“Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?” -Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
(From Omni's color collection, see other colors highlighted elsewhere:)
This day is grey. The future seems grey to me today also. My mood is grey, so I speak of this shade today. I set out to go about my day, but suddenly I stop.
Autumn rains are soaking the forest around me now. Everything is cloaked in grey today, the sky, the trees, the air in between. The atmosphere swirls with water in many moods as well, ranging from rain, to windy almost-hail, to tiny gravity defying droplets gently suspended in the air, to being so completely encased in the cloud that all I can see at noon is an even, dismal, shade blanket between me and my remembered warm, bright, beloved daystar.
Grey reminds me of the level of our perception in which we use shadows to reveal the light, and light to reveal what is real. Grey is an acknowledgement of complexity, even an acceptance of a role for the dark in our path to understanding.
If you mix all of the colors together, as I found out as very young artist while mixing clay, you get grey. Grey does not bring clarity, it brings dimness. I ponder the presumed value of unclarity.
I recently heard an old grey woman extolling the virtues of aging. She says forgetting can be a gift, making more room in one's attention for now. And she says her poor eyesight makes the world more beautiful because everything looks softer.
If fall is a time of the warm colors of the harvest slowly fading, then the result would be brown turning to grey, the color that beckons the winter snow. This grey is a shadow that falls like a curtain upon the land, only to bring the glittering crystal snow beacon of the coming newborn solstice light.
And so I sit here today enveloped in a comfortable modern cocoon, ensconced in a swirl of mostly symbolic grey, meditating on the apparent need for the color grey.
Or the non color grey, because without color, grey is the very definition of the absence of color. But as an artist I know that the proverbial many shades of grey are often merely darkened colors, veiled with earthy duff and stuff. To make a shade, you darken a color.
Anyway, if grey had no color, why do I get the blues when it's like this outside? So we nervous creatures feverishly pad our centrally heated cave this season and festoon it with lights, to chase away the menacing gloom.
But first, I pause. I sit very still and ask what it is I really need to do. I listen deeply for that still and small voice. All around things are falling, dying. All of this returns to dust, I observe.
I consider all of things we do, the things we make, accomplish, acquire. I ask why and if all of the things we run around chasing after all year long are so important.
I sit just there in the grey, waiting for the inner guidance that I believe always comes whenever I ask, listen, and wait. I know that the moment when I get the inspiration, I will enthusiastically rise up and joyfully go do the next thing. I wonder...
You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather. -Pema Chodron
