People collect things. This can happen with intention or sheer accumulation. My mother collected tea cups and had them displayed all around her house. It always made for an easy Christmas or birthday gift. Her friend collected thimbles which I always carried back from a trip to add to her the display case she had needed to purchase to house these tiny treasures. I admit to collecting stones and shells…inexpensive reminders of places that have etched themselves on my heart. At one point I had started collecting small pitchers and have still purchased one or two even after I decided that I was heading down the road of needing to buy a piece of furniture to display them and wanted to nip that prospect in the bud.

Last week I was searching for some materials I need for an upcoming retreat I have agreed to help lead. That’s when I realized that I, too, have a collection. I collect poems. In files. Between the pages of books. Inside my calendar and those of years past. In small stacks that can be found inside a desk drawer. Tiny pieces of paper with the poet’s words stashed into places where I will find them again. Just when I need them. And this says nothing about the actual books of poetry that line my bookshelves and sit on available table tops. Poems that have been read or written for a particular event or worship service or within a facebook post or in a magazine. I have held onto them with a collector’s mind and heart…and grip.

Looking through one file marked simply, “Poems”, I became lost in the wash of words. I could no longer remember from where the particular poems had come. I only know that I had decided that I simply could not live without these words…and those…and especially these very specific ones. Tucked among them all was this poem by Catherine Barnett:

Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more.
Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know.
Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord 
to keep it from fraying?
Not the man who called my life a debacle, 
a word whose sound I love.
In a debacle things are unleashed.
Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary.
I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate, 
the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing. 
They don’t use words, but they can be said to love. 
They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another tree.
And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing
stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect 
or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare, 
to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.
Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth
and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.

I am not sure how this poem came to me or what was going through my mind…or my life…that caused me to add these words to my collection. It could have been the word ‘debacle’. If nothing else it is one of those words that just feels good in your mouth to say regardless of its meaning. It could have been because its title, “Epistemology” took me back to my seminary days when, like the word suggests, I was in the pursuit of all kinds of knowledge. 

These days dedicated to living my retirement with some manner of intention, I find I have more questions that answers and am more fascinated by words than ever before. This is a strange surprise of age. Yet I find I love the questions and the words that connect and the learning that results. (Life’s debacle…things are unleashed.) 

But if I allow myself to unravel the reason for the poem’s presence in my collection file, I am sure it had to do mostly with the trees and their communication and the notion of their loving. The ways in which they send sweetness to the root of suffering like a mother bakes cookies or adds sugar to milk to soothe the illness of her children. And the ways in which they stubbornly grow through obstacles and will not be deterred by wire or stone in an effort to connect and speak that love into the world. 

“Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.” I am grateful to the poet for affirming my conversations with trees, birch or otherwise. My heart is particularly full these days with love for the trees that are showing such devotion to beauty and letting go and waking us all up. Over the weekend I was witness to humans standing, simply standing, in awe at the color and the majesty of what autumn speaks through these grounded oracles. 

My big little mouth wanted to shout praise and joy at being alive and connected to these great teachers. Me, a birch among birches, a black walnut among others, a maples among them all.

“I’m so glad to live in a world where there are Octobers.”
Lucy Maud Montgomery, Ann of Green Gables.

October. Last week it dawned on me that October is kind of the Wednesday of the seasons. Even though it is the tenth month, it feels like the middle of the week…hump day. The glow of summer is moving into memory. Much like a weekend that has not yet been fully planned, the fullness of winter lives only in the imagination. For those of us who live in the northern hemisphere and in the midwest, October is the month that can feel like we are suspended. Some days are warm enough for short sleeves. Others require gloves and sometimes a hat. And of course there are those who live in the before and the not-yet, wearing shorts and a warm, fleece jacket. 

All seasons, all months, bring a definitive kind of light. October brings its own special golden glow that bathes trees full of surprising color which spills onto our floors inviting us to think about embracing a feline nature. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to crawl into the sunlight moving slowly, ever so slowly, through the window and across the floor? That action would also help stifle the message of wonderment about how dirty the windows have become and the urging to wash them before the snow flies. 

