Awakening to Landscape

Jochen Bockemühl

From In Context #44 (Fall, 2020) | View article as PDF

When we appreciate the beauty of a landscape today and want to protect it, our idea of beauty is usually based on images relating to earlier conditions of life to which we long to return.

However, beauty “preserved” in the old image does not normally fit in with present-day life styles. Something comes into the picture that is not in accord with the times and we realize that it has been artificially imposed.

It would be quite a different thing if we were to see beauty in the landscape where human goals are in harmony with naturally occurring processes. In this sense, awakening to landscape also means awakening to oneself and to personal responsibility. This is the starting point for a completely new way in which human beings relate to their environment: The decaying environment is perceived as our own inadequate human nature. The seeds for a new life, seeds we can help to develop, will then be found in any place where we become aware that something wants to come into existence that has the quality of wholeness.

How can we relate to the living environment of the landscape in such a way that new beauty may arise?

The countenance of a Jura mountain landscape in Switzerland through the four seasons, drawn from memory: