It is no secret that fall is the time to head to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee, where you will find a mosaic tile of natural deciduous trees like the red maple, sugar maple, white oak, and tulip polar trees, and you will see an autumn cascade in the Little River Canyon. Nature, as we ordinarily use the term, means the order of physical existence which forms our environment, the objective or external aspect of our own lives, the World of animals and plants and minerals, surrounded with the sea and sky. Nature means this, and is supposed to be majestic and beautiful. The most important imaginative impact that physical nature has on us is a sense of alienation. Nature feels intelligent, moral, and peaceful. It is natural for humans to also be moral, civilized, and socially disciplined; it is unnatural to live like animals. Humans are supposed to possess innocence, chastity—the nature of God. The Great Smoky Mountains—they are the very definition of a forest, and one of America’s most visited parks. Mammoth Cave, which is located in the Great Smoky Mountains is the longest cave in the World, with more than 360 miles of mapped passages. Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, which protects a simple, yet beautiful landscape that once covered the Midwest.

  The nature God had originally planned for man was that of the Golden Age or the Garden of Eden: this was lost at the Fall of man, but in some measure is recreated by the disciplines of civilization, morality, religion, and the arts. Man is subject to death, and on the physical level of nature there can be no more natural event than death. Yet death was not part of the order originally planned for man, and in that context, death is unnatural, sin even more so. The circling of the immortal heavenly bodies in the sky is the most eloquent symbol of the order and harmony of the nature that was originally intended for humans. The traditional, music of the celestial spheres symbolized a harmony that is recreated by human music. Music in God has its traditional Platonic meaning of the musical arts, which include poetry (as distinct from the technical arts of painting and architecture), and it also has regularly attacked to it the pun on the word harmony which makes it a symbol of the original order of nature established for man before the Fall. God consistently uses music to represent the order and balance that ought to exist in both individual and social forms of human life. Music is indispensable in restoring sanity to the insane, health to the sick; even life itself to those like Thaisa, have temporarily lost it.

 Harmony disciplines the soul, and the human mind, symbolizing the hidden sympathy between man and nature evoked by music and poetry. The art is man’s nature, the World of art and music and nature are identical on the human level, natural life goes hand in hand with proficiency in music and poetry. The settings of my photographs are usually designed to suggest the Garden of Eden or the Golden Age. In ordinary life the fact that humans essentially belong to a World with a human shape is symbolized by the garden, the cultivated form of nature. When cultivated, the garden belongs to the human level of nature; when left uncultivated, it relapses to the ordinary physical level. The garden is used as an image of human society, to appease God. Evergreen trees symbolize immortality. In Contrast, Deciduous broadleaf trees are dominant at moist, temperate latitudes, where winters are not severe.  As we move out of tropical rainforest, we enter regions where temperatures remain mild, but rainfall dwindles during part of the year. Here we find tropical deciduous forests, in which many trees drop some or all of their leaves during the pronounced dry season. The monsoon forests of India and southeastern Asia also has such trees. Farther north, in the temperate zone, rainfall is even lower, and temperatures become cold during the Winter.

 Here are regions of temperate deciduous forest. Conditions do not favor decomposition as much as they do in the humid tropics, but nutrients are conserved in the accumulated litter on the forest floor, which helps to keep moisture in the soil and fertilize it, but in the cities and suburbs, if the leaves collect in the street, or of the roof of your house, they can cause flooding and water damage to houses and roof. Nonetheless, all trees are beautiful. At one time, deciduous broadleaf forest stretched across northeastern North America in Sacramento, California, Europe, and eastern Asia. Ash, beech, birch, chestnut, elm, and deciduous oak trees dominated the forests, which largely disappeared as land was cleared for farming. Some species introduced to North America brought diseases that wiped out nearly all chestnuts and many American elms. Without rain, Earth would turn into Mars, and the planet would burn up, terminating all life. Today, maple and beech forests predominate in the Northeast. They give way to oak-hickory forests father west, which grade into oak woodlands and tall grass prairies of the Midwest.

 The God addressed the gardener as Adam’s likeness, and talks of Even and the serpent, but this garden is not Eden: it is the ground that Adam had to till after the Fall of Man, and the Queen’s attempt to curse it is useless because the general curse of nature is already there. This nature is the physical World. This is the upper or human level of nature. Humans are nice and kind and smart and gentle and caring and social, but monogamous. The natural state of man, then, is a civilized and ordered state because man is made in the image of God, and God is perfect, therefore, so is man. Geometry is one of my favorite courses.  The King is the less, he is a symbol and the more he is an incarnation of nature. Nature above art in that respect, like poets, are born not made. Murder in the order of nature, which lets in a destructive force, represented by the tempest-raising witches, and by the prodigies and portents of the murder itself, will lead to your own inevitable destruction. However, no king can actually restore mankind to the Golden Age; all around human society is still the lower physical order of nature. People on the lower levels of human nature are persistent danger of severely hurting self or others; or president inability to maintain minimal personal hygiene; or serious suicidal acts. They are repeatedly violent, maintains almost no personal hygiene and have made potentially lethal suicide attempts. Are manically excited, smears own feces, and is either incoherent or mute. Speech is illogical, obscure, or irrelevant.

 This order moves in circles, imitating the stars in their courses, but it cyclical movement is an amoral force, and it operates by necessity rather than by intelligence and freedom. It produces not only the cycles of prosperity and decline that is called the four seasons on the wheel of fortune, Earth. Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park is just over an hour from Washington, D.C., but a World away. The park contains more than 500 miles of hiking trails, including 101 miles of the Appalachian Trail, but its most famous feature is Skyline Drive, a scenic byway that funs 105 miles north and south along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. If you are planning a trip in the fall, aim for the middle of the week, as the route is usually packed with cars most fall weekends. In life, some have mostly bad experiences because they are at lower levels of functioning. At the higher wheel of fortune, the highest parts of your life are represented by superior function, in a wide range of activities. No symptoms. Life’s problems never seem to get out of hand. Person is sought out by others because of his or her many good skills and qualities. People at the lower end of the natural cycle will experience a lot of chaos of the storm. Happy people move upward with the ascending cycle, people who are kind and honest and hardworking.

 In a way, history cannot do, a reintegration with the higher level of nature. The only paradises are the paradises we take care of. The natural head of state; because of the conception of nature involved, he does what is required of him. If he does not, society’s natural order throws up another natural force. A natural force that under certain conditions inevitably makes its appearance. Because of his de facto authority, and society’s need of order, becomes de jure as well, a fact borne witness to by Sacramento’s dramatic transfer of loyalties to him. Still this transfer of power to William Randolph Hearst does not illustrate a breaking of the connection between human society and the cosmic order, and consequently the deposing of William becomes impotent, all the architectures, art, magic of music and poetry becomes attacked to him, because of the fact that he shares the same name as a great head of state. Now he begins to bear the obloquy of responsibility, but neither his effort to dissociate himself from the Winchester nor his dream of going into retirement can give his crown the glamour that, in history, only a lost cause can have. William Randolph Hearst, with his tremendous energy and egoism, is very well adjusted to nature as an amoral force, the aspect of nature that has been intensified by William Wirt Winchester’s accession.

The Winchester Mystery House

 The Winchester Mystery House is the key to many answers. But be careful, for on the day that you come for a tour, your mind will be open, and your life will be changed forever! https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/