Laughing Ravens

  Color seems like a simple thing, right? A color is a color. Kids know what blue is.  Blue is always blue. There's something very concrete about color. Until it isn't.  As a little kid I learned that color is complex. First through paint, mixed with my fingers, where yellow and green made mucky brown. Then Playdoh taught me that yellow and blue didn't make green... but more of a vomit color. This was not looking good for my little color wheel. (I went looking for photos on the intertubes that would illustrate my childhood frustration, but apparently Playdoh has changed to remedy that frustration, so that now the colors do blend together according to the color wheel... but they sure didn't in the 1970's. Also of note in my search were the number of sites which offered homemade versions of Playdoh because apparently that's a thing.) At the same time, I was trying to understand how light changed color. My mom found these educational toys at a garage sale one weeke...

 I started out tonight, wanting to write about loss and grief... shit that makes me blue. But blue doesn't reflect my sadness. I like blue. As a child it was my absolute favorite color. I could never understand why folks saw sadness in it. When I feel the pangs of grief, they tug at the wet cold greys and the icy mud.  Fragmentary Blue Robert Frost (1874 – 1963) Why make so much of fragmentary blue In here and there a bird, or butterfly, Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye, When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue? Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)— Though some savants make earth include the sky; And blue so far above us comes so high, It only gives our wish for blue a whet.   Blue-Butterfly Day Robert Frost (1874 – 1963) It is blue-butterfly day here in spring, And with these sky-flakes down in flurry on flurry There is more unmixed color on the wing Than flowers will show for days unless they hurry. But these are flowers that fly and a...