This week I have been putting the finishing touches on my new book Tough Transitions that will be published in June 2005 by Warner Books in New York. Today I was writing about things I find myself doing that help me when I’m having a difficult time. I was focusing specifically on art. I talked about going to The Museum of Modern Art many years ago to see Monet’s water lily paintings in the early months of my being a widow. I’d sit on the bench for long periods of time in the room that held the water lily paintings. There was something about the serenity, the calm, the peace of the paintings that nourished me.

This is the cover of my new book to be published June 2005

Then I started talking about how I’ve found myself, during more recent tough transitions, gravitating to learning about color and going to exhibits where color is the topic of a particular show. Why? I don’t have a clue. I can only speculate–which I do in the section I wrote for the book this afternoon. I think I’ll share that section with you now. You can be my earliest readers—of a book that isn’t even a book yet!

Here is the section I wrote today about color helping me during difficult times:

From Tough Transitions, Section Entitled Responding:

Lately it’s been color that’s spoken to me most strongly as I moved through new transitions. I’ve gone to art exhibits based on color. Bought books about color. Sought out artists who build their creations around color. Whole new universes are opening to me that somehow and someway affect the way I think about my own transitions. Don’t ask me to explain this in some kind of one-to-one relationship, for I can’t. I just know that color and art are now nurturing subjects that I’m drawn to during times of upheaval and change.

Here is a left-hand page for the color salmon pink from the book called Colors

At the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston I bought a little book called Colors. The left-hand page will show you the color of, say, Parma Violet. The right-hand page will show you a painting “Evening in New York, 1890s,”by Childe Hassam in which Parma Violet is a predominant color. On another left-hand page you can see the color Green Blue and on the right Paul Signac’s “The Bonaventure Pine, 1893,” where the tree is that color. There’s cobalt blue and salmon pink and Sienna earth and carmine red and meadow green… each color showing up in a scene or a portrait an artist painted.

I’ve asked myself a dozen times why do I love this little book so? Why did I look at it almost every day when I was dealing recently with a really tough transition? I don’t know, except to say my eyes were always opened more, my mind stimulated, my imagination stirred when I put the book down. Perhaps the last page of the book gives a hint to why I find looking at and learning about color so satisfying when I’m in a difficult time. The author, Caroline Desnoettes, writes: Color, like painting, is a source of beauty and pleasure. By mixing the primary colors of yellow, red, and blue the painter obtains new, complementary ones—orange, violet, green. The painter organizes his [her] palette with cold colors—violet, blue, and green—and warm colors—yellow, orange, and red. Then he [she] adds white and black for light and shade. And so, the painter can make an infinite number of color combinations and give life to his [her] paintings as light reveals the color. Cold, warm, white, black… infinite number of combinations… give life… light… color: perhaps at some level I’m making an analogy to possibility in my own life. Who can say?

	Here is the right-hand page from the same book, showing the color, salmon pink, in a painting by Walter Ufer

I know I am so excited when I come across a line like this in another book called Color: A Natural History of the Palette. The first challenge in writing about colors is that they don’t really exist. Or rather they do exist, but only because our minds create them as an interpretation of vibrations that are happening around us. Yep, I say to myself, there’s something there for me to relate to my current life situation! I learn to understand color by having Victoria Finlay, the author, compare it to “a soprano singing a high C and shattering a wineglass, because she catches its natural vibration.” When light catches the natural vibrations of electrons, the expert tells us, it shoots them to another energy level where that portion of light is used up. What’s left is reflected out, and our brains read it as color.

Then there’s this:

	Here is a page from a calendar I have that features colors. All these colors make me happy.

The best way I’ve found of understanding this is to think not so much of Something “being” a color but of it “doing” a color. The atoms in a ripe Tomato are busy shivering—or dancing or singing; the metaphors can be as joyful as the colors they describe—in such a way that when white light falls on them they absorb most of the blue and yellow light and they reject the red—meaning paradoxically that the “red” tomato is actually one that contains every wavelength except red. A week before, those atoms would have been doing a slightly different dance—absorbing the red light and rejecting the rest, to give the appearance of a green tomato instead.

