A puddle of Colour.

Blue sky with thinning light cloud spread across, it moves almost majestically this campervan morning. No sense of speed, just a slow purposeful crawl. A chill on the air catches your fingers. It’s a bright morning and the birds are busy. The light is bright and clear. A change from the almost interminable dreariness of the last few days. I can hear crow calls and replies, starlings in the oak, robins moving around hedges and bushes and cockerel cries. No sign of the usual early morning hubbub of humanity except for the occasional car. It’s a relatively quiet start to a Monday in suburbia. Prep for the short journey to Scotland close to completion and a full days drumming today. A chance to pause before the week kicks off. So my head is full of crossing off points on lists and must remember thoughts. Trying to get to the end of a couple of books in order to start afresh with others, but life was determined to get in the way. Solnit writes of the self as :

“ A patchwork of the felt and the unfelt, of presences and absences, of navigable channels around the walled off numbness “.

There is a wee bit of a sense of that this morning. I was involved in a beautiful conversation a few days ago of discussing ‘standing in a puddle of colour’. The opportunity to soak up the colour of your surroundings, bring colour into your life and into your experience, take possession of your imagination. See the colour around you and let it filter into everything that you do. Oscar Wilde once wrote :

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

The self as a patchwork of colours, of greys, blacks and whites and the palette of colours that lie between. Nothing attached to them, no meaning, no judgement and no fear. Solnit talks of the colour blue :

“ I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.”

So part of me is looking at colours today and standing in a puddle of them, but also fixed on the far horizon and the blue of distance, solitude, desire and where I am currently not.

Lovely days people.

“ Love was a feeling completely bound up with color, like thousands of rainbows superimposed one on top of the other.” Paulo Coelho.