Last October I had the pleasure of being on Mackinac Island in northern Michigan for the first time. You probably remember that beautiful place and the majestic Grand Hotel from the 1980’s movie “Somewhere in Time.” Christopher Reeves plays the part of a playwright who falls in love with the picture of a beautiful woman and chooses to leave current time to go back to 1912 to be with her. If you have seen the movie, you remember the beautiful cliffs, the sparkling water of the Straits of Mackinac and the horses and carriages (which are still the only way to get around the island unless one walks. No cars allowed.)

One afternoon during my stay on the Island I was using a narrow dirt path to go from the West Bluff down through Marquette Park to the main street of the village. I had been up on the bluff admiring some of the wonderful old homes from the 19th century with their bay windows, unusual roof lines, and high wooden steps. As I began my walk back to the village the weather turned. What began as a sprinkle turned into a full-blown rain gale before I got back to the hotel. So I was both hurrying and being careful as I walked down the sloping path.

Suddenly I saw up on the bank to my right this tree:

click the image to see a larger view

photo copyright © Elizabeth Harper Neeld

I was stopped in my tracks. Mesmerized. This image seized me. Here was a misshapen ancient tree that was to my eyes one of the most beautiful objects I had ever seen in nature. I noticed all the roots that reached out in every direction to find some purchase in the soil, some way of allowing the tree to hang on to the side of the bank. I saw how massive the tree was yet it hanged on such a precarious perch. I saw all the different colors and hues and play of light surrounding the roots, leaves, and branches of the tree.

As I thought about the tree later and its impact on me, and as I have looked at the picture every day since (I had the image enlarged and framed to hang in our home), I remember a class I took when I was in graduate school. It was a class in aesthetics; and our professor required us to engage in two specific questions: what is beautiful and what is sublime?

We had to read what thinkers had written about these two ideas. Some argue that the two—the beautiful and the sublime–are the same, just a difference in degree and that both give pleasure. Some argue that the sublime is more than beautiful. Some assert that the sublime is pleasurable because it is so ugly that you see the ugly as beautiful.

In the class we had to choose one of these thinkers and write a paper about his ideas. I chose Joseph Addison. Addison said that what makes an image or a scene sublime is that the three pleasures of the imagination are satisfied: greatness, uncommonness, and beauty.

Greatness, uncommonness, and beauty.

Was that what seized me when I saw this amazing Mackinac Island tree? In my assessment, the tree definitely was great. As in great big. As in great surprise. As in great in emotional impact. The tree, too, was, without question, uncommon. Will I ever see a tree like this again? Ordinarily a tree’s roots don’t hang spindle-shanked out in mid-air reaching here, reaching there, twisting here, finding support there. And beauty: to me this was the strangest sort of beauty. Yet beautiful, it was. And not in the way we ordinarily use beautiful or think about beautiful. This tree was beautiful in its ungainly shape, in its oddity, in its very misshapen form. It was beautiful perhaps because it was so strange.

Joseph Addison also said about the kind of beauty that he called sublime required the use of absolute superlatives to describe such a scene or image: words like “unbounded,” “unlimited,” “spacious,” and “greatness.”

Looking at something that strikes one as beautiful and sublime enlarges the very space around us. Life, at least in that moment, is unbounded, unlimited, spacious and great. We are stimulated to think large thoughts, to reflect on deeper subjects. (Is this tree a symbol of tenacity, of adaptation, an image that can become a metaphor for living life itself?) We are taken out of ourselves, at least for the moment. We stand in a kind of awe. It’s like the man who said when he was traveling through the Alps, “Space astonishes.” I could say of my Mackinac Island experience, “Tree astonishes.”

When I shared an early version of this newsletter with a writer friend of mine, he said, “That makes me think about a quote in one of your books…that quote about the three laws of the Aztecs.” I remembered:

The Aztecs had three laws:

Thou shalt not lie.
Thou shalt not be a coward.
Thou shalt acknowledge the wonder.

I had been struck by the sublime on that slippery dirt path on Mackinac Island–by the unbounded, the unlimited, the spacious and the great. You’ve had similar experiences, I know. Perhaps not on Mackinac Island (though you might also have been on that very path yourself) but somewhere. You’ve been surprised by a strange beauty. Awed by a scene for which you really didn’t have the words to describe. Pulled out of your customary ways of looking, to see something amazing or intriguing or so beautiful it almost made you hurt. When we have these kinds of experiences, we, at least for the moment, think bigger thoughts and step outside our customary more defined and limited worlds. We are stopped in our tracks by something strange, beautiful and sublime.

We do acknowledge the wonder.
Love,

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Dr. Elizabeth Harper Neeld offers wisdom and practical insights to anyone whose life is in a time of transition, change, grief and loss of any kind. As an internationally recognized and accomplished consultant, and author of more than twenty books - including Tough Transitions and Seven Choices: Finding Daylight After Loss Shatters Your World - she is committed to work that helps lift the human spirit.