A Few of My Favorite Things 2 ~ color vision

on etsy shop

In church on Sundays the prayers ask us to reflect on what we are grateful for in our lives.  Things come and go, but I am often feeling blessed for experiencing colors.

There are those who are born without it and there are diseases that will take it way.  Apparently the latter fall into depression as their world enters a place of grays.

We grow up thinking everything witnesses the world as we see it.  But that is far from the truth.  There are blind cave critters.  Birds and insects stretch out a visual spectrum wider than ours.  But in the world of mammals it is rare to see as much color as we do.  Some distant relative of a primate had a mutation and ran with it.  We are blessed to see this world, even if at times they see horrific things.

I created the above piece to celebrate my neighbors surviving a fire and returning to be our neighbors.  Five family homes, connected by the walls of a row house and the trauma of a fire, became a place for me to create a rainbow.  Thinking about colors reminded me of this piece.  For it is a single piece whether it spread among five families or placed on etsy to raise money for the firefighters that caught my eye.

uncertain blendings --- bee purple, eternal life

My Biology students continue to read Anatomy of a Rose by Sharman Apt Russell. In the chapter on color she speaks of bee purple, something we can only believe in.

Pet peeve--- purple is not violet. As humans we can see a small range of colors, or a large range depending if you focus on wavelengths that we can't see or those that we do see. They range from red to violet. If you make a circle of that range and bring the edges together, you get purple...the blending of red light with violet light.

Bees see UV light. If you twist their range into a circle and blend... bee purple is created. Color only found in our imagination The fact that flowers look so amazing to us, is amazing. They could care less what we think. They want to catch the eye of a pollinator which sees true flower colors.

I am driving to work thinking about bee purple and wonder what would happen if we blend opposite ends of our thinking. What if we blended fear and joy? Purple visions of eternal life float through my brain. Fear of death. Joy of Resurrection. The Thrill of Hope.

...