For those of us who rise early, there is also the darkness that has crept into the morning hours. No longer is there the greeting of pink-tinged morning light and the sound of birds trumpeting a wake up call. With windows closed and darkness lingering longer and longer, we are reminded that a shift is happening and we are wise to stay awake to its invitation. As the author A. A. Milne writes: “Yet, I can face the winter with calm. I suppose I had forgotten what it was really like. I had been thinking of the winter as a horrid wet, dreary time fit only for professional football. Now I can see other things—crisp and sparkling days, long pleasant evenings, cheery fires. Good work shall be done this winter. Life shall be lived well. The end of the summer is not the end of the world. Here’s to October…”

Yes. Here’s to October. There are places in our world where it seems like ‘the end of the world’. Their world as they know it. In these days bathed in changing light and leaves that show themselves as the artist of limb and trunk, we can hold those places and those people in our hearts and, if we are praying people, our prayers. And we can toast October with the hope that it sends us gently into a winter that might offer a calm. For all the people. For all the places.

Three generations back
my family had only

to light a candle
and the world parted.

Today, Friday afternoon,
I disconnect clocks and phones.

When night fills my house
with passages,

I begin saving
my life.
~Marcia Falk

Last Sunday I began my morning as I usually do. After reading the paper, I sat down to watch CBS Sunday morning. I have come to think of this as my pre-church tailgating…coffee made, breakfast on a tray, settled into my comfy chair, I fill the 90 minutes before heading out for worship with this show filled with mostly feel good, inspiring stories. People doing good things for other people. Artists making art. Musicians making music. Kind words and some beautiful, colorful images of mandalas that offer an ‘amen’ at the end of every story. 

At some point of the show, my refreshments consumed, I picked up the needlework I had been working on the night before and began stitching. “You’ll have to pick those stitches out with your nose on Judgment Day.”, my Mother’s voice echoed in my head. This was something she would say if I began to sew on a Sunday. Sundays were not for sewing, or working in the yard, or going to the movies, or any other task that could be done on the other six days of the week. It was a message that came through loud and clear and while said with a certain tongue-in-cheek tone, it was not to be argued with.

That much-loved voice in my head, the voice that I don’t have the privilege to hear in real time anymore has stayed with me all week. I am sure my Mom did not literally believe this. And certainly, I don’t think the Creator of the Universe is much concerned with whether or not I move a needle through fabric on Sunday or any other day. But the intention behind her reprimand carries truth and wisdom: The importance of setting aside time for sabbath, for rest, renewal and honoring the Sacred keeps us in a balance that can move the world along in a gentler, more thoughtful way. In the pace of the world, when not only days but light and darkness gets blurred into one long opportunity for working harder and longer hours, the practice of sabbath…stopping, slowing down… calls to us from nearly all faith traditions and from a simple understanding of how to remain healthy. Even in retirement, I find myself packing days fuller than need be and to what end?

This all led me back to a gem of a book I have returned to over and over. Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal and Delight in Our Busy Lives by Wayne Muller. It is a classic and yet, as most classics do, it finds ways to offer new insights given the passage of time and all that has happened in life since it was last perused. I thumbed through looking at the places I had underlined(a character flaw I refuse to give up) and wondered what I had been living, thinking when those words grazed my mind. As I flipped through I came upon the chapter that discussed the lamentation of many as to the decline of morality and values. Muller argues that this all needs to be seen as both individual and communal. It is in our valuation of time and how we live it that the answer can be found: “All these ‘lost’ values are human qualities that require time. Honesty, courage, kindness, civility, wisdom, compassion-these can only be nourished in the soil of time and attention, and need experience and practice to come to harvest.” 

I like to believe that my Mother’s attention to setting aside the kind of time we did on Sundays was meant to sow the seeds of these ways of walking in the world…honesty, courage, kindness, civility, wisdom, compassion. And certainly as we look around our country and our world, these all seem to be on rocky ground, don’t they? I wonder what might happen if we gave more of any day to nurturing the soil of those seeds. What kind of harvest might we reap?

My Mother was full of all kinds of sayings that she sprinkled through the conversation of the day. Some were funny and have become the kinds of quips grandkids remember and we all cherish. Others were meant to shape my brothers and me and remind us of the stock from which we sprang. An all time favorite when one of us was upset or anxious about something we had little control over was “A hundred years from now you’ll never know the difference.” 

