Colours

This morning, I look out from my window and see a delicate blue-grey colouring the sky to the north-west. I have been exploring removing myself from the yes / no polarities that surround me and colours help me to do this.

It began as I contemplated my belly in the bedroom mirror. I could lose a few pounds quite happily. Well... more than a few. Yet I don't choose to dwell on being fat as opposed to being thin. I could gain a few thousand dollars in my bank account - now that it is time to start planning the extensive landscaping needed here, where last summer there was mud surrounding a brand new construction. I don't choose to dwell on having as opposed to not having. I am exploring what it feels like to remove myself entirely from these dichotomous concerns. Colours help.

This is not unprecedented for me. There was a time, some decades ago, when I explored removing myself from what I then saw as the tyranny of words, the limitation of my experience of things through the myriad definitions that make up our sense of the world. Words like tree, ground, sky, dog... mother, rock, car....

We first, as young children, experience the world without definitions to mediate between our direct knowing and our mind's interpretations. Later, we learn more and more words, acquire more and more definitions. These definitions come to stand between self and world, so that tree is known as much through the word and our previous experiences of tree as it is through our direct experience of it in the Now. That seemed to me to be a terrible thing. I resolved to experience sometimes without words, to intentionally refrain from defining, describing, limiting the experience by assigning words to it. This latest exploration has a similar feel to it. I am removing myself from the whole structure of this as opposed to that.

What if I am this Lu in the moment rather than being this overweight Lu or this not overweight Lu? Can I simply refrain from defining myself as rich or poor, having or not having, lucky or unlucky? And like the earlier exploration of living in a world without words to mediate my experience, this feels like a quiet place, a very simple place.

The thing that I like about colours is that they have no opposition in the world. Oh, I know that we speak of complementary colours and opposite colours - blue and yellow for example. I don't see the duality inherent there. It is no mere accident that we speak of the colour wheel. The circle of colours corresponds for me with the 360 degrees of selfhood, the totality of my experiences summed and held inclusively, each enriching the other.

It is my intention to move completely outside of duality, to BE in a new place, where lack and abundance, for example, do not signify. Both are dissolved in the totality of my acceptance of, and appreciation for, the moment in which I find myself. The colours that surround me in the moment, complete within themselves, as I am, as every thing is, remind me to fully enter into my immediate experience of the Now, complete, whole, perfect.