Ask me why this kind of information pulls at me when I’m in a tough transition, and I don’t have a clear answer. All I can tell you is that I’m enthralled by what I don’t know! By what I can’t see with my normal sight. I light up when I think of the turnips I have today in a dish on my counter top “doing” purple and white instead of “being” purple and white. Perhaps somehow this attention to color is enlarging my way of thinking about the world around me and making it less pat and solid and rigid. If the world’s full of vibrations that make music and create color, perhaps from the “vibrations” of my own life might make something interesting or something useful. If everything is always changing so that this week a berry on a bush is red when next week it will be black and ready for me to put in a cobbler…well, why do I try to hold on so tightly to the shape of my life as I have known it. But these suppositions are all in hindsight. Don’t believe for one minute that I think this way when I reach for a book or talk to an artist. I’m just doing what I’ve come to notice helps me when I’m in the kinds of Responding experiences we’ve talked about earlier.

I’d love to know how to respond to color. Why not send me an email from this website and let me know.

Have a wonderful September.

A long time ago T. S. Eliot wrote in one of his poems that “April is the cruelest month.” With the war in Iraq going so badly and so many other conflicts bursting out all over the globe these past thirty days of April, we can only answer Eliot with a sad, sad “Yes.” The lives of hundreds of thousands of families and friends of people wounded and killed from and in many countries in the world will never be the same.

So often it is poetry that can resonate the words we cannot quite bring forth personally when we are hurting and sad. In the week after 9/11, the New Yorker published a poem by a Polish poet Adam Zagajewski entitled “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.” (I am indebted to Esther De Wahl’s lovely little book Lost in Wonder for knowledge of the poem.)

In this poem Adam asks us to find some way to praise the same world that is mutilated; praise it for its moments of beauty, loveliness, quietness that are so often a fleeting gift. Part of the poem goes likes this:

Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew…
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns….
Praise the mutilated world.

I remembered this poem in the past days and tried to honor the moments of beauty and loveliness even while I honored my sadness. Yes, there was the roll call with photographs of women and men killed in Iraq concluding The News Hour on PBS; and I read the women and men’s names out, their age and cities as my husband and I sat in the stillness of grief. And there was also the surprise of the iris blooms—huge bright purple—on the plants my husband brought from the yard of his great-grandmother when she died. We had been waiting for almost ten years for those irises to bloom, and they bloomed this month, this spring. Try to praise the mutilated world… There is the desecration of our air and our water in the U. S., terrible fouling that is increasing and multiplying danger. I sign petitions and write letters and checks. And there was my discovery for the first time behind the gym where I go to work out of the clearest, little stream that rushes over rock ledges and makes the most peaceful sounds in a couple of small waterfalls. Try to praise the mutilated world.

The gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns

So I will do my best to hold the tension: the horrific things being done in our world and the pain and loss of all that…and those precious moments of grace and gift when I do see a red bird in the cedar tree by the edge of the garage, when I hear the soft rain falling in the valley behind our house. May each of us find someway, while acknowledging the truth of what is happening here at home and far away, to notice strawberries, dew, a gray feather, and gentle light. Praise the mutilated world.

At the beginning of each new year, I choose two or three new things to turn my attention to for that year. Those words sound so ordinary for what really happens in this process. The year I chose wildflowers as something to turn my attention to for that year, not only did I find books on wildflowers in Texas–and Ireland, the country of my great-grandparents!–but I also found myself hiking in the desert mountains around Tucson after I had bought a little magnifying eye in a tiny leather pouch which hung on a string around my neck. What was I doing there? Looking at wildflowers, both with my eyes and with the little magnifier. Not by plan or design…but as a natural evolution of something as simple as saying I will pay attention to wildflowers this year. Another year one of my areas of focus was technology…and I found myself–again not by conscious planning–buying my first hand-held pda and transferring my calendar and address data base… something I had resistance to for years previously.

This last year one of the areas I chose was color. It is amazing what all I began to see in the world because I had decided to pay attention to color. I read the most marvelous book about the invention of the color mauve and how that invention affected x-rays, photography, fashion, and a host of other things. (In fact, the subtitle of the book contained the words: “The Color that Changed the World.” I also read a history of the color pallet which had wonderful lines like this in it:

The best way I’ve found of understanding this is to think not so much of something “being” a color but of it “doing” a color. The atoms in a ripe tomato are busy shivering–or dancing or singing; the metaphors can be as joyful as the colors they describe–in such a way that when white light falls on them absorb most of the blue and yellow light and they reject the red–meaning paradoxically that the “red” tomato is actually one that contains every wavelength except red.”
–Victoria Finlay writing in Color: A Natural History of the Palette

Hand carved color pencils from the Jewish Museum in Berlin

It would not be an over-statement for me to say that the idea of an object “doing” a color instead of “being” a color altered how I looked at the world permanently. And I thought I had chosen “color” because of the beauty!

