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INTRODUCTION

“Color is the language of light;

it adorns the earth with beauty.

Through color light brings its passion,

kindness and imagination to all things:

pink to granite, green to leaves,

blue to ocean, yellow to dawn.”

John O’Donohue, Beauty

What did Jesus really mean two thousand years ago when he told a small group of ordinary people sitting around him on a remote Middle Eastern hillside: “You are the light of the world”? What did those fisherfolk know of physics? What do I, for that matter? Or you? Or even physicists, come to think of it, because our scientific understandings of color and light change over time and color theories shift as surely as moonbeams. But if, as this book claims, color is the language of light, and we are light, then you and I — and those scraggly Galileans lounging in the grass as described in the fifth chapter of the book of Matthew — embody all the color that fills this world.

Colors tap down deep into the very roots of our archetypes — of who we are — and offer truths that need no persuasion to be real. Colors pull the heart along a rainbow path familiar to anyone who has ever stood in dripping sunshine and looked up.

I walk my Vermont pathways and marvel at tiny neon-orange mushrooms — electric-orange aliens perched on a stretch of moss. I’m in awe of metallicgreen wings of insects and the deep pinks leading to black seeds hidden in peony petals. I count the shades of gray in the sky. But what if, in addition to taking color in, we also give color off? What if we are transformed from color observers to color emitters?

While writing Sophia: the Feminine Face of God, I read a great deal about one of the nineteenth-century Russian Sophiologists, Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov. From his poetry and essays I realize that color and light are integral to the understanding of the Divine Feminine Force that inhabits and colors our lives. This understanding can bridge all sorts of dualisms (men vs. women, liberal vs. conservative, light vs. dark) to create rainbow-circled “wholes.” Yet even in unity, each colorful soul maintains its unique distinction. We, too, remain who we are, but by melding of “opposites” into one, we discover that we are so much more than we once thought we were. And, best of all, we’re free to color outside the lines! The Bible calls this feminine divine figure Lady Wisdom — “a reflection of eternal light… fairer than the sun.”

When she was a little girl, Mary Catherine Bateson, daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, loved to make up stories. One fairy tale she told her mother was about a sad and very dreary kingdom that had no color. Everything was the same. Only the princess could see color and differences but by showing others how to see as she did, she brought new life (and diversity) to the kingdom.

Color sucks our feet up and out from our muddy tracks and places them on sure footing. But this path is like no other. It’s like walking on a crusty rainbow or dancing inside a flashing kaleidoscope. We twist the kaleidoscope just a teeny bit—not adding any more colored bits to the mix, but simply shifting it—and a whole new mandala appears. We live in a multi-hued “world soul.” A world fully penetrated by Her light rays. She brings new life to our kingdom.

But it’s not enough just to reflect on Her beauty, Her colors. We actually reflect them. How? By loving. Loving others, loving our world, and most importantly, by truly loving ourselves. Even when we feel goofy gray and sad-sack brown. Even when we face that “Dark [colorless] Night of the Soul,” as John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic described it, She sends Her colors into our minds, into our bodies, and most importantly of all, into our soul-spirits.

Contemplating writing a book on color, I closed my eyes and stretched out on the bed one morning in direct eastern sunshine and saw squares of the most intense reds I’d ever seen. They were far from solid, but broken into wavy reflective pieces of the sun. I wasn’t experiencing those sharp shards of intense colors that sometimes preview a migraine. Instead, I was wrapped in gentle yet commanding reds. At first it seemed somebody had glued a carefully stitched quilt to my retinas. The color-pieces were constructed in such a way that no bit of it was boringly the exact same color. It was all a shimmering, strong red but each textured piece a bit different—some surfaces looked rough, some smooth, some lines were a bit wider than others, some squares had red circles in them and the pieces were not perfectly or geometrically-rigidly formed. I saw brilliant apple reds, crimsons, and clarets, vermillions and maroons. Some pieces seemed to be smaller rectangles than others but together they formed a perfectly woven, shimmering tapestry. It saddened me to realize that if I blinked it would all disappear and I had no way to scan it and print it out. As I was held captive by these vivid and varying red colors, my inner self just said, “Ohhhhh.” I didn’t want them to go away, but of course they did. I shook my head, got up, crossed the hallway to my office, and scribbled down a draft table of contents for a book on “color.”

As soon as I began typing, my confidence was shaken. I wasn’t a color expert. What could I possibly add? But the sunshine-retina inner experience of that morning-red called me to want to try to figure out how colors and the many ways we experience them help to form our spiritual selves. Artists and clothing manufacturers, color theorists, interior decorators and landscape architects already know a great deal about color — but do they address our inner selves? Chromo-therapy tackles color and healing. But how does Sophia experience color? How do I? How do colors feed and shape my soul? That’s the question that continued to flicker as the word became pages and the pages became chapters.

When Jesus spoke to his disciples gathered on the hilltop, he said you’re not just light. You’re also salt. When I think of light and salt, I think of light as coming from the sun and salt coming from the earth. My husband and I recently crowded into an antique lift and decended a shaft deep into the Wieliczka historic salt mine deep in Poland’s Carpathian mountains. Salt has been mined here for seven hundred years. Methane gas, fires, water, tunnel collapses — over the years, miners found it very dangerous work. Chapels for miners, marked by religious salt sculptures they have created, dot the passageways through two hundred miles of underground chambers. Breathing in the “gray gold,” my lungs were bathed in the mine’s refreshing, healing, sweet, salty air. Breathing salt air, as anyone who has spent time near the ocean knows, is a rare and healing gift.

We are surrounded, up and down, with color from light as well as the “salty” earthy colors we get from chemicals, minerals, resins, insects, and plants.

The Buddhist Dogen said, “Handle even a single leaf of green in such a way that it manifests the body of the Buddha.” Every leaf ! Every color! Together we can learn to read the language of light.