Cool blue moonlight. A dense silence, playing to the crickets’ ever so faint beats. She emerges from the thicket, and howls AWOOOOOOO! Piercing through the air, it rips apart the silence. The other wolves join her, and the thunderous chorus sends a rush down the spines of the creatures nearby. What are they saying? What if they’re saying WOAOOOOOO?!

Woaoooooo to their lovers, families and friends; to the creatures around – big and beautiful, great and small; to the petals and to the thorns; to the last rays of sunlight and the pastel hues they paint in the sky; to any little star that cares to hear them. What, it didn’t seem like woaoooooo to you? Well you see, wolves aren’t fish, they don’t go to schools, they tend to muddle up their letters. Similar to the exclamation of wonder in our language, the woao is their artistic expression of the beauty that surrounds them.

Our ancestors were possibly also like this, exclaiming to those around. We now call it art, music, poetry – any expression … but it’s essentially the same thing no? The wolf in her howl, the nightingale’s call, the colourful scales of a fish, the deer’s antlers – they’re all communicating, they’re all expressing, this too is art. All creatures are creating art. To us creatures it is work. Work for the weaver bird to construct a beautiful nest, so that a nice young lady may come lay her eggs. He needs it for survival, but he’s creating art. We work to survive, but what if the universe has framed it in such a manner that what is for our survival (I don’t deny it is a matter of survival, and a tough one at that!), ends up being creation of art for the universe.

The universe in herself is beautiful, art of such a nature that we are still grappling to experience, describe, and understand it. William Blake, in ‘Auguries of Innocence’ had written:

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.”

What if the universe exists to create art? Art expressing different ideas, composed of different elements, and from different perspectives. Now what if the universe created living things, so that they’d create art from their own experiences, in their own ways? And pushing this dreamy imagination a little further, what if the universe created conscious beings like us, to create an entirely new level of art? Conscious beings who experience and engage with the world, process it within, and in our unique expressions, add to the understanding and beauty of the universe.

What if that is the meaning? Art, beauty, expression, love, consciousness. That’s what the universe wants. That’s why the world exists the way it does, and maybe why we do too. The wolves have always known it, and have been howling it to the rest of creation. Can you feel it rush down your spine?!

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