I found myself buying a calendar called Colours at a design museum in London. When Jerele and I toured the Jewish Museum in Berlin, I could not pass up some wonderful thick, hand-carved color pencils which I keep in a cup on my bookshelf and look at every day while I’m working. An art book I saw mentioned in O Magazine called Wolf Kahn’s America: An Artist’s Travels jumped right out to me because of the beautiful colors, and I ordered the book immediately and often look at it during my quiet time in the mornings, being inspired by the serenity and peace of the beautiful paintings. I found that I was paying more attention to color when I planned a meal for friends: how about roasted cherry tomatoes along side the broccoli, and maybe some yellow lemon peel in the rice? It was if “color” were a way I was actually looking out at life…not just a “subject” I might be paying attention to.

	Colours, a calendar from a London design museum

Some of the most fun about all this is deciding what to choose. I’m never in a rush… I start thinking about what focus areas I’ll have for the new year usually in mid-December; and by the last week of the year I’m thinking about the possibilities a lot with so much joy. I have decided on two areas so far for 2004: photography and hospitality. In photography I’m going to pay attention to things like how to make photo albums using I-Photo on my Mac and also I’m going to pay attention to getting a few of my photos ready for a small exhibit by the end of the year. For hospitality, I don’t have a clue what is going to show up…the idea just keeps sticking up front in my mind, so I’m going to choose that area and see what happens. I’ll let you know next December! I will probably chose one more focus area for 2004 but I don’t know what that will be yet.

Wolf Kahn’s America: An Artist’s Travels

It’s so easy for me to get a rut, thinking about the same things, looking at the world in the same ways. I don’t want to do that. I want to stay awake, interested, learning, enjoying…and with so much variety, beauty, knowledge, pleasure in the world around us, how can anyone be bored?

By having three new focuses for 2004, I know I will be different next December 31. I’ll have had experiences, thoughts, dreams, adventures, conversations, ideas, and pleasures that I would not have had, had I not chosen to pay attention. I’m so excited!

And I wish the same for you. If you do something similar or decide to begin choosing an area or two for new focus in 2004, send me an email and let me know what you’ve chosen. And let me know from time to time during the year what you are experiencing!

Jerele and I live on a high hill, and I often take our dog Dusty to walk up the hill to the top where we can turn left or right and walk on the spine of the mountain in a straight line for several miles. But going up the hill is what is tough! One day recently, I was so tired by the time we reached the crest of the hill that I had to stop and rest. And fortunate for me. Because I rested right by a big cactus plant. I’m guessing the pads of this cactus plant were perhaps six inches across at least, seven, and 4 or 5 inches high. And there were several of them.

But what really struck me—in fact, startled me so much that I had to go closer—was that the cactus pads were solid purple. Now, I’m accustomed to seeing a cactus plant that is green. In fact, I’m expecting to see a cactus plant that is green. But there was not a spot of green anywhere on this cactus plant. It was purple. Really purple, not purple-tinged, not purple spotted, not green with a purple flower. The cactus was purple. I found this so beautiful that I wanted to turn around right then and go back home to get my camera! Until I remembered I’d have to walk up the hill again, so I decided I’d settle for just remembering this surprising plant.

I thought about this cactus that surprised me so much again last weekend when I walked into an art gallery in Santa Fe to see the paintings of a dear friend, Joan Bohls, whose work was part of a show having its opening that evening. There on the wall was a picture Joan had painted of a cactus. Her cactus even outdid my cactus! Red, green, yellow, pink—and even a little purple. A joyful painting. A painting that really makes the viewer look at the cactus and see it in a new way.

	Painting by Joan Bohls

Many, many years ago, I spent a few days in the Mojave Desert in an Outward Bound course. (If you’ve read my book Seven Choices: Finding Daylight after Loss Shatters Your World, you’ll remember my talking about this escapade in the “Integration” chapter.) When I was thinking about the cactus I saw on the hill above my house and about Joan’s cactus on canvas, I remembered that Outward Bound Course.

One afternoon each of us in the Outward Bound course was dropped off somewhere in the desert to survive alone. After I had spread out my plastic, set up my supplies, checked to be sure I had my food, there wasn’t anything else to do. No one to talk to. Nowhere to go. No assignment except just to be there. I remember that after a while, I started walking right around my campsite, being careful not to venture too far. (After all, this was where the Outward Bound folks knew where to look for me!)

