Light Blue

Light blue is not a color you are likely to find among the life-giving produce in the grocery store. You'll find many shades of green:  lettuces, spinach, and green beans.  Do you like yellow?  If so, you'll find bananas, squash, and corn to add to your color palette.  A range of reddish tones is also available, from apples to plums to tomatoes.  I wish you luck, however, if you want to find produce that is light blue.  (The closest you might get is that peculiar sheen that clouds the dark blue of blueberries.)

Despite this oddity of evolution, I've decided that light blue (the kind we see in a luminescent blue sky) might be one of the most nourishing of colors.  What got me to thinking this way was not looking at the sky (although I do enjoying doing so) but singing and listening to the words of a hymn sung to the tune of Sibelius's "Finlandia."

Even though that tune's name makes it sound like the national anthem of Finland, and even though it's opening line also makes it sound like a national anthem, the hymn we sang was written by a hymn-writer named Lloyd Stone in 1934.  Titled "This Is My Song," it was a very appropriate part of the worship service.  Nevertheless, even though it does begin as a prayer ("O God"), it quickly turns to thoughts of nationhood:

"This is my home, the country where my heart is.

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine."

The danger that my love for my own country might turn into nationalistic self-centeredness is tempered, however, by the wider awareness of the next two lines:

"... other hearts in other lands are beating

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine."

The next verse is where the role Nature -- as well as the color light blue -- come into play. My own emotion of love leads naturally to my feeling that the things I love have to be what is most wonderful.  That characteristic of passion is allowed for with the first lines of the next verse:

"My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,

And sunlight beams on clover-leaf and pine;"

But immediately, any tendency towards provincialism is countered by the expansiveness of that blue sky.  The next two lines ring with the wonderful recognition that:

"... other lands have sunlight too, and clover,

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine."

Yes, we, in each of our countries of the world, have our own species of plants, our own forms of produce. Different species and varieties have been developed for different soils and different climates.  But none of us can claim that the sky is exclusively ours.

When our spirits and souls need to be nourished by a wider vision and a wider love for other nations, light blue might be the color we need.  We may not be able to remember the words to "This Is My Song." But we can remember the spirit of its words each opportunity we have to notice that the sky is a luminescent light blue.

~~~

What helps you counter our human tendency toward provincialism?

You can read the song's entire lyrics at this external link: "This Is My Song."

Getting Wisdom from Mountains

When I think back to my American history classes in public school, I think that mountains got mentioned mostly as something challenging to be crossed.  First, there was European-Americans' discovery of the Cumberland Gap through the Appalachian Mountains.  Later, there was Lewis and Clark's challenge of getting over the immense Rockies if they were going to reach the Pacific Coast.

Today, when I browse in the works of a number of Chinese writers, I find them mentioning mountains more as a means for growing in wisdom.  True, the contrast might come from a difference in genre (literature contrasted with history).  But maybe there is also a difference between East and West.

Li Po

More than once do mountains raise their head in the poetry of the 8th-century Li Po, a romantic lover of simple life and fellowship.  My favorite is the deceptively simple four-line poem entitled "The Ching-ting Mountain":

"Flocks of birds have flown high and away;

A solitary drift of cloud, too, has gone, wandering on.

And I sit alone with the Ching-ting Peak, towering beyond.

We never grow tired of each other, the mountain and I."

Li Po's saying he sat alone with a mountain made me recall an Oriental painting on a book jacket for an anthology of writers about Nature.  The painting depicted a boy, seated in the branch of a tree, his back to the viewer, looking at a not too distant mountain.  What might I see as I look through that boy's eyes?

Several years back, my wife saw a film in which she got a good look at the great mountains of China, and she was surprised to discover that they do actually rise up, and up, and up -- just the way they do in traditional Chinese paintings.  Until then, she always thought the painters had been exaggerating for artistic effect.

In Chinese landscape paintings, mountains are frequently dominant. The early 20th-century writer Lin Yutang, who emigrated from China to the U.S., made an insightful observation about the smallness of the human figures in contrast to the mountains.  He wrote: "Nature... if it can cure nothing else... can cure man of megalomania... That is why Chinese paintings always paint human figures so small in a landscape."

My wife and I have had the joy of visiting the U.S. national parks that straddle the Rocky Mountains:  Rocky Mt. Natl. Park and Glacier Natl. Park.  When I recall those trips, I remember our driving the winding roads built by venturesome and hard-working laborers, thus allowing tourists today to venture in a way Lewis and Clark never could have.  I remember taking photographs from a number of lookout points.  The sights were beautiful.  However, if I struggle for words to state succinctly my impression of the mountains, almost comically I can come up only with the word "big."   Yet, I would not mind, like Li Po, having a chance to just sit for a while and contemplate a mountain.

~~~

Have your traveled in mountains?  What were your impressions?

(The Li Po poem, trans. by Shigeyoshi Obata, is from The Works of Li Po, by Obata, © 1922.)

(The Lin Yutang quotation is fromThe Importance of Living, by Lin Yutang, © 1937.)

(The drawing of Li Po is in the Public Domain, its copyright having expired.)