terms of a larger collective, and stimulates wonder and curiosity. While looking at these flowers, I was struck by the way people I have never met or even imagined (and I have a very active imagination), have lived entire lives that still impact and shape my own life. The tulip craze in Holland, for instance, drove people to experiment with genetic engineering and creating 'unnatural' plants. Within the scope of my lifetime, however, this color is naturally occurring, as the plants producing the colors have grown and blossomed naturally and may themselves be entirely untouched by human hands. I find it fascinating to explore the reasons my brain picks out these particular plants as noticeably unnatural and out of place in the landscape, while being shocked that most types of ivy are equally foreign to this region. I think of things created by humans as being 'unnatural' but I can't help but wonder if there is any such thing as 'unnatural'. After all, humans are as much a part of nature as a plant. Ultimately, we are all natural extensions of early external forces.