Looking for Color

From a distance the world around me is still and brown. I live on a wooded hill. When I look out the window behind the house I see a tangle of fat and thin brown trunks all the way up to the ridge. The ground is covered with brown leaves and brown dirt and brown rocks. The sky varies between blue and white. Looking out the front windows there is more color but most of that is due to things outside of nature. I went for a walk the other day. I took M and my camera. I told her we were going to try and find signs of life out here in this monochromatic hillside. I helped her learn to still herself a bit and really look around at the surrounding details. We made some lively discoveries in the pictures below.

BLUE!! I think a blue sky is a beautiful backdrop. It goes pretty well with brown too.

Yeah so it’s another brown tree but I was intrigued by the centipede like patterns under the bark.

ORANGE!! M and I couldn’t resist digging this up with a stick. It felt kind of rubbery. We both decided it was some kind of fungus.

Green!! Even in the tiniest of buds there is so much color. This one had threads of red and purple running through it.

GREEN!! The backside of the hill gets a lot more sun. I was amazed to see that the bushes on that side of the ridge had already leafed out it felt like another world over there.

BLUE!! This is what the path looks like at the top of the ridge. Thankfully the sky was blue.

PURPLE!! (my favorite color) and GREEN!! This plant was given to me by a neighbor last fall after I commented on its unusualness. She plucked it off a rock and told me to just set it on the ground. I simply placed it on the ground next to a rock and it is still there.

So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Here.Forward. in light of the walks I’ve been taking on the ridge. The ridge has recently been cleared for walking. Cleared as in, huge machines came in to knock and tear down trees. It isn’t a very pretty sight when you look at how many trees were just on the edge of the path and were shred standing up. Or the many dead trees that were just tossed into a jumbled pile off the side of the path. It really is a tangly mess of destruction. Oh, this happened just over a year ago- well in the past. What amazes me as I walk around up there is that there is an overwhelming abundance of life budding in the midst of the signs of trauma that have been left behind. Even the tree stumps that have been cut to the ground have multiple shoots circling them with buds. Despite everything that has been killed, life keeps moving forward.