Health and Beauty

I rarely try to vividly describe nature or wildlife, because I’ve found that I don’t have much of a vocabulary when it comes to writing about non-human things. I’d probably inflict injustices upon nature if I tried, and call a coniferous tree a deciduous one.  

At Tai Po, however, I feel like I have a moral obligation to write about the environment. I’m surrounded by a beauty that demands to be talked about. If I can’t identify the wildlife around me concretely, at least I can describe them abstractly. Pictures help too. 

The photo above was taken on one side of the campus looking toward the other. Our academic buildings are embraced on all sides by mountains. Standing here, I feel shielded by the broad arms of mountain ranges hugging our school. If I looked further outward, I could see small trails of houses snaking across the hills of some mountains. The houses weren’t perched on or dug into the mountains, but seemed to blend into them, like they were made for each other. 

Yes that was a humble brag about how early I woke up for a run, rest assured it didn’t happen again the next day.

This is a photo of the sunrise I took while on a run on Thursday morning. It took some discipline to run straight while the sunrise was fighting for my attention. I compromised and struck a middle ground between my health and the sun’s beauty by stopping to take some photos. The sun rising over the mountains reminded me of the old dust jacket of The Hobbit.