Tag: peace

Color!

If you know me or glance at my Facebook posts you know my love of color. I cannot imagine a world without color. Bright colors, vivid colors, striking colors, shocking colors. I am drawn to them in all forms: textiles, clothes, fall leaves, visual arts. I am not drawn to pale colors, pastels, or colors that don’t sing and jump out in front of you wanting to be noticed. I’m hoping that doesn’t change this Thursday.

I have cataracts and will be getting my first IOL (intra ocular lens) on Thursday. I am curious how I will see differently — if at all — after surgery. If all goes well I will have the lens in my other eye replaced in late November. Will colors be different with IOLs? I’m told that whites will be much whiter — thank goodness for that. My living room walls seem more pasty and yellow lately — and someone has changed the wattage in my reading lamps so that I can’t read so easily by lamplight.

Could my attraction to intense color has been influenced in part by these cloudy cataracts that all of us eventually develop? I’m curious. When I was in my early 20’s and 30’s I wore mostly earth tones and “natural” beige-y tops. My walls were painted a serene yet warm beige that I loved. That could have been because of my “earth mother” philosophy at the time or maybe a holdover from my hippie days. I don’t remember really loving and even craving intense purples and golds and so many varieties of green and blue and red until my 50’s. And it was my playing with color that led me to watercolor painting and then jewelry making with beads. And recently I’ve delighted in piecing and quilting with color rich fabrics.

So I wonder — could the increasing filtering of light and color by these cloudy lenses of mine have led to the explosion of color in my life these days? Will I wake up on Friday and be shocked by colors I’ve chosen and used in quilted creations? I doubt it. I hope my heart will dance at the glorious profusion of color in the fall leaves, the quilted table runners and the art on our walls. An explosion of delight!

Color can be a bright and colorful oasis in the midst of a terribly hurting world. Blessed be each of you in this time of chaos, danger, and transition. Take a moment to pray (whatever may be your spiritual path) for healing, justice, peace. Offer blessings for hope in times that drain that precious wisp of sanity. Imagine/visualize justice in place of lies and corruption — and peace in place of cruelty and war. Take just 60 seconds. . . right now . . . please.

Jane+

9/11

Reading the date, I saw in my memory that whole horrific morning and felt again the terror and threat that overwhelmed me on that blue sky day.

That is what I remember . . . that blue sky. Intensely blue. Purely blue. No clouds or contrail of exhaust. Just blue. Piercing, penetrating blue.

When we visited the Ground Zero Memorial several years ago, I stopped before this wall, unable to pass by. A collage of nearly 3000 watercolor squares in an attempt to capture that color. Piercing, penetrating shades of blue. Like that morning on 9/11. No clouds or contrails of exhaust. Just blue.

And I breathed the blue into my body, feeling the peaceful beauty of pure color fill me. Having walked through the misshapen pieces of tragedy — steel beams twisted and torqued by impact and fire, a searing picture of someone standing in the hole left in the side of the building and about to jump, the dented and damaged stairs from one of the towers — the serenity of the blue sky that day was a gift.

Was that what they saw in their last moments in this life? Foolishly perhaps, I would like to believe that was a part of their awareness. Some brief moment of blue sky . . .

Staying Grounded in a World of Despair

IMG-2508 (1)

I am in need of peace and hope. No, I am not in despair, but there are times in this chaos of 2018 in America when it seems that all that was familiar is being dismantled or hatefully deconstructed.  And what I value in life: kindness, honesty, caring actions towards others, strength of purpose, wisdom . . . these things are being devalued, tossed away, seen as weak and worthless.

It is when I realize I am on the edge of the dark abyss that I go to my Poetry and Inspiration digital file.  When I taught, I always opened my class with 5-8 minutes of silent centering/meditation/ breathwork and then (to end the silence) read one of many poems that I had collected over the years and that fit the day’s class content.  One of them was Wendell Berry’s The Peace of Wild Things:

When despair 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 for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Today is a day on the edge of the abyss, and so I go happily to walk in today’s rain shower and feel the cleansing and peace of just being alive.   I rest in the grace of the world and am free.  

Blessings and hope and peace.

Jane +