A Thousand Hues of Blue

Many many many moons ago, I traveled to Australia.  I went there and spent three weeks wandering the coastlines and countrysides; sleeping outside and waking to the most intense sunrises and shrill animal alarm clocks.  It was something else entirely...

But the thing that has always stuck with me was just how gold it was there.  I've rambled on about it to distraction, but it's true.

Everything in Australia is Gold: the sunsets, sunrises, mountains on the horizon; the dew coming off of grapevines in vineyards, the batter on fried fish and the taste of ice cream in the hot hot heat.  It's all just so gold.

Fast forward to only one moon ago... I've been away for a little over two weeks now, cruising around the Adriatic Sea and Dalmatian Coast.  And besides the obvious, the difference between this trip and that one of the distant golden past is the blueness of it all. I've never seen so many shades of blue before (save for the transition from sunset to dusk to night skies).  Everywhere here, there is blue.

There's the soft, almost dusty blue of early morning and late evening.  There's the blindingly bold blue of the midday sky.  There's the clear, dark, crisp blue of the Adriatic itself- so clean and so fresh and so startling.  There's the freshwater river-blue which is a step toward green but still so beautiful.  There are blues that are so bold they become almost violet through the right lens- a blushy, lush purple color that reminds me of dark hydrangeas.

There are blues that bracket the land.  Then the land itself becomes blue in certain lights- distant mountains take on that rich depth of color.  The blueness infringes on everything there, even the sun- spending time between the constantly changing sky and the constantly moving sea.

Every new shade of blue I met over the past few weeks chiseled a little bit more of my soul off.  These colors kept a part of me to themselves- a little sliver of me stayed behind in every one of those blue hues.  And I was happy to leave it.

It is one of the most profound perfections of nature- how many different shades of the same color are contained, refracted, and reflected there.  How many different bits blue there are in the Adriatic; how much gold is there in Australia.  It is a palette of unimaginable complexity and density with a quality that borders on addictiveness: how rich the world around us truly is- in life and color and goodness.

And if we can all give and take just a sliver of that liveliness, that blueness or goldness or goodness... imagine that.

And until next time... just imagine that.