Brown

(Visiting friends. Photo by Robin. June 2007)

Of all colors, brown is the most satisfying. It is the deep, fertile tint of the earth itself; it lies hidden beneath every field and garden; it is the garment of multitudes of earth’s children, from the mouse to the eagle.

~ Mary Webb, The Spring of Joy, 1917

I discovered a sort of irony to brown as I began this entry. I think of it as a very earthy and comforting color. A color with lots of warmth. But when I started sorting through photos, the first place I looked was through the late fall, winter, and early spring scenes. Although brown appears frequently during the warmer months (especially during a drought), it’s often hidden in the landscape by the brilliant greens, reds, yellows, oranges, blues, and purples. What I think of as a warm color comes into its own during the colder months.

(Reflections. Photo by Robin. 2006)

Red

(Flower at Longwood Gardens. Photo by Robin. June 2007)

The color red has not always been one of my favorites. In fact, it moves in and out of favor with me depending on how it manifests in my life. At this time in my life I often associate it with hot flashes and the color of my skin when my internal thermostat is malfunctioning and I’m heated from within. Or without, on hot days such as today.

Red is the color of my face when I’m embarrassed. I’ve been teased for that for as long as I can remember because I blush easily. Very easily. Red was the color of my hair when I was born. Red is the color of my skin after about 20 minutes in the sun without sunscreen. Red is not a color I’m likely to wear because it brings out all of my natural red coloring.

I often think I have an overabundance of red in my life. But red isn’t all bad and there are times when I’m attracted to it and find it delightful.

Yellow

(Field of dandelions. Photo by Robin. 2006)

I’ve always thought of yellow as a happy color. The color of sunshine and summer, lemons, buttercups, dandelions, and sunflowers. Bright yellow just POPS right out at you, as if the yellow object is lit from within. In some cultures yellow is associated with happiness and peace. The Buddha wore yellow robes after Enlightenment.

(Buttercups. Photo by Robin. 2007)

The initial explosion

(Fireworks. Photo by Robin. 2006)

Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to a soul in a thousand different ways.

~ Oscar Wilde

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

~ John Ruskin

The human being is played upon by various influences at various stages of his life in the body. We all know what climate and music will do to create different moods, but one factor often not understood or neglected is the influence of colour. It is always there in our surroundings, in a room, apartment, or house, in our clothing and in our furnishings. It can contribute towards health or take away from it; it can cheer up or depress the emotions; it can invigorate or devitalize the body; it can give pleasure to the eyes or irritate them.

~ Paul Brunton

A favorite of mine

(Crayolas. Photo by Robin. June 2007)

Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air — explode softly — and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth — boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn’t go cheap, either — not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination.

~ Robert Fulghum

This is one of my all-time favorite quotes. It brings to mind a variety of things at a variety of times.

Today when I stumbled across it again it reminded me of colors and how lucky we are to have so many colors in life.

With that in mind, I’m going to do a small series on color, mostly because I think it would be a fun thing to do, a way to cover the world with a little of my imagination.

The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.

~ Hans Hofmann

In the shadows

(Longwood Gardens pathway. Photo by Robin. 2007)

The secret of life is in the shadows and not in the open sun; to see anything at all, you must look deeply into the shadow of a living thing.

~ Ute saying

The blissful body

(The body of a tree. Photo by Robin. 2007)

Here in this body are the sacred rivers: here are the sun and moon as well as all the pilgrimage places … I have not encountered another temple as blissful as my own body.~ Saraha

As I slowly approach the age 0f 50 (the turn of the decade occurs in December 2008), I find myself finally (FINALLY!) beginning to feel comfortable in my body. But lately I’ve felt more than comfortable. I’m actually enjoying myself.

I thought, at first, this was a brand new feeling, one I’ve never had before. But then it occurred to me that I must have felt this way as a child. Happy, joyful, glad to be in my own skin.

I haven’t had plastic surgery. I haven’t lost a lot of the weight I need to shed. I still have the aches and pains that come with getting older, various parts beginning to feel a lifetime of usage. I still have to take care with my back injuries.

Perhaps that’s it. The back injuries. The call to action. The decision to honor and care for my body as I wish I had been doing all along.

It’s interesting how life set up this series of coincidences. There have been quieter wake-up calls that I’ve ignored over the past few years. Then I got hit hard with the back problems and being unable to walk. What’s interesting, and coincidental, is that if we’d stayed in the Bogs, hadn’t gone on a sabbatical adventure, I’m not sure I’d have pulled myself out of the dark pit of pain. Well, maybe. Eventually. But the move to a new town with new things to explore forced me to do something while I waited for our insurance to kick in.

My waiting wasn’t passive as it might have been at home. It was an active waiting. A waiting in which I went faithfully to the gym every morning, even when I couldn’t do more than hang on to the rails of the treadmill and shuffle along at 1 mph. Even when all I could do was sit on the bench of the weight machine and hang there, in a kind of sitting traction. Some days the better part of the workout was just getting to the gym. Walking down the hallways, riding down in the elevator, walking down more hallways, opening doors. Those simple acts, things we all take for granted, were often all that I could manage. Sometimes more than I thought I could manage, making me push myself beyond what I perceived to be my limits, limits enforced by pain or by my own thinking.

