Читать книгу Color - Karen Speerstra - Страница 10

The command of Genesis “Let there be light!” was so strong, according to the Hebrew tradition, that Adam could see from one end of the universe to the other. This primordial light is sometimes called a “Hidden Light.” Howard Schwartz, professor of English at the University of Missouri, describes it as coming forth from the place in the universe where the Temple in Jerusalem would one day stand. Some say it came when “God wrapped himself in a prayer shawl of light.” Where did it go? Perhaps it’s hidden in the stories of the Torah. Others say it’s not hidden at all, but only the righteous can see it.³

Our Divine Creator may have said, “Let there be time and space!” “Let there be a universe filled with possibility.” “Let there be a womblike environment for all things to grow.” But first, the Creator said, “Let there be light.” Why? Because our Creator wanted to have us help with the creating of something in His/Her image. We come from light and color. And we will return to light and color. Physicists tell us everything, every atom that forms what we see around us, inside us, and within everything on earth, and in fact, in all the planets we can number, once came from the stars. Every breath we take is “star-breath.” Kenneth F. Weaver, a science writer who died at 94 in 2010, once put it like this: “It may come as a shock to learn that nearly all the atoms in your body and in the earth were once part of a star that exploded and disintegrated, and that probably those same atoms were once the debris of still an earlier star.”⁴

People from around our globe tell various stories of how we were collectively birthed into light on that “first day.” The ancient Mayas-Quiché say in their sacred book, the Popol Vuh, that “The Heart of Heavens” was the “track of lightning,” the “flash that wounds.” Australian aborigines explain it like this: “In the Beginning the Earth was an infinite and murky plain, separated from the sky and from the great salt sea and smothered in a shadowy twilight. There were neither Sun nor moon nor Stars… On the morning of the First Day, the Sun felt the urge to be born… The Sun burst through the surface, flooding the land with golden light, warming the hollows under which each Ancestor lay sleeping…”⁵

The Maoris’ oral culture from New Zealand tells how Ranginui, the sky father, and Papatuanuku, the earth mother, came together and birthed seventy children. They were so close, however, that their embrace kept the light out so all their kids had to live in a world of darkness. Finally, a long, rhythmic, Maori creation chant tell us, the children managed to separate their parents from their embrace and then light streamed into the world.

From the conception the increase,

From the increase the thought,

From the thought the remembrance,

From the remembrance the consciousness.

From consciousness the desire…⁶

From nothing our planet received the begetting. It all came, Japanese traditions explain, from a place beyond. “Before the heavens and the earth came into existence, all was a chaos, unimaginably limitless and without definite shape or form. Eon followed eon: then, lo! out of this boundless, shapeless mass something light and transparent rose up and formed the heaven. This was the Plain of High Heaven.”⁷

The Kono people of New Guinea tell the story of how the tou-tou bird sang its first notes and that brought light. The Yoruba people of Nigeria sing of Olorun, a great being in the sky who sparked gases into an explosion and from this fireball came earth’s light. And the Mossi people of Africa say everything originally came from truth. Interestingly enough, the ancient Greeks also used the same word for “light” as for “truth.”

Scientists tell us blue-green algae and bacteria lived on our planet for two billion years — all alone. From these first colors sprouted all life.