19.

Contrast

“A woman once told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you could imagine” –John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Somewhere just beneath the surface I have been thinking about contrast. I’m not sure that I’ve had a complete thought about it, and I’m certain that I haven’t had any sort of epiphany, but images of stark contrast keep popping up in my life.

I can’t shake two images that appeared on the front page of the newspaper last week. I opened the paper and there was a white-washed Wisconsin contrasted with a Tucson Palo Verde tree in a storm of yellow flowers. Two places that are so different and so much a part of who I have become, bright white and burning yellow both stirring things deep within me.

Yesterday on my run I daydreamed about Tucson in the snow. Palm fronds cradling white flakes against green walls; Barrel and Cholla and Saguaro cacti smoothed over; orange trees in full bloom, each orange capped with snow. I walked out my front door one afternoon and the world was suddenly different. I watched the snow through my bedroom window and ran around in my backyard, but after a little while it faded into rain and I went back to work. Only it didn’t stop and when I went outside again the entire world seemed transformed.

And then today I read an essay with the following:

“In Sunday’s New York Times David Richards reviews a stage performance by George C. Scott. To encompass it he proposes what he calls a ‘theory of contradictory impulses.” Scott excels in a mediocre role, Richards says, because before giving the audience one emotion, he gives a hint of its opposite: laughter before tears, hate before love. This works because it reflects how life is, each emotion closer to its opposite than to anything like itself.”

and

“As a child in Eastern Europe, fiber artist Neda Al-Hilali knit a lot of gray socks for the family, always gray. She lusted for color and when she once managed to get some bright yarn, she hid it as an American boy might his copy of Playboy, looking at it, touching, working in secret ecstasy under her bedcovers. Now she is internationally known for her mastery of color. And personally known as a wonderful cook—her classes usually end with festive party meals. When asked how she gets her colors so vibrant, she replies that she always puts a dash of the opposite color dye in the pot. ‘You know,’ she says, as if everyone does, ‘just like you put in a bit of an opposite spice when you cook’” (both quotes from Mary Paumier Jones’s “The Opposite of Saffron”)

If I had to guess, I would say that everything in me is seeking some form of self-sustainable balance, trying to heal in lots of little ways, all the time. And I think that I am both failing and succeeding a lot.