We may not, Mom. But if we can slow down and create time to nourish the best within us, we just might save not only ourselves but pave a path of peace and goodness for the generations to come.

The fog comes on
little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor
and city on
silent haunches 
and then moves on.
~Robert Frost

There is something about fog. I am a lover of this meteorological phenomenon. Perhaps it is the Celtic blood running deep within that is drawn to those mornings when there is a veil that seems to hang over the arrival of the day much like a good Scottish moor. Perhaps it is my dramatic nature that finds the romance in the shadows the mist creates. Whatever it is, I always find a foggy, visually complicated start to the day touches something deep in me.

A few weeks ago now, I drove early on a Saturday to the St. Paul Farmer’s Market, a weekly ritual if I can make it happen. At the top of the High Bridge as it crosses the Mississippi River I encountered the gift of fog moving lazily over the road in front of me, drawing me toward a horizon I could not see. The road simply seemed to float into a Brigadoon-like land I was being called toward. It was so beautiful, so mesmerizing! Driving along the river road the familiar houses and buildings appeared and then disappeared as the wind moved the misty presence this way and that, taking new forms as it shifted. I pulled over to get a better view of…things I couldn’t really see but knew were there. There was a magic in it all on what good have been a regular, ordinary Saturday morning.

Every time I experience fog I think of how it is both a real weather-related, scientifically understandable fact of nature and yet is also metaphor. A metaphor that is a kind of teaching tool for all humans. How many times has the fog of a life experience cautioned us to slow down, be present to what is right in front of us? How many times have we walked in a kind of fog not knowing what lies at the end of the road, beyond that bend? These foggy times can be brought on by any number of things…anxiety, grief, self-centeredness, distraction, to name a few. It is then that the shadows move in to urge us to slow down, listen, breathe deeply, trust in the good possibility of the next step. It is then that we can squint into the shadows to bring something forth that had perhaps not even been imagined, something just outside our reach.

As Robert Frost’s classic poem teaches, fog always moves on. Always. It is short-lived. It can come just as quietly as little cat feet and then travel on, often, with a similar kind of silence. The foggy life times, hopefully, also move with the same gentleness, lifting to bring a fuller picture of the road, the path, the next. 

In the meantime, the shifting shadows can provide a magical backdrop to not only the present but what lies just beyond. Beyond this moment. Beyond this day. Something our eyes can only see once the fog lifts and moves on to that mysterious place from whence it came. 

Until the next time. Until the next time.

Fall has arrived. Though we have experienced some of the hottest days this summer, there is now a scent of chillier air that will eventually lead us into the inevitable winter. No matter our age, September can bring with it that anticipation of learning. It seems the rhythm of the school year is etched deep in our senses. I always feel something like hope in these weeks when the shift to busses driving by and children standing in wait appear. Something is triggered in me that has me thinking about new opportunities, new lessons to learn. There is always the desire to buy at least one notebook…just in case.

As I have been thinking about this shifting time, what really has captured my imagination is really the learning I have experienced over this summer. It all began with that crazy, amazing sunflower that planted itself outside my kitchen window. I wrote earlier about this seven foot beauty that just kept sprouting new limbs and then shooting out yellow blossom after yellow blossom.  In fact, it is still at it!

The first learning was to pay attention to all the things that happen in life in which I had no part in their creation. A very big, important lesson. Yet over the last weeks this plant has offered up even more wisdom. Not long after the golden flowers bloomed, bees…a variety of bees… started arriving to drink of the nectar which I imagine to be sweet. I don’t know this to be the case but it is how I imagine it. Then in the last three weeks tiny birds have perched on the shoots and tips of the flowers eating the seed of the sunflowers. I can stand at my kitchen sink and stare with awe at the beauty of goldfinches and sparrows and wrens nibbling away. They are so close I can see their little eyes and the movement of their beaks. Each time I find myself holding my breath in part so I don’t frighten them away but also because their presence seems to warrant a breath-holding moment. 

And at different times, there will be several kinds of bees, these beautiful, fragile birds… and then a monarch butterfly will show up. All these beings co-existing together on the same plant, sharing in the gift the sunflower offers. Right there for me to observe. And I think of how we are all of us…insects, winged ones, this two-legged one…here all together, sharing this moment in time, on this little plot of land, swirling around the galaxy on this big, beautiful ball of Earth. It is a lesson in the countless ways we are connected to so many living things. It has helped me to be awake and aware of all those whose lives are a part of my own living. And it has caused a kind of confounded, humble, gratitude to grow in me.

