Blue

I've been thinking about the color blue. Do you think there are some universal rules of beauty, or is it all truly in the eye of the beholder? I wonder because it is hard to not respond to the color blue, wrapping us as it often does in the vast canopy of a morning sky or the arcing heave of ocean turquoise, teal, and indigo.
I think we need blue. Perhaps it is an essential visual food that calms us and tempers our edgy human spirit more than we know...like hugging a baby lulls it to sleep without a spoken word.
As with the golden mean, blue might occur in just the correct mathematical porportion to our need. A diet of light. I know some days I need blue.

This little texas lizard perched, almost invisible, on the limestone ledge where Ian spied (and grabbed) him. Flipping him over revealed this amazing peacock blue marking.....
My friend Paul, who is a geologist and naturalist, would tell me the biological imperative this blue is designed to address...and he would be right...but I wonder about that blue. Maybe there is more to it; something more subtle in the blue.
A hidden post card from God?
I've always thought that if I were God, I would want someone to notice my work.........


This purple gallinule is a rare visitor to our parts, and I hear there is one on Town Lake in Austin. We saw him in South Padre, resting from a long migration in a marshy tidal pool. The hues and colors of this bird are impossible to ignore. Somehow, his blue is a command to my heart to look, to be amazed, to acknowledge the big-ness of the mystery that so much color offers. How can he be so blue? How can the tiny number sequences in a strand of his dna be so precisely aimed to create thousands of blue feathers that grab my heart?



And then there is the other blue. When I talk to my clients and they tell me of the sad things that have happened to them; the bitter turns of fate and shipwrecks that human life unavoidably delivers.....they say to me....."I am so blue." We sit in my little office and share their grief like a communion cup and taste it together. It is an honor and a humbling thing for me. Blue is the perfect way to describe it: the way we feel when life slows to a crawl and our pain is a metrinome; when we are forced to stop living on rote and just "be" where we truly are. To me, blue describes it perfectly...and not in a negative way...in the same vast, all-encompassing, unavoidable, sweeping way that the sky and sea and clouds bring their blueness to us.
Maybe feeling blue is our lark song to Mother God.