Abstractions: Heirlooms of Earth

Last Updated on September 28, 2017 by Patrick

Talent is always conscious of its own abundance, and does not object to sharing.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Many have said that my country, Romania, is rich with minerals. I’d say that if there is richness in the air, in the water, in the earth (crop fields, forests and all) there is richness in the soil as well as in the rocks. And yes, I’ve seen something amazing this past summer. I’ve seen the heirlooms of Earth in forms of small rocks on a river bed, with all the colors of the rainbow. I was amazed by their richness and abundance, resembling them with lots of coins of various shapes and sizes.

Such variety of details, such depths, I’ve seen! The amazing thing is the colors. They were like crystallized stars, shattered and minced like breadcrumbs and skattered all over the place. They were in a place abundant with water. And where there is water abundance, there is plant abundance, and soon animal abundance as well. First you create forms, then you create movements.

But I think that those mountains are full of basalt, andesite and iron ores, because of the bluish, greenish, brownish colours. I’ve seen red, orange and yellow as well. I took nothing home, though I was wondering if it’s any gold there.

I could see these colors only when the Sun cast its rays upon them. Otherwise, they were all dark gray to brown. These color abstractions were highly detailed and I thought that I need not to resemble them with anything intellectually real, so to say, because if I were to think abstract, I needed to see the abstract in the real. I saw coins from the merely wet alluvial rocks is all.

The resemblance with something we call real was in the fact that we, humans, too share the same abstract pattern of a multitude of coins in a chest from the medieval past of the noble folk. They kept their heirlooms in tight places, gathered in chests and coffers so to symbolize abundance, richness and all. But their value was the one their masters gave them, nothing more. Symbolic is all.

I have noticed the fact that the physical world is merely archetypal, full of models in many forms and sizes. They mean something as well as we do. But what gives us value is not the form, but the essence within. Not the thoughts but the presence within. Who we are gives us value. And this is a question we cannot answer with intellectual words, but with what we do, with our heritage.

We can keep our coins in another abstract form called a trunk, a chest, a cupboard drawer, a piggy bank or what have you, but the minerals these are made of are already valuable in themselves: their colors are star like.

Mankind started to replace these values with our own manmade a few thousands of years ago. Since then we have been descending and descending still we are. We even seem to have gotten lost and know not what to do. But again, Nature reminds us of what we used to do before this transgression. She reminds us of our natural abilities so we can share them as currencies. These are our money when anything else fails.

But it is not money to blame, but who uses is it, how we use it and why. We seem to want to punish ourselves because we think badly of us. This empties our inner treasuries extremely fast that nothing remains but the need to sleep, to gather our forces so we can still go on, so we can still live. I find this amuzing now more then ever, because poverty and misery doesn’t exist. Mother Nature always takes good care of her children. So why the worry?

The rocks have beautiful colors. Tree leaves have beautiful colors as well. Animals and people too. We live in a world full of color. All else is personal details one may choose to believe in whenever, as it doesn’t really matter.

Colors are spirits, photons of light…