Outer noticing, inner knowing
Story Time #09: A meditation on colour, healing + meaning with a flash memoir piece about my love affair with crystals
Story Time is a behind-the-scenes glimpse into my creative non-fiction projects, a place to explore brand story, life writing and the rhythms of the creative process.
There is a walk I take near my house, a path that winds around the fields I look onto. It’s a peaceful stretch where I’ll pass the odd dog walker, a keen runner or occasionally a tired farmer bobbing on a tractor through his land.
This year, the walk feels brighter, more alive. The oilseed rape is here for the first time since I moved, marking the landscape with shocking yellow. I’ve taken so many photos of the scene, looking as though a paintbrush has been swept across it. Bright citrine for the rapeseed, verdant green for the hedgerows, azure blue for the sky and then chalky white for the swirling clouds.
When I talk about colours like that — the citrine, the azure — it makes me feel like a bit of a wanker. I can imagine someone reading this and thinking, “You mean yellow and blue.” But the thing is, if you can’t describe colour, if you can’t appreciate the nuance of it and how that makes you feel, then you haven’t been lucky enough to enjoy colour fully. But there is time.
I live and breathe colour. I explore my Pantone books for brand palettes, and it’s one of many small joys I take from the design process. Colour can pull you in, turn you around, shift your mood and make you reflect.
Tell me you haven’t experienced it: greyish seascapes with cool mist that bring an eerie sense of calm or, in contrast, ombré skies of pink and purple that make you want to stop and stare.
“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
— Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds
The language of colour
I was in London with my daughter last week, and we went to the Tate Modern. She hadn’t been before and, at first, seemed unimpressed. We meandered from room to room, and I could see the look on her face: I could do this.
Modern art isn’t something I fully appreciate myself, but there is something about the atmosphere. When you stand before a Rothko, for instance, the sheer magnitude of the work pulls you in. You get a sense of darkness from some, lightness from others. He remarked that his paintings, “are involved with the scale of human feelings, the human drama, as much of it as I can express.”
Rothko also said of his work, “This kind of design may look simple…but it usually takes me many hours to get the proportions and colours just right. Everything has to lock together.” And this I do understand. The fact that the simplest creations can often take the longest.
“I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way.”
– Georgia O’Keeffe
Today, I spent time vision boarding and journaling, pulling out colours, graphics and words that speak to how I want to feel — alive, confident and energised.
The process is still unfinished, but it put me in a more thoughtful frame of mind, maybe even a state of active noticing. Truly seeing the world around me — the outer noticing — seems to influence the inner knowing.
On my walk this evening, I was somehow carried toward the war memorial. I don’t know quite what drew me there, to walk among the graves — achromatic in contrast with the canary fields — and study the headstones. I paused by the resting place of a man who lost both of his children. One child was 6 when he died, his younger brother was 1 at the time, and that younger brother died at 10.
While I could never claim to understand the pain this man had to endure, knowing some of that aching and longing pierced me a little. My mind then wandered to the friction between permanence and transience, between headstone and ashes. Of course, you can have both, but after 10 years of holding onto his felted urn, cut from the soft cocoon that carried him, I think I’m ready to gift Harris to the sea.
I turned for home, legs like lead, wondering what it is that pulls us toward certain colours and places, and how they can impact us in such profound ways.
Tell me about your favourite colour, or about a scene that lights you up when your beloved colours are showing off.
For those of you who had been following along with Story Time before my winter hiatus, you’ll know I share a piece of flash memoir from time to time. Today’s was written many moons ago, edited last night, and is a nod to colour and crystals.