The poet Ross Gay wrote a book of poetry called simply The Book of Delights in which he offers many images of these kinds of wake up calls that can lead to a gentler living. He has written this poem which he calls Wedding Poem:

Friends, I am here to modestly report
seeing in an orchard
in my town
a goldfinch kissing
a sunflower
again and again
dangling upside down
by its tiny claws
steadying itself by snapping open
like an old-time fan
its wings
again and again,
until, swooning, it tumbled off
and swooped back to the very same perch,
where the sunflower curled its giant
swirling seeds
around the bird and leaned back
to admire the soft wind
nudging the bird’s plumage,
and friend I could see
the points on the flower’s stately crown
soften and curl inward
as it almost indiscernibly lifted
the food of its body
to the bird’s nuzzling mouth
whose fervor 
I could hear from
oh 20 or 30 feet away
and see from the tiny hulls
that sailed from their 
good racket,
which good racket, I have to say
was making me blush,
and rock up on my tippy-toes,
and just barely purse my lips
with what I realize now
was being, simply, glad,
which such love,
is we let it,
makes us feel.

Though the poet says it much better than I ever could, this is some of what I have learned this summer. And now I am ready for what this ‘school year’ will bring and what new lessons await. Thank you, Summer Sunflower. You have been an amazing teacher.

Last week on the CBS Sunday Morning show, there was a story that has traveled with me all week. It was a story about a man in his eighties who is the gravedigger for a small town cemetery. It might sound like a downer yet it was anything but. Though he could have handed this job on to someone else, he continues to do this work because he wants it done right, even digging the grave for his own wife. He also does other handyman tasks for people well into the years when most people are settled into retirement. Those interviewed talked of his kindness, his helpfulness, the way the work he does for people often does not come with a bill… though he says he will send one when asked. One of those who had received such generosity said about him that “He is someone who knows that he has enough.”

I have thought about that ‘enough’ many times over the last week. Enough. It seems an elusive thing at times. Living in a country, a world, that has difficulty recognizing what is ‘enough’ it is easy to be lured by the next shiny thing, the new, must-have product, the advertisements that convince us of a need we did not know we had. These messages permeate our screens, our written pages, and eventually our minds. It is an insidious landscape to traverse and it is one that is planted in us from a very early age.

Thinking about this man whose work is to prepare the earth for the eternal reception of loved ones, I wondered at this message of ‘enough’. What is enough for me? What is enough for you? Did I raise children who know how to recognize the enough in their lives? Do I live a life that reminds me that I do, indeed, have enough?

Of course, enough is a relative experience. I write this from the place of privilege. I have enough food, a safe place to live, friends and family who support and care, resources that provide for all my basic needs. There are certainly countless people around the world and in my scope of living who cannot say the same. Their enough is different than mine and can provide a mirror for assessing my own life and how I choose to live it.  

Of course, there are some things I can never have enough of…beauty in all its forms…the sound of birdsong…the sight, sound and presence of my children…the color green…music, music, music…the sparkle of sunlight on water…books and the stories that live in them. For these things, I am a hoarder and proud of it. Yet all these things add nothing to the financial economy. Only my soul economy.

These days I am trying to be awake and aware of all that creates my own ‘enough.’ Before I am seduced into the product that calls out to me from the store aisles or that pops up on my newsfeed, I ask myself about my true need. And that true need is usually pretty simple. It may be best expressed in this poem by David Whyte that I have come back to again and again:

Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to life
we have refused
again and again
until now.

Until now.

What is your ‘enough’? What guides your thinking and acting in discovering this? It seems to me it is a lifelong quest and one that takes courage and wisdom. But I believe, like the grave digging octogenarian, it is, in the end, one that leads to a life of gratitude and joy. A life spent opening itself again and again. Every day. Every moment. 

There are people I know who are described as ‘hummingbirds’. These are folks who have the ability to flit from one thing to another, always on the move, sometimes accomplishing many things in the course of a day. Their constant motion can make those of us who have a slower movement in the world feel as if we are laggards, sitting as we do trying to squeeze in the last paragraph of a book we are savoring, putting off till tomorrow what could be completed in the day, in the next moment, breathing at a different, slower pace. 

