The Horizon

I was wondering through the Museum of the North one morning, when I noticed a beautiful painting. The reason that this particular painting caught my eye was the way in which it depicted a beautiful horizon over a forest splattered with greens and yellows and oranges. This forest, spreading outwards, was a gorgeous forest during the fall, the greens from the Evergreen Trees mixing with the yellows and oranges of the rest of the forest, but a simple picture of a forest during the fall isn’t what caught my attention. This was a painting of two worlds, the forest and nature, untouched by anything other than the swaying of the wind and wet of raindrops; this forest was split in two, bisected right across the middle by a thin line of grey stone and metal structures. This building, just peeking up over the tips of the trees, represented the little civilization that existed in this painting. You could see the little cars driving on the road running alongside those drab, banal structures; sharp corners, hard colors, flat, static. This new “Horizon” meandering across this field of trees just seemed so out of place, yet it perfectly fit. The last part of this painting which truly caught my eye was the real “Horizon” beyond the trees and the streak of stone and steel. This “Horizon” was one of imagination, embodied by the mountains which framed the whole picture, mountains capped by clouds of white. The land beyond, the “Horizon” beyond these mountains was a guess, a world yet to be discovered; presenting by its very nature, a world of imagination and adventure.

This world is the reason I loved this painting. The colors, the forest, the streak of grey stone cutting across; all capped off with a world where nothing can be seen, the mountains hidden by the clouds, a world hidden by the mountains. When I saw this and stared at it, I couldn’t help but feel the desire to discover, and imagine, “What is past those mountains?” I wanted to find out, and when I saw those structures, I wanted to find them and see what they were. This painting showed a picture of our world, massive and complex with circles within circles. Then you see the part of our would which we have tamed, the part which we have dissected and examined, researched and analyzed; you then realize how little we actually know about a world designed in such a way that we may have theories that work and are reliable but we will never truly know more than a small fraction of what is around us. The final part of this painting, the mountains of imagination, capped in the snowy clouds mystery, yes I realize that was over poetic and over dramatic; this world is what we will never know in this life, a world where everything and anything that you can imagine could exist. Skyscrapers that reach the moon, tunnels to the Center of the World, the Family we always wanted, the lost dreams and lost hopes we have forsaken as impossible or hopeless; thrown away simply because we aren’t willing to keep on trying. This world of the imagination is the source of the hope and beauty which this painting showed me.

P.S. In case you every get the chance to see this painting, I just wanted to tell you where it was. Walk up the stairs to the second floor and stop three-fourths of the way up, and look out the window. Everything I just described to you is painted across the earth and the sky, and on a clear day it is beautiful. We must never forget the beauty which surrounds us every day and often stares us in the face and we never notice.