Story #8 “Emotions”

What’s beautiful to you? “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” so we’ve been told. Can beauty ever be objective, or is all beauty subjective? I find beauty in a forest, not necessarily because of certain colors, or plants, or smells, or views. I find a forest beautiful, because it is all those things and more interacting with each other and creating the ecosystem that exists in front of me. Whereas someone else may walk into the forest and say that it is beautiful because of the tall trees, and they see nothing else about it, just the trees. They look past the newts in the creek below, or the owl perched on the branch, or the oyster mushrooms in fresh bloom on that downed log, but they agree that the forest has beauty. So then, is the forest objectively beautiful? Although people may see the beauty in different ways, they are still getting to the conclusion that the forest has beauty. What then, when a person walks into the forest and says the forest has no beauty, because it has no rose. But wait! The forest does have a rose, but they are not satisfied with that rose. They want the big rose! The rose with different colors! The rose with no thorns! But this forest rose is that rose, the rose they desire came from right here. The same way you came from stardust, the rose you want came from this forest rose. The only difference is that this rose is smaller and usually is only one color, but it’s often more fragrant, it will attract way more insects, and coexists well with the balance of all the other plants. Now can I say that the forest is objectively beautiful? Since the rose they desire is the descendant of my forest rose. You may ask, what about the person that doesn’t like nature at all, lives in the heart of the metropolis and doesn’t like going hiking, or doesn’t like listening to the bird’s songs, then is the forest only subjectively beautiful? But that person likes their apartment building built from the tree of the forest, or mushrooms on their salad that came only from the healthiest of forests. Give me anything and I will prove to you that the naturalness of nature is objectively, beautifully, awe inspiring.