Hummingbirds. Over the last few days I have had the blessed privilege to be present to hummingbirds. Their rapid beating wings. Their flight passing by my head with a surprisingly loud sound for such a tiny creature. Their constant motion as they suck sweet nectar from the feeders of admirers. Have you ever tried to photograph a hummingbird? It takes a finer camera than my iPhone but still I try with limited success. 

Weighing in at 2.7-3 grams, the Ruby-throated Hummingbird is about the weight of a penny. Its wings move 70-80 times per second…per second! When in love…or at least mating…they can flap their wings up to 200 times per second. Wow! What a seducing tactic! And some species of hummingbirds can live up to 12 years though most live only 4-6 years. Considering their size, their very fragile size in this big world, this seems miraculous.

Observing these beautiful birds as I did I became aware of how we are invited every day to be present to those beings that travel the planet with us. Most of the time I am focused on the two legged, those that walk upright on the ground. I have things to say to them and tasks to complete with them, things to give and receive from them. But allowing my eyes to simply hold the fluttering wings of these fellow Earth inhabitants made my days fuller, richer. We were existing here…at the same time…on this amazing planet. Their work was to move quickly, storing up as much energy as they needed to be able to fly so furiously. My work was to watch, to love their frantic beauty, and to allow gratitude to rise in my throat like tears.

Of course, the words of Mary Oliver rose up from some stored place in my memory:
My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

A new week is beginning. The opportunity is before us to be astonished. This mind and heart and ‘body-clothes’ filled life is waiting to see the large and the small. Like the hummingbird calling to us to notice and rejoice.

These summer days are, for me, hope gathering days. The very beauty of flowers that grace my garden and the songs of all the birds that have arrived at my feeders fill me with a sense of hope that the world is beautiful and wonderful and carries a kindness that is at its core. The warmth…even the heat…calls on our bodies to be open, be alive to the greenness and the growth that during the winter months seems only a dream. So it seems the right thing to do to gather it all up…color and sunshine and sounds of wind and music and place it in the storehouse of our heart for the needed times which are bound to arrive.

I thought of this this past week when these words of Louise Erdrich came across in something I was reading:
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”

Loss. It is everywhere of course. And I have felt it deeply and have observed its presence in those I know and love. Over the last months people have left this life in quiet and in bold ways. Their loss is palpable and being present to the space they once occupied tears at the heart. Nobody can protect us from that. Yet, love and the practice of love is, I believe, the reason we are here on earth. The risks we take, that swallow us up prepare the gardens of our lives for the beauty. What else is required but to taste and feel and waste ourselves in the sweetness as long as we can and with as much enthusiasm as we can?

So these gathering days of summer are washing over us and asking us to be present, to savor, to relish the gifts of Earth and Sun. Much like the bees who are so busy on all the flowers in my garden right now…drinking deeply of color and sweetness. They flit and fly with a fury that says they know the flowers will be lost to them in a precious moment. They are tiny teachers. Of presence. Of tasting. Of hope. Of living. Of the loss that is bound to come. And the urgency of tasting as fully and as deeply of love and life as we can. 

It’s happened again. Last year, sometime in August I believe, I posted a photo of a sunflower that had planted itself in my garden. While I could logically know it was probably an errant seed dropped by a bird or one of the pesky squirrels that raid my birdfeeders, its presence still seemed magic to me.  I reflected on the gift of it and how so often the amazing things that come into our lives do so without any help from us. All the many invisible lines of connection that we are aware of…or mostly unaware of…that bring surprise and delight. The many ways unknown people support us and make our living possible and often easier. 

Well, it’s happened again. I did not plant this sunflower that has been growing and now is blooming just outside my kitchen window. But this sunflower…this SUNFLOWER…is bigger and bolder than last year’s guest. It started growing in late May while I was away from home on a long trip and has continued to get taller and wider every day for the last several weeks until now, every time I am standing at my kitchen sink, I jump thinking someone is peeking in. Oh, no. Just enormous green leaves. Oh, no. Just stupendous yellow flowers. Oh, no. Just a hungry bumblebee or a delicate monarch butterfly taking a rest among petals. 

