Design by Nature

For design consult Nature. Man, however skillful he might be with his brushes and paint pots, his T-squares and calipers, his tools and machines, has never been able to equal the grandiose, the majestic, or the delicacy of pattern that represents good mother Nature in her every day chores. Has there ever been a man with fingers so nimble as to construct a snowflake? Could all the men and machines on earth dig a Grand Canyon and embellish it with such radiant coloration? Has any artist ever been sufficiently inspired to catch the resplendency of a western sunset on canvas?

What sculptor, however sharp his chisels, has ever equalled the elegant enormity of the pinnacles of Bryce? Idle questions, perhaps, to be answered only in the negative because man, despite his many attributes, has never attained the god-like and only in the works of Nature do we find the true and inspired works of God.

The tools of Nature are many. There is the sun, the implacable sun. There is the wind, the relentless wind. There is the sky. There is the heat of summer and the cold of winter, the rain, and the weather. There is the alchemy of the soil that creates the peculiar pattern of leaf and flower, the sheen of a blade of grass, the spine arrangement of the lowliest of cactus plants. There is one of the most powerful tools of all, a drop of water which joins with its fellows to form a rivulet, a stream and then a river. In the end it is the drop of water that carved canyons and shaped and reshaped the very face of the earth: But the most important of all of Nature's tools is time fleeting seconds that became hours, and hours that turned to days, days into years, the years into centuries, the centuries into aeons that began when inner forces of the earth exploded and, with God's will, lifted the world out of the depths of the sea and when all of Nature's tools were put to work to design the planet as we know it now, a planet difficult to improve upon.

The tools of Nature are busy tools. They never stop because Nature is a diligent and patient artist, with endless tomorrows at her disposal. The basic patterns of Nature change little in a man's life, but they change, nevertheless. The canyons get a little bit deeper, the stone face of rocky cliffs a little bit smoother, aged trees bend a little more before the demands of the wind.

Nature is at her best in her simpler patterns. Perhaps, to mortal man, these are more understandable than the works of grander scale. Some of the commanding designs byNature, such as a mighty mountain range, are too large to be encompassed by the mind of ordinary man. But that is of no moment for there is a treasure-trove of exquisite designs all about us, soul filling to contemplate.

Even a small child will gaze in wonderment at an icicle, a field of wild flowers, the shape of a tree, the ripples in a pool of water reflecting the clouds and the sky, the wind whisperings in a sand dune, the mass of gold that covers the ground when autumn has pulled all the leaves off a tree. All of us, even the most unobserving, will pause to study a cloud formation, the evanescent rainbow, the shadows cast by trees as the sun sinks towards end of day. A single leaf is a miracle of design. In fact, there is never ugliness in Nature's work. Always there is beauty, always something to admire and to wonder about.