Color, chaos, claustrophobia

Even if I'm not a painter, color moves me. I was thrilled on a recent trip on the Swiss autoroute to see three copper-colored cars among the monotonous white, black and gray. 

Bright colors, matching colors, soft pastels, all bring me a sense of peace among the chaos of today's world.

This painting in the Stubli of a St. Moritz hotel describes how I often feel. The color stands out against the world that surrounds me. It's not just the fear that my birth country is being destroyed from within, the difficulty despite alleged technological advances of things of the same technology's failures requiring days of trying to correct them of even to find a human to do it -- maybe. Covid does not frighten me the way those who have no desire to protect BOTH themselves and others scares me.

War is being threatened on the Ukraine border. I am not a genius but I knew that the Vietnamese would never attack Reading, Massachusetts. So many Vietnamese and Americans died for a lie. I knew there were no weapons of mass destruction, that once again people were being lied to. They were whipped up into a frenzy of patriotism for a lie. And once again the pressure of possible military violence is being circulated.

I shudder that as Blinken bemoans the loss of press freedom in Hong Kong, the U.S. is persecuting Julian Assange.

People worry about bad words in books as their children have alerts against possible shooters in school. It reminds me of my childhood hiding under my desk in drills against Russian bombs that were never to come.

Those are only a few of the black umbrellas around the colorful dress in the painting. There are so many more black umbrellas outside the frame that their images could fill a museum. 

I fight the claustrophobia of the evil and try and push back the grayer ones of the chaotic aspects of modern life.

My desire is to keep everything as simple as I can. To have the technology that makes my life easier work for me -- not against me. To be able to savor the calm. To have time to see what is before me. To not be attacked by too many possessions. To be able to concentrate on the moment, words, color, affection, sharing with those I care about. To have as few interruptions of what I'm doing. To celebrate Sherlock, my four-footed fuzzball, deciding he needs to play, pee or eat when I'm in the middle of writing.

Today, I will seek that feeling of peace, grabbing all the rainbows that seeps into my life. I will absorb the blue of the berries on my cereal, the almost red pink of my sweatpants, the gold stars decorating my laptop, the multi-color pattern of the duvet cover. When we go out, I will see the intensified colors of the cobblestones wet from the rain. I will look at the lake to see what color it is dressed in today. It has so many: brownish when the wind has churned up the water, aqua, light blue, marine blue.

I will use the balance that color gives me to put down the chaos to make sure each cell in my body knows that so much of my life is filled with beauty, of love, of pleasure. I may use that sense of peace to write or to revel in the pleasure of little actions, conversations of those around me.