Lighthouses.

The Sublime.

When I was in college, I took a class on British Literature. In that class, we read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, some Wordsworth and Keats, and other works by The Romantics and The Transcendentalists. We also talked about "the sublime". Which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is "that quality in nature or art which inspires awe, reverence, or other high emotion; the great beauty of grandeur of an object, place, etc."

Of course, if you're like me and walked away from that definition (and class, honestly), thinking "so, what?", a more palpable way to explain the sublime is that feeling you get on a hike where you just sort of stop to embrace the view, and everything else falls away. Maybe you're seeing the sunlight hit the leaves just right and it fills you with emotion, even moves you to tears. You take a deep breath and you are okay because you are part of this beautiful, grand design. You even forget you're alive for a moment. You are simply consumed by a humbling sense of the wonder and majesty of the natural world.

If you're not into hiking, and therefore don't get the hiking example, here's a few more. Some people feel the sublime the first time they visit Italy, when they look up and see Michelangelo's fresco ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, or when they taste the unmistakable flavor of authentic Italian gelato. Others experience the sublime when they fly over the Grand Canyon, or attend the opera.

Personally, I experience the sublime when I visit lighthouses. Better yet, the experience, or rather the journey, that is tracking down an old lighthouse and driving or hiking up to it for the first time. I'm simply in awe, until that feeling fades, and I have to do it again. And there's definitely something to be said about the fact that I have been to and photographed over 100 lighthouses at this point. I seem to chase that feeling, hoping each time to bottle it up in a picture, for a rainy day. It's cathartic, really. And it's an experience that I'm hopeful to share with you, dear reader, on this little page, on this little blog. So that you, too, can find and feel the sublime in some small facet of your life. Maybe it's hiking, maybe it's a song, maybe it's something you have yet to discover.

Because that's the point of all of this, isn't it? The "human experience". Sharing. Story-telling. Connecting. Finding meaning in everyday life.

You might ask "Mare, isn't this a lot to drop on someone on a Tuesday?" And I'll tell you, it's actually Monday, and of course it is. But we're all romantics, aren't we? We're all searching for something greater than ourselves to reach out to that makes us feel whole, reminds us why we're here. So, why not take a small step toward finding that something, whatever it may be for you, and read this stupid little blog? Maybe you'll find meaning through these little musings, maybe you'll find heartburn. But that's the fun of this little experiment called life, isn't it?