While I was hiking alone at Lassen several years ago, I stumbled upon a grassy clearing at the base of a mountain ridge, and in the middle was a tree, perhaps a juniper. I couldn’t help but approach this tree. Touching it, I thought: this is my shrine. I stepped back and sat on the soft, silty ground, and after some time, I stood up, dusted myself off, and left. As I left, I looked back at the grassy clearing, and thought: this is my sanctuary. I cannot explain why this place had such a power over me in that moment. I dream of going back to it, and embracing the tree once again. I dream of taking the people I love and care about there to the clearing, and telling them: this is my sanctuary. I imagine they’ll look at me like a crazy person.
Although, at this point, I’m not even sure where it is. If I had taken a picture of it, I would show you. But I didn’t. It looks like a grassy clearing with a tree. You can imagine it.
For decades, I’ve studied beauty in music. I’ve tried to wrap my head around harmony, melody, and orchestration, and make sense of formulas that decide what beauty is and what it isn’t. I’ve composed things I think are beautiful, and I will rationalize: “Well, there is this tension and this resolution, and the patterns of tension and resolution, by either fulfilling or subverting expectations, create beauty and meaning.” But I’ll still stare at my own work, and wonder: why?
Why does it work? Why does it fail?
Why is it that when I listen to the opening passage of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, I get chills? Sometimes I wonder if it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. It’s thirty seconds of chords, played by clarinets and bassoons, and it sends me to an indescribable place. Whenever I want to think about how little I understand music, I think about the beginning of Romeo and Juliet, and I realize I know nothing. I can’t explain it. I can’t explain why it awes me so much. Could Tchaikovsky explain it? Or was he as mystified by his music as I am?
Do the tones bring back idyllic childhood memories or something? I don’t think so. That would be too easy.
This last summer, I went backpacking in the mountains out in the Great Basin – an island of life and majesty surrounded by plateaus and desert valleys. When we came upon a meadow of corn lily growing on the forest edge, in a slope of streams below the mountain ridges, I sat beneath a tree and tried to understand it. I wanted to wrap my head around what was going on – not what it was – but what I felt about it, and why.
Why was this meadow beautiful?
Meadows are buggy, marshy, awful places. You can’t eat a meadow. You don’t survive in a meadow. Why do we like them?
And the more I tried to wrap my head around it, the more frustrated I became.
Why do we like snow-capped mountains and desert vistas?
Why do we like the red leaves of Autumn?
Why do we like flowers?
Why do we gawk at the stars in the sky?
Why do we look out over the vast, endless ocean, awestruck and dumbfounded?
What is so sublime about an alpine lake?
I don’t get it. I can’t get it. And the fact that I can’t get it drives me insane.
There I sat under a tree at the edge of a meadow losing my mind over not understanding why I found a meadow beautiful. My psychotic breakdown was imminent. The meadow was making me angry, teasing me, mocking me with all its corn lily-laden grandeur. I hated how much I loved the meadow. I pride myself on understanding things, or at least understanding that understanding is possible. I find comfort in the idea that everything can be understood. Wait, is that a comforting idea? Or is it a horrible one? My life’s work has always been one of seeking understanding. Once I understand the world, I will have triumphed.
But this meadow, making a mockery of my intellect – if I can’t understand a meadow, what worth am I? What can I, who doesn’t understand a meadow, possibly have to offer society?
And then finally, as my frustration peaked, as I beat the forest floor with my fists and sifted through the dirt with my fingers, I told myself, “Maybe you don’t have to understand.”
It was the greatest burden ever lifted.
I don’t need to understand.
I don’t have to understand the meadow!
I don’t have to understand flowers, or autumn leaves, or Tchaikovsky, or junipers!
I don’t have to ask why the starry sky is beautiful. I can accept: it just is.
And yet, that relinquishing of responsibility, or self-value, or ego – it’s so damned hard. It’s so damned painful. Many of you probably even find this struggle absurd. Maybe you gave up on understanding long ago, you lucky bastards.
Why do I cling so strongly to a need for understanding? Is it a selfish desire? Is it so I can hope to reproduce beauty? For music, perhaps yes, but for nature? I can’t forge mountains. I can’t cap peaks with snow. I can’t control the wildflowers or the changing seasons. Why is it so important to me?
Why is understanding so important to me?
I guess… I guess I just won’t understand.
And maybe that’s okay.
Maybe my self-worth isn’t connected to understanding.
And maybe… maybe that’s how the world will stay magical for me.
Doctor Quack 
Long ago, I came to the understanding (which I am tempted to put in quotes) that a significant part of the beauty of music—or anything—is that there is always something about it that is beyond understanding. I am capable of understanding a great deal about a piece of music, but there is always something I cannot and never will understand. I understand a lot about the music I am writing, but there is always something that defies understanding, even by me, the creator of the music. It isn’t the mechanics of how a Bach fugue works that makes it beautiful, though that is part of its beauty, and the fact that those with no technical understanding of the same fugue can be moved by it is proof to me that the music’s ability to move us deeply is beyond our understanding—and blessedly so. It is some kind of magic, and I am content to understand that I will never quite understand what that is.
The things we think we understand, we often manipulate to submit to our will or way, crushing out the meaning and nearly destroying them. The things we don’t have any control over – those are the things that remain pure, awesome, magical, and beyond the understanding. I’m glad life provides both for contrast; I’ll forever be in awe of softly falling snow that starts out of nowhere and leaves as silently as it begins.