Friday, September 4, 2009

Love, Color, and Comfort

Color is everywhere in our lives, yet so seldom do we stop to appreciate it. When I focus for a moment on the beautiful color of leaves in the backyard, my mind fills with something that nurtures me, something like joy or love. I am filled with a passionate greed for color and want to touch it, hold it, own it, and for it to always be visible, the way the mountains are always present on the horizon. Perhaps some of the beauty comes from knowing it is short lived, that the color fades and this beauty, like our own, passes.

In Autumn, I am drawn to orange and believe it is my favorite color. It's hard to pinpoint the emotion that it conjures up, but I think it is beauty and mischieviousness. But not just surface beauty. The beauty is deep and includes the sounds of the season, the changing textures, the smell of dampened earth and leaves, the feeling of a warm sweatshirt on a brisk evening, and inhaling cool fresh air under a crystal blue sky.

I have a love affair with the color purple, shared with cobalt blue and orange. I yearn to wrap myself in a purple quilt made by loving, wise women,. The house in which they live as all the earmarks of comfort, security, and unconditional love, as though in that place are all that a person needs to live a beautiful life forever. Loving, wise women remember what it was like to be young, but aware enough of their own mistakes to gently guide young women in their own journey. Their warm home has crowded rooms of old creaky chairs, a large table around which the women sit and talk about their past loves, several couches adorned by afghans and quilts where it is permissible and even encouraged to have a nap at anytime, where there is always hot soup and fresh bread, where the pantry shelves are lined with jars and jars of homemade preserves, all beautifully labeled in the hand writing of the beautiful women who are like guardians of young women. And where love and comfort hang in the air like an incense so subtle that you don't realize it's there, though they are palpable. The women understand that all women are sisters and that we all stand together in a circle, hands held, that excludes no one, that grows as new women join, and fill the space of those who previously stood in the circle but have left the earth.

1 comment:

Jelly said...

This is beautiful mother :)