Watching its growing progress, I have laughed to myself. Apparently the Universe surmised that I had really not received the message of the volunteer sent to wake me up last summer and so decided to do it up big this year. Not one yellow sphere but many are flanking the side of my house. I have stopped counting and now only wait in anticipation. How many will appear? The one thing I must do, am compelled to do, is to pay attention. Pay attention to the brilliance of golden color and the leaves sized to be helpful clothing Adam and Eve. Pay attention and be in awe. Pay attention and remember…I did not do this. I did not do this. 

It has, again, led me to ponder all those things that come into my life that I did not cause or create. All the people who work behind the scenes to bring food and energy and water and heat and cooling to my every day. All the bees who are busily pollinating and the food that is then grown by hands other than my own. The teachers who are instructing children who will then become the people who help me do all the important yet mundane acts that keep a house, a car, a bank account, a garden, a library, a life humming along in this beautiful and complex world. And all the researchers and scientists who are doing experiments over and over again to find cures and hope…all faces most of us will never see…yet whose work may be just what is needed now or in the future. 

This sunflower…this amazing, amazing sunflower that showed up on my doorstep is an invitation to remember all these invisible beings who flutter in the shadows of our lives. Of course the poet Mary Oliver has something to say about sunflowers:

Come with me
into the field of sunflowers.
Their faces are burnished disks,
their dry spines
creak like ship masts,
their green leaves,
so heavy and many,
fill all day with the sticky
sugars of the sun.

Gardeners will tell you that in this growing season much has come earlier than usual. The sunflower that surprised me last August has been supplanted by its genetic relative arriving in June and blooming in July. ‘Burnished disks…leaves like ship masts…filling the day with the sticky sugar of the sun.’ A wake up call. An invitation. A gift. 

And for this human, gratitude beyond measure. 

Blue. It is not even my favorite color. But last week as I was sitting at a little cafe table outside my neighborhood coffee shop enjoying an iced mocha and reading a book, I was assaulted by the color blue. I looked up at the clear, summer sky and it took my breath away. It was as if blue was screaming:”Look at me! Look at me!” And so I did. I put down the book and sat there. Transfixed by the simple beauty of blue.

Later I was drawn to this poem by the wonderful, intuitive poet, Naomi Shihab Nye:

We forget about the spaciousness
above the clouds

but it’s up there. The sun’s up there too.

When words we hear don’t fit the day,
when we worry
what we did or didn’t do,
what if we close our eyes,
say any word we love
that makes us feel calm,
slip it into the atmosphere
and rise?

Creamy miles of quiet.
Giant swoop of blue.

Since that moment when blue awakened me to the ‘spaciousness above the clouds’ I’ve been thinking about this primary color. It really is the color that is the curtain that frames the stage that is our living. It is the canopy under which we stand. I wondered how we would perceive green (my favorite) without blue. And what would the white of clouds be without their backdrop of sky blue? It says something about our need for diversity in all things, doesn’t it?

Of course there is the other meaning of blue…that feeling, that melancholy that visits all of us at one time or another. In my pursuit of all thoughts of blue I was reminded that Picasso had what was known as his “Blue Period.” During this time he painted in monochromatic shades with washes of blue. It was during a period in his life when he was responding to the poverty and instability he was experiencing and he saw reflected in the world around him. Definitely something to feel ‘blue’ about and if someone painted us on certain days, blue would likely be our color. Interestingly, these paintings are believed to be some of his most popular works. Maybe we all need a way to paint the times in our lives when blue comes to take up residence in us. 

It is a strange thing to become fixated on a color. Yet, I am thankful for it. It was, and is, another nudge toward paying attention to these fleeting summer days when blue sets the scene for the greens and other colors that grace our gardens and our days. Soon enough the blue of the sky will hold not only the white of clouds in place but reflect off the snow that will visit for a season, often one that seems to overstay its welcome. 

Perhaps on those winter days I will be able to think back on the moment that blue startled me into amazement. On those days I might remember what the poet says: “what if we close our eyes…say any word we love…that makes us feel calm…slip it into the atmosphere…and rise?Creamy miles of quiet…Giant swoop of blue.”

Yes. Blue. Blue. Blue