My daily practice: Seeing Color in the Garden

Color is both a gratuitous gift and one of nature’s most sophisticated tools engineered to capture the attention of all living creatures. While the lure of color is universal, our response to it is personal and emotionally evocative. In a word: powerful.

A few years ago, in the midst of a particularly harsh rollercoaster of chronic sorrow and loss I became a very human stew of anxiety, fear, and depression. And then my dad died. I was gutted.

This project, which began around that time as a timid attempt to simply show up for an online 100-day challenge, has become a treasured daily practice. A meditative exercise that quiets my mind even on days when my clumsy attempts frustrate me and fall short of depicting what nature does so elegantly.

Naturally, the garden is the center of my practice because it is the lens through which I view the world. I am a gardener. Only in my grief did it occur to me that the garden is a proving ground for encountering great love (and no small measure of lust) along with heartbreak, loss, death and plenty of tedium—pretty good training wheels for life’s many challenges.

Seeing takes a beginner’s eye. You have to put away assumptions to really see everything that’s right in front of you. This ongoing practice of foraging for color has taught me to be mindful of and accept my own cycles of attention. Some days flow with a colorful chime. Others produce nothing but noise and a tiresome repetition that just about does me in. Usually, the doing of it is enough. And there’s always tomorrow… and the day after, and the one after that. Though not necessarily any easier, my practice has become second nature; a virtuous cycle that helps me to cultivates awareness.

I seriously doubt that I’ll ever pin down in pigment every color I see. Like the sun and light itself, the source of all color, my practice is in constant motion. Blue + yellow = green. But the greater truth is hours + days = life.

How we direct our attention matters.

Everyone knows when you’re looking for one thing you discover another. Posting my efforts to Instagram initially provided exterior accountability and a public witness of my private practice. But over time it has become a point of cherished connection with others.