Delight

In that light, it is a delight...a wonder to study and to learn to love some small part of what God must have loved when he made a lizard. To delight with him in its scales, color, spines and forms. And to me, God is saying "you like that? me too!" 

- Nicholas Kole

One of my favorite memes is the German Cola Kid. As attempting to explain any meme is a fools errand, you should probably watch this animated version to see what it's about. But in the event you don't have time for that, I will now attempt to explain the meme. In the video, the aforementioned "Cola Kid" excitedly relates how his mom has just allowed him to drink cola and play Fortnite, the combination of which is enough to send him in a joyous YIPEEE!!

Kids, exemplified by the Cola Kid, are able to find joy and excitement in the most mundane of things. For me, it wasn't cola and Fortnite, but it was frozen pizza, being old enough to stay home alone, and watching Cartoon Network. As a kid, it didn't take much to have a good day, or to be obsessed with trains, dinosaurs, and sea creatures. (Isn't it crazy how deeply kids fall in love with things most adults never care about?) I think this open wonder and delight towards the world is one of the first things to go as we grow older. It was for me, at least. As we see more things, even incredible things become normal, and we forget that they were ever unexpected in the first place. As we see more broken and sorrowful things, our open delight in pockets of beauty and brilliance is replaced with a defensive cynicism.

As I've recently been thinking about What I Want to Say With My Art, I keep coming back to this idea of delight.  I think about the way God delights in us, His children. And the way He looked at His creation and said that it was good. Because God didn't have to make the world so dang beautiful. He didn't have to make a world with jellyfish, and sandstone arches, and the color blue, and good pizza. But He did. And I think that gives us the permission to get excited. Childishly, foolishly excited. In our art (our writing, drawing, cooking, all of it) we can lash out in unbridled admiration for this flower or that person or this cola and say yes. this is good. taste and see! That, at least, is what I want to do. To, in the words of artistic theologian Robert Capon, "look the world back to grace."

For me, the aquarium is one of the best places to practice this habit. Here is gathered, at great cost and human effort, the strangest and most majestic forms of life on earth. And our whole mission is simply to look at them. But the looking, we find, is difficult. We're anxious to move on to the next exhibit, so we delegate our looking to a quick photo and keep walking. 

I think the designers of Georgia Aquarium particularly understood this tension. For all its beautiful theming and chaotic, lawless atrium, the building's most impressive feature is a simple dark room facing a massive wall of water. Rays and sharks more than twice my height effortlessly sail across its cerulean surface and back into the murky distance. To me, it's the brontosaurus scene of Jurassic Park, only real. Finally, as an adult, I'm confronted with things I haven't seen, on a scale I cannot understand.  In response, the Georgia Aquarium offers me a large, carpeted step. I sit down, pull out my Ipad, and begin drawing. Drawing convinces my adult brain that I'm not wasting my time, so that my kid brain can say again, "cool shark. big shark." More than making a "good drawing," I now want to capture what's delightful about "shark." I wonder if what you find delightful may be entirely different. But regardless, I think we have a lot to learn from each other. 

So get painting, dancing, writing, and let me know!

Thanks for your readership :)

-dh