.: … and driving back from Tucker’s, I found myself meditating on colors. Not a difficult thing to do, considering the quaintness and yule-ishness of these backroad, South Park neighborhoods: ’tis the season for the splendid carnival-blaze of lights, hanging icicle-lights, moving reindeer lights, and palm trees wrapped in diamond-white lights. Oh, I am sucker for christmas lights… in fact, I am a sucker for all things christmas. And as I drive up Fern Street, I figure out why, exactly: this is a time when people open themselves to the transition between worlds; not only of this world and its border on that (and of course you know what I mean), but on the present as it borders on the past. And not only that– or, I should say, even more important than that– is the belief that what lies beyond this world is generally beneficient; how else can you explain this persistent pagan ghost, the Saint Nicholas or Kris Kringle, that wizened old Celt who moved, as times changed, from the quiet, pine forests of central Europe to the far more abstract plains of the icy North Pole?

Flying reindeer, like the old hunts of the Woden, tamed for an age when gifts are a greater spiritual transport than the mushrooms that spring from the divine saliva, fallen from the mouths of the taxed reindeer.

Think about it: it is this that we welome with our beautiful lights, like circus-airstrips, leading into our homes, our hearths. Light serves as the gateway: the Norse again had it right, with Bifrost, the Rainbow Bridge; a spectrum of light that led from Midgard to Asgard; worlds joined by the energy that touches both but belongs to neither.

And that is what this meditation is on, really; the living vibrations that enrapture the eye and entangle the heart. I have always thought color a living thing, unbridled and shifting and only letting you glimpse it at odd angles, imperfect yet suggestive. But even so, it is an elusive power, and cannot fit into the decor schemes and paint tubes and catalog values that enumerate its shade but fail to convey its totality. After all, a shade of red can make me crumple to the couch and be wrapped in the soft flesh of luxurious recursions; the right yellow can crawl up my scalp and set my neurons to whistling and babbling out poetry; green can grow chlorophyll in my blood, making me a photoreceptor of nostalgia; and do not even mention purple, its majestic and marbled veins that can cleave flesh apart while its tongue enunciates ecstasies.

And so I find that I agree, in spirit, to the quote above… a phrase that circles through my mind as the frozen-fireworks slide by my side window. But I tell you all this: I think long and hard before I bring a color into my home. Not because of my decor, mind you– such that that is– but because I respect its power, and do not use it lightly; for it can be like a feral cat, with razor-sharp claws… if you bring it into your home, it just might tear you to pieces.