As I walked, there was nothing to look at but the desert. Dirt, stones, rocks, desert plants, Joshua trees, and cactus. At first everything looked beige and dusty brown. But the slower I walked and the closer I looked, the more color I saw. I remember seeing a lot of purple. But I also remember seeing other colors, too. Pale yellow, ochre red, chocolate brown, gray, and green. In a rush, I had seen what I expected to see—beige and brown. When, really, what was present was a beautiful variety of colors. My eyes adapted because I was really looking.

A halo of light over Manhattan. Today’s New York Times announces that on September 15, 2003, Cai Guo-Qiang, the Chinese-born artist, will create a three-part pyrotechnic experience that will illuminate the New York City sky over Central Park. The display has “been created as a blessing for New York,” asserted the project director. The artist, Mr. Quo-Qiang, says that he intends the light display as a metaphor for “renewal, timelessness, benediction and wholeness.” Included in today’s announcement was the artist’s rendition of what his halo of light will look like when it floats in the New York City sky on September 15.

I had been thinking a lot about light, even before I read this announcement. Not too many weeks ago, I was struck by the unexpected beauty of light as I started down the staircase in my home. We have one of those sets of stairs that goes down for a bit from the second floor; then there is a landing. Then the stairs turn and go down a bit further to the main floor of the house. The builder thought to put two beautiful clear, etched-glass windows at the landing of the staircase. These windows were probably one of the reasons I was drawn to this house when we were looking for a place to live.

On this particular morning, I saw on the right-hand wall of the staircase a full replica of the glass window on the landing. It looks so real that you might think it was a window itself; and it was only the light coming in through the glass which was making a replica window on the wall where no window actually was. In many ways, the “unreal” window was more beautiful than the “real” window. I took several pictures with my digital.

Window Made of Light

The beauty of this “light window” stays with me. As do questions about “real” and “unreal.” When is something more beautiful because it isn’t “real”? I enjoy the real windows on the landing on my staircase; but I’ve never marveled, been stopped still, awed by them the way I was by the “unreal” light window made that morning on the solid wall.


The French writer Proust said once: “If I were dying,and the sun made a patch of light on the floor, my spirit would rise in happiness.” If you’ve read Seven Choices, you probably remember that I mentioned this quote when I wrote about deciding to put a skylight in my house after my husband died. And if you have read A Sacred Primer, you probably remember the story I told about the day when I was a little girl that I learned something about being a part of everything sitting on my grandparents’ farmhouse porch. Here is what I said in A Sacred Primer:

	Window Made of Glass; Window Made of Light

I was nine years old and visiting my grandparents on their farm in middle Georgia. It was an early summer afternoon. Grandma was at work in town, sewing doctors’ coats at the cotton mill. Grandpa was taking a nap before he went back to setting out sweet potato slips. I was sitting by myself on the front porch in a tall rocking chair with big wide arms.

Maybe it was the quiet everywhere. Maybe it was the little bubbles of molecules floating in front of my eyes in the hot summer air. Maybe it was the rhythm of the rocker. But I was pulled into something I had never known, a stillness beyond all stillness. My sense heightened and I could hear the corn blades in the field next to the house scrapping in the wind. I could feel their sharp sting as much as if Grandpa and I were walking down the rows looking for roasting ears to pull for supper. I could taste the mushy fig hanging on the bush at the edge of the porch. I felt the knobby trunk of the chinaberry tree. The corn, the fig, the tree–we were all one and the same.

And I could see farther than I had ever seen–all the way across the red clay road, over the pasture, past the stile Grandma and I climbed on Wednesday nights to go to prayer meeting, into the thick woods far in the distance. I could even see back into time, to the day when Daddy was a little boy and his baby brother fell into the water trough in the feed lot and drowned when nobody was looking. Back to the time somebody finally dug in the right place and–yeepee!–found the dishes and tableware Aunt Susanna had hidden that fateful day when Sherman’s troups marched through Georgia.

It wasn’t until the mailman honked to let us know Grandma’s package from Sears had arrived that I returned from the stillness. Returned, but forever changed. Even as a nine-year-old, I knew something important had happened. Today I can put words to the event. In those moments I knew another reality. I experienced timelessness and transcendence. In those moments of stillness I became one with all living things.

The stillness that day when I was nine was one with the light, the light that was like little floating molecules in front of my eyes. I’m sure, too, that you remember a time that light struck you as something amazing, sacred, full of awe, content-making, eye-opening. Isn’t it a paradox that something we can’t hold in our hands can make such a powerful impact on our hearts?