BLUE BABY BLUE

Growing up there wasn’t a thing I liked about the color blue. Home was walled white with black and white Japanese hanging prints, glass topped tables and smooth black lacquered chairs upholstered white; white baby grand. In contrast, blue was the color of bruises, of sadness. Blue was the sky where the angry father god lived, white beard trailing through the ethers, accusing finger pointing straight at me. The wild blue yonder reeked of bombs dropping their pods of death onto victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I memorized color in nature: spinach-hued ivy leaves, viridian pine, the foliate domes of camphor, bucolic stretches of eucalyptus-lined seasonal streams. A fruitless olive wept over lime-colored grass while the sycamore my father planted in a hoed-up hillock in our front yard – the tree I was told I’d have to wait fifteen years to climb – stretched tangled roots into dun-colored earth. The kelly green of three-leaf clover spread before me like a sea where I sat for hours as in meditation, picking through to discover the uncommon four, while the rhythmic kuff of my father’s shovel hitting dirt paced with vole-like intensity, carving out a fallout shelter beneath our home. In the face of the ‘fifties, green smelled of eternity, the future, something like hope my young self could aspire to.

I was superstitious back then, careful not to step on sidewalk cracks, terrified of losing my only protector in a world filled with dread. Now although I know great whites cruise vast turquoise waters, I swim along gleefully, free as any migrating humpback. I know that God lives in every oak and boulder, in each living creature and substance, every blade of grass. No longer do I shiver in terror of immediate annihilation, trucking worries on my back like a Bosch nightmare.

I am now familiar with the blackest elements of human nature as never before. The Dachaus and Fallujas remind one daily of our basest, most terrifying potential. Yet despite them, I awaken each day to clear my mental palate, gazing at an azure canvas streaked with coral, peach and salmon stretched over indigo horizon. From periwinkle to peacock, blue impresses on me the need for boundless, ubiquitous space in a field of possibilities. It’s like rolling all the marbles in the bag around in my hand at once, feeling the texture of the ceramic cobalt and the glass eye of the cat, or deciding how I’ll drop my line, laying it easy onto beryl waters, waiting for the catch.

 

image: Leonardo DaVinci

image: Hieronymus Bosch

Looking out over the Alanuihaha Channel at Maui, from Big Island.