A LOVE LETTER TO THE PNW & IT'S MANY MOODS | Lars Gesing Fine Art

More than anything, I have found, the PNW is a mindset. To thrive here takes mental fortitude. Up here, we embrace the fog and the rain, the rain and the fog.

"I’ve lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me," John Steinbeck wrote in Travels With Charley. "How can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?"

Around here, we see the beauty of the color gray. We know that it makes our rainbows shine so much more brightly. Life in the PNW is one of earned wonder, after all.​​​​​​​ We don't mind a cold wind in our face, so long as we can still keep our eyes open to marvel at Mother Nature's bounty all around us.

There is a special kind of companionship with rain and gray days you'll learn to appreciate in these parts.

As I write these lines, the steady rain of a November morning is falling outside my window. Turns out, it was the invitation I needed to look within, to explore in the crevices of my soul what it is that makes me love the PNW with all my heart, even on gray days, especially on gray days, what inspires me to create timeless Pacific Northwest art inspired by its many moods, and to pour that affinity into a semi-coherent stream of words.

Affection takes time to grow, and such is the gift of rain: Time. 

Time is the currency that helps grow stronger relationships — to both the people and the places we love.

I have the rain to thank for these quiet moments in the presence of flickering candlelight, steaming coffee, my thoughts about relationships, and nothing else. What luxury. 

"The rain illuminates that which the eye cannot see," writes Daniel Firth Griffith, one of those authors whose books moonlight as spiritual counsel.

It's no coincidence that humankind's favorite smell is earth after rain, by the way. Ah, petrichor. It's a PNW delight, another sense engaged, the endorphin-laden scent of happiness, the reward for the stoic and stubborn, the wanderers and wonderers.

Do you really want to argue with me that the presence of rain somehow equals a lesser quality of life? Before you do, take a look at this collection of moody wall art I created around here first.

I told you... the PNW is a mindset.

Deep down, every single one of us has an affinity for soul-piercing rawness, the magnetic purity of experiences taking place outside our comfort zone — and the kind of adventure wall art that celebrates those experiences. It just so happens that most of us nowadays congregate in places designed to make us forget.

Not here. Here, we grab a coat, and we head out the door of our homes that, more often than not, feature a healthy dose of nature-inspired Biophilic interior design.

What is the trait of a true Northwestener? Call us stubborn, but we're just not willing to let life pass us by in the name of comfort.

I still remember the first time my well-traveled parents came to visit me here in Seattle, a long way from the comforts of the life they've worked hard to build back in my native Germany.

It was early March, and the weather was doing early-March things. Undeterred, we went out to the Olympic Peninsula. We stood in awed silence, surrounded by some of the oldest forests on this planet, as we listened to the raindrops fall. (Is there a more surefire way of knowing that you've arrived at a calm place than the moment you can start hearing a single drop of water fall?)

We watched gale-driven waves crash into coastlines that were shaped not by human touch but natural force. We felt the wind and the rain and, periodically, the sun, and then the wind again, and the rain again. And all the while, we felt so very alive.

And when we were comfortable again, we wished we still weren't. 

Such is life in the PNW — elemental.

"I will need time to process this experience," my mom told me before she got on the plane back home.

It's what the raw, unfiltered beauty of the Pacific Northwest does to the soul — rain or shine.

Eventually, of course, every storm subsides. Such is life, and not just around here, but especially around here. And when it does, and summer makes its much-anticipated return, gone with it are the moments of gray melancholy, giving way to a no-holds-barred three-month jubilee.

Summer. Life of pleasures, life of the senses. Up here, it just hits differently. (Don't believe me? Take a look at this collection of my award-winning summer wall art.)

Remember Steinbeck? What good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness.

Or, as the incomparable Annie Dillard put it in Teaching A Stone To Talk: "When winter’s cloud cover vanishes, the naked planet lies exposed to marvels. The heated summer air, ground under cold northern air, becomes lenticular, shaped like a lentil or a lens. When the very air is a lens, how the mind ignites!"

A mind, ignited. I am no fancy branding consultant, but isn't that the unofficial slogan of life in the Pacific Northwest?

It should be, anyway.

Here's to your ignited mind, my friend.

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