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| "Impression" by Claude Monet |
You must
cherish the blank paper in front of you
and write out
words that cannot be erased.
From “Paper” by Ha Jin
Just moments ago, as the sun rose through the low ceiling of coastal fog, suddenly the leaves at the very tops of the trees caught fire. In the blink of an eye tiny golden, specks of light~hundreds of them~shimmered like glitter, electrifying the tips of the leaves, as though someone had flung strings of tiny iridescent lights like a net over the topmost branches. Behind them the horizon looked as though orange sherbet had spilled then melted softly, filling the edges of the sky and the contours of the distant hills. As I stared in rapt marvel, was it a minute, two, maybe five? just as quickly as it began the lights twinkled out, just like the stars fade with the first sun's rays, and I was left wondering if I had really seen what I knew I had seen.
Cherish the blank paper in front of you.
Yesterday I watched a family of quail run across a small country lane. It was possibly one of the most heartwarmingly charming things I've seen in a very long time. Two adult birds flanked by little marbles of light orangey-brown downy feathers rolling across the road. Like the light this morning, there and gone in an awe-struck instant.
and write out words that cannot be erased
For years I attended process painting classes. It was not about learning to paint, but about learning to let the subconscious speak through color, texture, and form, trusting that what you are intuitively drawn to is somehow exactly what is wanting or needing awareness, process, expression. Like dreaming or meditating, only with a brush, blank paper, and tempura paint. Sometimes when I had no idea what wanted to come next, when I felt stuck, the message from our teacher was always the same: pick whatever color you most do not want to paint with, then pick the shade within that color that you dislike the most, and paint with that. I never had to think; I knew the unwanted answer before her question was even complete, truthfully before she even sat at the stool next to me to see how I was doing. Always, every time, it was orange. And not just any orange, not the soft pastels of apricot or peach, but ghastly neon orange. I can still smell the unholy scent of it as I opened the bottle. Yet the strange thing was that once loaded onto my brush, even with the very first few tentative strokes onto my paper, every time without fail, I felt alive and energized and vital; the block miraculously evaporated as I melted with ease into the mystery of that strangely repugnant hue.
Feeling very stuck right now in writing takes me back to those years in painting. What color, or in this case, what words am I reluctant to write? Or, put another way, what words want or need to be painted on the canvas of this page that cannot be erased?
I wrote so cavalierly last post about feeling fully alive. About the helix of joy and sorrow, and being open to the continuum, the full spectrum of what being truly alive can encompass. And it was all true, every word, in that moment. It's still my most genuine thing, my true north, the star I would follow to the ends of the earth: In order to feel fully alive, all will need to be welcomed.
But what I forget, what is so often forgotten, is that with trauma, it's not just about joy and sorrow and all that lies between, which are authentic experiences true to simply being alive, to living and loving. Post traumatic stress, which occurs when traumas are not properly seen to so that the wounded parts can heal is a thing unto itself. For me, it's overwhelm, and also, especially, shutting down, and in the resulting numbness is the inability to feel. It's the freeze part of the fight, flight, freeze response (along with less well known but intimately familiar cousin, collapse). It slips in unnoticed and parks itself; it may take days or even weeks for me to realize it's arrived again, with its numbness, its deadening, its suppression of all feeling except, I've realized recently, the utter pain of living anesthetized, exiled from connection with the precious light of my being, where it all lives, the sacred inner garden from which so much arises in my life, including words.
I had also forgotten orange. Happily. (Such irony~) I look around my house, in my garden, my closets, there is nothing resembling orange. I don't use it in art; I never photograph anything close to it. Years ago, after the process painting classes, but long before now, in a color for design class I learned all about orange for my term project. But I have forgotten that, too; the way it vibrates with aliveness more than any other color. How warm and inviting and stimulating it is. That in color psychology it is associated with enthusiasm, rejuvenation, vitality, freedom, happiness, adventure, and courage.
In her frankly joyful book, Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness, Ingrid Fetell Lee writes, "From the moment I first started studying joy, it was clear that the liveliest places and objects all have one thing in common: bright, vivid color." She writes about bright color changing not only individual's lives, but entire school and town populations. That health improves when vivid color is used, healing is accelerated, and depression, conflict, even violence and crime, decrease.
Seeking to understand my loathing of the hue that is so often described as the happiest color, I am relieved to learn that our brains are actually wired toward negativity, which served our ancestors well and helped us to survive as a species. Having unsolved trauma doubles down on that, and I recognized years ago that I simply do not trust happiness. It is not because I am skewed toward pessimism innately because I am not, not by a long shot. Though it could well be argued that this is exactly how trauma has shrouded my true nature; because things happened that caused that groove in the limbic system to record over and over again that being happy, that being carefree, that simply being at ease was just not safe.
The great news from Lee's research is that just the act of incorporating more color ~ as well as many other things she identifies in her book, like abundance, harmony, and play ~ changes things as if by magic. Over and over studies bear this out. We don't have to "try" to be joyful, we don't have to "try" to change those pathways; they can transform on their own simply by what we choose to surround ourselves with.
Lee writes, "Every human being is born with the capacity for joy, and like the pilot light in your stove, it still burns within you even if you haven't switched on the burners in a while." Oh, happy day: To be reminded that even through these times of painful disconnect, nothing is actually gone, merely masked. I see how nature herself provides the kindling, in vivid sunrises and sunsets; in trees alight with the first sun's rays; in spectacular light and color everywhere, even in those sweet baby birds scurrying wildly across the deeply shaded road. It's everywhere, readily available, penetrating even in moments gone otherwise cold with numbness and apathy.
Here, now, are words. Words written out. Words that live on this cherished page, words that rebound in my cherished world; colorful words like a soft breeze against that inner flame; sacred words that cannot be erased.
I grab my camera and go in search of orange.
