Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.
~Paul Gauguin

The winter leaves us starved for color. Especially this past winter. One that found us cocooned inside with threat knocking at our door and fear swirling its meanness in corners like dust gathering. For those of us in the northern climes winter has its own language but this year’s words were particularly unkind. No warm gatherings with friends except those we could do outside round a fire calling on the wisdom of our ancestors who did stoked their own circles of fire before us. Though the fire was warm, our layers many, the freezing temperatures kept our meetings short and sweet reminding us of the control we didn’t have. And while the spring is slowly unfolding there are still days shot through with cold winds, low temps and even the stray snow flake.

All this has led me to reflect much on color. I have often thought that it is the absence of color that finally gets to us after a long winter. Many of us seem to strengthen the cold’s hold on us by wearing black, brown, gray, as if to mirror the colorless world outside our window. Days of white and gray become our only vision which the seed providers must know well as they send out little pages of hope in the catalogues that begin to arrive in January. Sitting in my colorless clothes, leafing through those pages is a balm.

Right now I am standing watch over yellow tulips that have emerged in my garden. I am guarding them from the squirrels that like to snip off their heads as soon as they bloom. I have nearly wept at the orange-reds the little rascals left laying on the ground after decapitating the green stems that stand nearby. Perhaps the squirrels are hungry for color, too. They do not know the depth of my need for this color and will likely encounter an enraged woman running at them to protect the bloom reaching its green body toward the heavens as I scare them away. My neighbors are hopefully turning a grace-filled eye.

It is not a coincidence that artists speak boldly about color. “Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.” writes Claude Monet. “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any way.” says Georgia O’Keefe. And Wassily Kadinsky spoke,”Color is a power which directly influences the soul.”

Yes. The soul. It is the healing power of color that reaches out to touch our wintry souls. Souls that are weary of the pandemic and all the pain and suffering of this last year. Weary from isolation and staying away from those they love. Weary from tragic headlines and compassion for the lives they hold. Weary from winter’s cold and hibernation. Weary of our dark wardrobes and multiple layers. Soul weary.

Last week I had the great privilege of being bathed in immense swaths of color as I visited the tulip fields in Washington. Seeing the large numbers of people filling their hunger for color(socially distanced, of course)was like sitting down at a soul buffet. While their faces may have been covered with masks, their eyes were smiling and the air around us danced with beauty and hope. My soul was soothed and ready to once again face life’s beauty and terror. 

Color. It is not the only healer of the soul but it is a good place to start. What colors are you seeing in your daily rounds? What color will lift your weary spirit? It is definitely a time to be awake, wide awake to all the color that is being offered up to us. May the colors of this spring dance before our waiting eyes and may we all be present enough to see because as poet Savita Tyagi says in her poem, Tulips:

…But I didn’t know much about tulips then. 
Soon I came to realize that each stem 
Bore just one flower, and their delicate 
Flashy bloom lasted only for a week most…

This blast of color is short-lived. Eyes open…and now I have to get back to my post, guarding yellow! 

Regrets…I’ve had a few…
~Lyrics by Paul Anka…sung by Frank Sinatra

There are changes happening in this world we have been traveling in since the pandemic began. The days of total isolation are finding openings and with those openings people are assessing what has happened to us, looking for markers of accounting for the days and months that have passed. Of course, there are the very real markers of lives lost and grief deferred for so many. How will we reckon with those wounds on our souls both individually and collectively? As more of us are vaccinated, we are confronted with the inequities of racial, social, medical, economic realities that have always been there but been made both more visible and palpable. How will we heal and make a new way in this wilderness? During the months that have passed we asked ourselves so many questions, searched for answers that eluded our grasp and brought home the truth of how little control any of us have over the simplest and deepest of life’s realities. What have we learned from this…and how quickly will we forget its truth once, as many like to say, “Life gets back to the way it was. Normal.”?

I have been reflecting over the last weeks about what I’ve really done with this last year. In the first days, when we were told to stay home, when many of us were having everything delivered(another point of privilege), when I washed my groceries, sanitized everything in sight, and washed my hands countless times a day, I had some ideas of ‘things I would accomplish’ since I had to stay at home anyway. I may have cleaned a drawer or two. I worked a puzzle. I walked many miles. I read a lot of books and Netflix and I are intimately acquainted.

Unlike many, I could not do much more than that. I am in awe and inspired by many of my friends who did so much with the time…created beautiful things, took online classes, organized all those closets, drawers and files that had just been sitting there waiting for ‘when there is more time’. My confession is that I could not do any of that and now I have the feeling of regret. This regret is seeping into my thoughts with great regularity. 

In between the times when I am putting on my regret coat, I have remembered that one of the things that did sustain me and kept me uplifted was poetry. And since April is National Poetry Month, I think it is a good time to give thanks for the poets…those artists who give us just enough words, but not too many, to help us feel, clarify, lament, and celebrate whatever life is dishing up. The poem that I kept going back to during the last year is a familiar one that always has the power to put me right: The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Just imagining myself into those words brings me to a depth of wisdom that never fails. In the despairing moments that have visited in both the daylight and the darkness, the image of taking what is stirring the fear monsters and placing them where the great heron feeds, causes me to remember the rhythms of the world that hold fast. I can scatter my regrets of what I didn’t do, what I didn’t accomplish, on the still waters allowing it all to settle into forgiving peace. Maybe that is enough.

For those who have much to show for these last months, blessings upon blessings. For those who have difficulty remembering one month from the other, grace upon grace. May we all know the freedom of letting go of any regrets knowing we have all been doing the best we can.