What Slips Through Your Fingers

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life

Wu-men, 13th century


Everything that matters to me is evanescent. Infancy, twilight, serenity. Sound, taste, color. I know I'm on to something holy when I try to grab it and it slips through my fingers. Even great art can't corral it. Matisse applies paint to canvas and leaves me something that makes a reference to permanence. But color itself can't be made material, can't be hung on a wall or worn around my wrist. It's a wavelength that enters my consciousness when I allow it in and sometimes grabs me by the neck and demands I pay attention to its fleeting hereness. Look at me, damn it. Look at the way crabapple blossoms send out beams of raspberry mixed with grape juice stain. I dare you to snare that shade and deposit it in the bank.

Everything begins with green. Green in spring and summer is so pervasive, so customary in the northeast that I take it for granted. I would be a different person if I woke up to the cream-caramel-pink of sand. I would be a different person if spirit had chose day-glo orange as the woodland wallpaper. Unimaginable. I rejoice at the return of green after the white-grey-brown winter and I want to write devotional prayers and love poems to it. But green is unimpressed. It just is and then it is not.

Set against the green outside my barn red house right now is a purplish rosy palette of magenta centaurea, cranesbill geranium, lipstick weigela and two different baptisias, one lilac fading into an aristocratic grey. An arrangement of blush, fuchsia and watermelon-colored Japanese primrose in the back garden is now past its season after sprouting up from seed donated by a friend. How do they do it? How do they grow and send out their own particular flavor of holiness, their own now-you-see-it-now-you-don't wavelength of the forever white light? The finite, the fleeting, the mortal arising out of the infinite.

Life's like that. Color itself, so defiant, so resistant to capture, makes a worthy object for contemplation. I'm aware of turning to it when I need a break from the effort of struggling with myself. Who else, after all, do I know well enough to struggle with, who else puts up such a good fight? I allow my gaze to settle on something in my field of vision, anything at all, a coffee cup. I say, look at the blue decoration on the cup. Blue. I make a mental note of it and somehow know that it's only passing through. Like my mother very late in the day of her life, sitting on a bench with me in Berkeley just before nightfall, looking up at the midnight blue of the California sky, the first stars flickering.

Lately, I find myself more than usually transfixed by babies and small children. The perfection of their feet, their lack of guile. These are not my children or grandchildren who all carry complex narratives of my invention. They are just centers of radiating warmth in little buttercup yellow dresses monkeying their mothers at the Coop. They are the small children who watch in graced unknowing as the wrinkled veterans ride by in the Stockbridge Memorial Day parade. That's the thing about babies and flowers. They wear their evanescence well.

Read some further observations on the miracle of the ordinary www.suzibanksbaum.com/blog/