water worn rocks

I'm at Hampi, in the Indian state of Karnataka, and this morning I have come to an area they call the waterfall. It's a part of the river where normally there are extensive cascades of water. But this year, the river is almost dry. There's barely a trickle. And that's left exposed a huge area of water worn rocks.

And standing here in one of the gorges, I'm loving the shape of these rocks. Everywhere I look, tt seems there's a Henry Moore sculpture. It's gorgeous. Each rock is unique in its shape, its form. And yet the whole scene has a natural coherence. It's a great work of art.

And looking at all these curves, it makes me realise how much of man-made stuff is based on straight lines and flat surfaces. I guess it's practical. It makes things easy to build. It's useful that the top of a table is flat. It's easy to hang things on the walls of a house because they are vertical and flat. This obsession with straight lines is a phenomenon unique to human beings.

Nature loves these artistic, creative, curvaceous forms. Looking around now, I cannot see a single straight line, or planar surface. Every face of every rock is curved. The edges of the rocks are curved. And there's something so beautiful about this curvaceous world, this natural world. In this case, carved by water over thousands of years. But really we could say the whole of nature, the whole of the natural world, is built of these curves. It makes human design seem rather impoverished in comparison. It's as if our over active minds, that want to control everything, can convince themselves that they are doing so by putting everything in straight lines. But it's ugly, it's dead, unattractive, compared to the curves of these water worn rocks.