ManicDDaily

Giotto Blue

I am right now in a beautiful country place.  My eyes are bathed in a bright light green.  I’m even wearing a light green sweater so I am literally surrounded by the color.

Though I’m also sitting beneath bright blue—not sky, but a screened-in porch, which I like to think of as a Giotto blue.  The paint does not shimmer like the green (or true Giotto blue, for that matter) but it’s still quite lovely.

All this loveliness.  It’s an odd time to think about death, but it’s amazing to me how the thought crops up.  “Crops” seems an anachronistic term till I think suddenly of the “Grim Reaper,” and then it all makes sense.  The fact is that just about anything that grows, dies.  (See how I manage to hedge that—“just about anything.”  How about “anything” plain and simple?)

Now you see it, now you don’t.

I’m not quite sure why I am thinking about this on a 4^th of July weekend.  Maybe it’s because when you return to a place that you have long returned to, especially a country place, where you see people you have long seen, but only periodically—you become very conscious of time’s passage.

So here I am in all this bright green, nearly the same bright green as in every single July I’ve spent in the last twenty to thirty years, but the people walking around the green are, well—balder, shakier, heavier, thinner, frailer, greyer, and, in the case of those who were very young in past years, perhaps even more beautiful, and also now able to cook.

Not quite so many day lilies by the garage, more down by the pond.

In my manicddaily way, I focus intensely on these kinds of changes, and can get very sad about them.  Manicddaily kinds of people tend to be extremely good at calling up past losses and imagining prospective ones.   I can become quite mournful even in the midst of what should be joyful moments at the absolute inevitability of loss, disappearance, death.

Some say that the best response to these types of feelings is “to be more in the moment”.  I’m not so sure.  For me, that poignant sense of loss is part of the moment (even if just the moment as experienced by my head or hormones.)

Okay, so maybe a better answer is to be more in the physical moment;  to focus on the coolness of the breeze against your skin, the green before your eyes, the gently warm sun lighting parts of both that green and skin.

But, sometimes the understanding of loss is part of  your physical experience of the moment as well as your mental experience, part of your very chemistry.

For me, one effective (though perhaps obvious) way to deal with this chemistry of loss is to try to summon up some kind of appreciation.  Gratitude  Even just relief.  Any one of these can work as a neutralizer, a base to the acid.

After all, I’m still right here, thinking these things through.  (Hurrah!)   And that mix of green and sun and breeze and Giotto blue is really quite wonderful, and also amazingly enduring.  At least, for now.