- Relevant: a Brain Pickings article on the book
- “The power of profound meaning is blue, said Kandinsky, blue is concentric motion. Of red he wrote, “Red rings inwardly with a determined and powerful intensity. It glows in itself, maturely, and does not distribute its vigor aimlessly.””
- “But colors are not possessions; they are the intimate revelations of an energy field. “Colours are the deeds and sufferings of light,” wrote German poet and dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They are light waves with mathematically precise lengths, and they are deep, resonant mysteries with boundless subjectivity.”
- “It has been shown that the words for colors enter evolving languages in this order, nearly universally: black, white, and red, then yellow and green (in either order), with green covering blue until blue comes into itself. Once blue is acquired, it eclipses green. Once named, blue pushes green into a less definite version. Green confusion is manifest in turquoise, the is-it-blue-or-is-it-green color.”
- Surya = Indian deity of the sun, single ruler of light, control over domain of color
- Relatable: “I was weary of rooms with sparkles on their ceiling plaster…”
- Cool place: the Topock/Mystic Maze, a geoglpyh in southern CA
Perhaps to know so familiar a place better it must become strange again.
Always remember that the value of any given stone is strictly dependent upon how much someone wants it—that is, a stone’s value is by no measure absolute. — R. V. Dietrich, Stones
- “Turquoise from the Nevada mines bore a notable amount of matrix, stone with thin veinlets of other minerals. Without the matrix, it was said to be the purest sky-blue in color.
- “Dreams remembered over time became oral myths, or “dreamed singings.” In these song-stories, the telling varied. The plot and tune remained fluid, and few events occurred other than the journey itself. To tell your story you recited the names of things, the springs, rocks, plants, animals, stars, mountains, rivers. To tell your story you sang a map. You set geography to voice.”
- “Desert dark is velvet dark.”
- This concept made me smile: “our salsa farm… the beds of tomatoes, chiles, cilantro, and onions.”
- “It was the palest turquoise I had ever seen, a robin’s-egg blue, which is not the color of leaves or sun on a spring day but the color of the space between them, the pool of light beneath the greenery that envelops and camouflages the nest.”
- “The Egyptians, for whom blue was truth, saw the color of daybreak in lapis lazuli. They considered lapis as precious as gold, partly because of its scarcity—and why not, if you worship Ra the sun and consider each dawn a tenuous miracle after night’s darkness?”
- “Precious stones speak of status and power, it is true, but also of how humans hold great space in their souls for color.”
- “There are nine different words in Maya for the color blue in the comprehensive Porrúa Spanish-Maya Dictionary but just three Spanish translations, leaving six butterflies that can be seen only by the Maya, proving beyond doubt that when a language dies six butterflies disappear from the consciousness of the earth.” — EARL SHORRIS, “The Last Word”
- Made me laugh: “…thick cover of green that stretches far into the horizon like giant broccoli gone berserk.”
- The idea that the tourism/hotel industry is analogous to mining: “land shaved to reveal a rough and raw nakedness, infrastructure installed, laborers swarming the premises. Here the ore is a spectrum of color that feeds a human longing for bliss. Here is the mining of Caribbean blues.”
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Interesting how much people invest in studying their ancestry and genealogy, as a status symbol or whatnot, compared to our short attention span for the future— even though our “actions affect the future more than they affect the past.”
What if all this fierce attention were given not to the generations behind but to the generations to come?
- “Behind the houses of Nishapur, the ancient Persians grew small garden paradises—pairi-daēzas (from pairi, “around,” and daēza, a wall or enclosure). In these gardens they mixed iris and saffron, a plant that prefers the sunniest locations and driest soils.”