Then one day I was able to pull down the bar of the lat pulldown machine. I discovered that walking uphill was less painful than a level or downhill course.

I was moving. I was doing. I was being.

I’ve lost a few inches. Weight/strength training will do that to a body. I’ve also lost about 10 lbs. But it’s not the loss of weight or inches that has me enjoying the feel and look of my body.

The change occurred within my soul or spirit or mind or whatever you want to call it.

I sat with my pain, listening to it, encouraging it to tell me what I needed to do next. I learned from it.

And now, now I’m discovering the awesomeness of the human body. The way it can bounce back, if given even half a chance, some nurturing, and some love. The way it can somehow work around the injuries, heal around them in such a way that it’s possible to start feeling normal again.

Cool beans.  🙂

My hands

(My hands. Watercolor and fingerpaints (and the real deal in the second photo). Photos and artwork by Robin. April 2007)

The art of life is to show your hand. ~ E. V. Lucas

Hands. They’re at the end of my arms. My hands are used to physically manipulate things. I can hold a pen or a paint brush and create with my hands. Or mold or sculpt. My hands are my primary source of touch (did you know the fingertips contain some of the densest areas of nerve endings in the human body?). My hands are typing these words.

The human hand has four fingers and one thumb. It has approximately 27 bones. There are lots of phrases associated with hands: Lend a hand. Open hands. Busy hands. Hands on. Helping hands. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Caught with your hand in the cookie jar. Out of hand. Business at hand. Talk to the hand. Raise your hand. Show of hands. Idle hands. In good hands. Time on your hands. Hold the whole world in your hands. Leave it in your hands. Many hands make light work.  Hand in hand. All hands on deck.

There’s hand-picked and hand-dipped. You can have your hands tied, your hands full, have/get the upper hand, take a heavy-handed approach, be in safe hands, get your hands dirty, wash your hands of the matter, and keep your hands clean.

But I digress. This about my hands.

My hands are not too big or too small. They’re just right for me. They tend to look a little small when compared with my husband’s hands or my sons’ hands. And they look large when I put them up against my granddaughter’s tiny (and very cute!) hands.

My hands are a little rough because my hands work. They clean, wash dishes, dig in the earth to plant trees. My hands wring, twist, scrub, dust, and hold all the tools necessary to accomplish these things. But my hands are also soft and gentle, caressing, loving, feeling, and healing, capable of the most delicate of operations such a removing a splinter from a child’s small finger.

Sometimes I express myself with my hands, giving signals to go with my words. My hands dance when I dance. My hands flutter, clap, fingers snap, undulate. When I was young and a gymnast, I could stand and walk on my hands.

My hands grasp, clasp, wield, thread, and make gestures such as a peace sign, a-ok, thumbs up, thumbs down, air quotes, and some that aren’t quite so nice such as the finger or flipping the bird.

My hands can play rock, paper, scissors, shuffle cards, roll dice, string a cat’s cradle, hold a jump rope, and pick up jacks or sticks.

I create meals with my hands. Holding a knife I can slice, dice, chop. Holding a spoon, I stir and mix. Holding a fork, I eat. My hands are utensils in and of themselves, capable of mixing, kneading, folding, and shaping.

My hands hold the books I read. My hands sew and crochet. My hands take care of both pleasant and unpleasant tasks. My hands are capable of hitting, slapping, punching, and pinching, but these are not practices I indulge in as an adult. (In all honesty, I did get into some scraps with my hands in my younger days.)

I’m right handed, but my left hand gets a fair share of the work. While thinking about my hands and about writing this entry, I began to realize just how much work my hands do on an average day. They’re hard workers, my hands.

Today I’m celebrating my hands. I’m thankful for the many things my hands do in life, most especially for one of my favorite activities: Holding hands with a loved one.

And I’m betting, hands down, this entry won’t be nearly as popular as the one about my feet. 😉

Hands

Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

I’ve been sorting through photos today since my computer is good for little else right now. This semi-break from the internet has given me a chance to finally clean up and organize the many photographs I saved. I’m not even sure why I saved a good percentage of them.

I have tons of photos of my granddaughter, many of which are not very good. Why do I save the blurry, the messy, and the half-way shots of her? I don’t know. Perhaps it’s because I don’t see her as often as I’d like and so I store up every little piece of her I can, to visit whenever I want.

My hands have been busy this weekend. I’ve been cooking, cleaning, unpacking from our trip home, sorting, painting and drawing. All in all, it’s been a very productive time, this time I’ve had to myself. Still, I’m looking forward to my husband’s return tomorrow. I feel odd when he’s away, as if a large part of me is missing. A piece of my soul, maybe. Certainly my heart.

It’ll be good to have him home again because, really, it isn’t home without him. In a sense, he is home to me.

Life by the pond

(Green frog by the pond. Photo by Robin. 2006)

An old pond
a frog jumps in
Sound of water

– Matsuo Basho

Another old post revisited.