INORDINARY DAYS

Such a normal image amid such grief.

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A twenty-five-pound cat named Steve lays on the keyboard, weighty and insistent as the events that have stolen my hours and pieces of my heart this week. You are most likely feeling the same. That is, an apparent difficulty in casting thoughts of what has transpired aside.

We have so many things to talk about, don’t we? I suspect some of you are expecting me to write about the details of a challenging cancer season. Even that didn’t make it to the top of my list.

I close my eyes, which is how I often think, sometimes type, and notice the softest orange where darkness should live. Thinking the glow is coming from my desk lamp, I adjust its position.

But there is no fixing this.  

Biologically, what I am seeing is not generated from some outside source, but a mystical light show within, formed from cells sending electrical signals to the brain—a memory of sorts—even where nothingness exists.    

Light piercing darkness. My cells have willed what is seen into being.

Orange. The color of childlike enthusiasm is what I see—
Of sun rising over desert.
Of balloons eager in their wanting to be set free.
Of hair gifted only to two percent of us.
Orange as fiery as a mother’s love.

I imagine [even hope a little] that you are seeing orange along with me.

What is both perplexing and a marvel is that we humans can go about our days…amid such horror…in the presence of such grief.

Between waking and rising, a greater tenderness toward the ones I hold as precious is seeping from me like an uncontrollable tear.  Greater love, and the appreciation of its tangible, touchable nearness seems the only productive response.

The rabbit hole of curiosity and anger, the human condition of needing to come up close, is wide and luring, beckoning me to peer over and down, calling me to remain enraptured with this embodied evil, locked in its grip.

But the orange is relentless…permeating, this color of life and of a holiness dipped in the dye of a nation’s tears.

If Orange could talk it would implore me to “think on these things”—

Whatever is true. Whatever is pure. Whatever is lovely. Whatever is commendable. If there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise.

Not a particularly easy…or human response.

Yet, I have been instructed by the Great Colorist to focus on the orange balloons rising above a shattered and dying earth. Without this instruction I would be unable to pull myself out of bed—
To place the softest slippers on dissonant feet and will them to my morning place where matcha and cat await.

In this moment of complex fear, it is the simple things that bring joy, a revelation that breathing is not merely biological, but Gift.

As I bend the words to something that reads like the gnashing of the soul, Steve folds his body into an impossibly small circle for such an enormous cat, and he purrs himself into oblivion. I allow myself to slow my heartbeat to the cadence of this self-soothing, joining in a necessary healing despite what is.

Our bodies are not infinite, not designed to absorb all that gives evidence to a broken world. Our cells metastasize the grief not given over, thus His instruction to release.

Releasing is not easy. But then I imagine tiny hands letting go of helium-tied strings and hear the far-off squeals of delight.

The orange among us are said to be more creative, outgoing, confident, carefree. May these be the outpouring of this dark season where the memory of light pours in.

How curious that color evokes an emotion. Even more remarkable is that it works the other way.
What we feel is often experienced as a color*.

I am feeling orange today.

Impossible, it seems, to inhabit the color of laughter, of possibility and unending childhood when the adult world is so often bent on black.

 Innocence lost in these inordinary days seems so permanent and unfixable,
until I close my eyes and set my mind on the vastness of eternity.

NOTES
Maybe it’s a Mama thing. If so, the whole world is a Mama this week. Monuments in the greatest cities of our time are cloaked in an orange hue. We are all orange in our confounding, indescribable, inconceivable loss.

In passing someone shared, “But it’s so far away from us.”
I respond with a question, “What relevance is there of anything if we chose at random what makes us smile and what makes us weep?”

Our collective grief is evidence of a Creator who embeds us with what brings Him angst. We do not get to choose…

I did not get to choose to write about the ginger Bibas babies this week. It was a laboring of the spirit that I was called to do.  

Rest in peace sweet babies. You turned the whole world Orange.
And I think that’s the most remarkable thing to do.

 *On Color Synesthesia—

There are those of us who experience emotions as colors. This neurological response is involuntary, triggering a perception from one sense to another.

These color experiences happen automatically and cannot be controlled. Remarkably, each of us with color synesthesia has a unique color association for different emotions, sounds, or words.

All of creation is a wondrous mystery. I fix my eyes on this.