The Fountain of Changi

When we spent the weekend in Singapore, we were planning to find a hotel in town, but one of our friends told us to just use the hotel inside the airport. We did, and the room was small but the bed was queensized and soft, and we had a TV and wifi and shower, and free breakfast, and since our return flight home left at midnight, we didn't have to worry about traveling to the airport late at night

But the brand new Changi airport also has a huge mall, so we could eat and shop. All sorts of food in restaurants (even Korean Pizza and a Turkish Mexican restaurant). What did we eat? I had a hamburger: here in the provinces we only have McD and Jolibee, so a thick burger was wonderful.

But the airport also has an indoor garden with a fountain coming down from the roof: At night the fountain is lit up with various colours and music.




and there is a "skywalk" where you can walk above the garden on a mesh (No, I didn't try it).

Singapore is full of gardens and beauty.

All of this reminded me of Gondolin, with it's towers and fountains.

"...Then did the throng return within the gates and the wanderers with them, and Tuor saw they were of iron and of great height and strength. Now the streets of Gondolin were paved with stone and wide, kerbed with marble, and fair houses and courts amid gardens of bright flowers were set about the ways, and many towers of great slenderness and beauty builded of white marble and carved most marvellously rose to the heaven. Squares there were lit with fountains and the home of birds that sang amid the branches of their aged trees, but of all these the greatest was that place where stood the king's palace, and the tower thereof was the loftiest in the city, and the fountains that played before the doors shot twenty fathoms and seven in the air and fell in a singing rain of crystal: therein did the sun glitter splendidly by day, and the moon most magically shimmered by night.

yes, I know: it should be reminding me of the hidden city of the Emperor of China, but unlike the forbidden city, most of the city gardens, and the airport, are open to one and all.

My point is that, while it is correct for the Pope and the Green types to lash out against excess and imply we should live a green life in yurts eating bread and water (or here in Asia, rice and tea), that if you stress only simplicity and helping the poor, (which, by the way, has been my life's work) as the way to serve the Lord, you are impoverishing God's reality: because God is not only the Healer and the comforter (and the Father and the priest and the shepherd): he is also the great artist and creator of beauty.

So some people are gifted the vocation as co-creators: God's nature is full of variety and beauty, so too men who are given the vocation of artist, musician, technician, engineer, writer, etc. so they too can create beauty that remind one of the beauty of heaven. As Tolkien wrote:

Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, 'twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we're made.

LINK to Roger Scruton video on why beauty matters