Light and Dark

(The following was written during my last weekend home while at my Dad's fishing cottage in Northern Wisconsin)

I am a firm believer in the fact that there is beauty in almost everything. I believe it's what God intended. At least I think that's what he meant by the whole "and it was good" thing in Genesis.

With that said, there are so many times while I am driving down the road, hitting a softball, or sitting silent in the yard that I see, experience, or hear things that strike me, sometimes odly, as beautiful. This weekend was no different. Or maybe it was.

There are many breathtaking scenes in this country. No one can deny the splendidness of a setting sun over the towering apendages known as the Rocky Mountains, or the complete awe that overtakes one while looking over the vast deep that is the Grand Canyon and the unexplainable belief that you could clear it in a single bound if you got a big enough running start. Even the deserts, with their millions of gallons of sand, poured out by God's dump truck and moved through the ages by the shovel of time, can inspire countless souls in ways than can never fully be explained. But there's a place even grander than the Grand canyon, more breathtaking than the Rocky Mountains, and more inspiring than the western deserts. It is an area located North of America's Heartland, East of the marshes of the Dakotas, and West of the Great Lakes. It lies nestled South of the boundry waters, dotted by hundreds of lakes and thousands of trees, giving shelter to some of God's most prescious creations. Heaven, you ask? Close. The Northwoods of Wisconsin.

I spent the past weekend in this area, and could not help but see the beauty. Although here, beauty isn't just seen. Here, beauty is so apparant it drips off your skin like hot wax rolls down a burning candle. You feel it hang heavy in the air as the smell of pine tar mixes with lake water for a natural calogne that would make some entrepeneur rich should he be able to harness the smell. Wherever you go, there it is. It's impossible to hide fromit. It seeks you out like an early morning fog on the prowl for every bit of open water on a secluded bay. The water, as clean as your conscience after a random act of kindness, beckons you disturb it's glass top while the treetops lead the loons in the tenor melody of nature's song. With every turn on the broken roads that desperately need refinishing, wild turkeys and new realizations greet you, proffessing that this is truly God's country. And whenever you stop dead in your tracks to take in yet another postcard panoramic, the wind whispers soft affirmations in your ears, confirming your belief that what you are seeing could not get any better.

It's times like these I wonder why I ever left. New York City is nothing like the picture I have just immortalized with words. But then something C.S. Lewis talks about pops into my head. Lewis notes that if we don't have the pain, we can never appreciate the happiness or joy life offers. If you think about it, it makes so much sense. We only know x because of its opposite, y. Or rather, we more fully understand x when y is present. Think about it this way, we can't fully know/understand light without dark, for if there were no darkness, light would just be that everpresent ora that never went away. But because we experience dark, we know how bright, beautiful, and necessary light is. New York City is my dark. If not for NYC, I would never know the light--the beauty--that is the Northwoods of Wisconsin.

So thank you NYC. Your concrete caves have helped me understand what true beauty is.