Our Lady of the Lakes: Longing for color

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Longing for color

I don't know if it's the cold weather or what, but I'm thinking a lot about home decorating lately. And I'm really getting the itch to do a little painting in my house. Though it was the living room I was really wanting to do before, my new area of particular interest is my bedroom. My idea is to do a bold turquoise wall behind my vanity to create a fun, relaxing space for dressing and getting ready in the morning.

So I've been poking around, I stopped in town to look at paint chips, and this evening I looked for some examples of bold turquoises I like. I once had a scarab that my elementary school friend Lisa brought back from Egypt, and this is kind of the color I'm thinking about, to contrast dramatically with my deep red comforter.

I like the idea of using non-toxic paints, so I'm leaning toward Mythic, and I think I'm mostly settled on Island Magic, below. It would probably be more sensible to take time and think about it, and consider the other shades a bit more, and bring home chips to look at in different light, but I'm feeling like doing something whimsical, and buying a quart of bright paint to color a wall seems like it could be just the thing.

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I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) (Walden or Life in the Woods)

Listener up there! Here, you! What have you to confide to me?
Look in my face, while I snuff the sidle of evening;
Talk honestly—no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large—I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh—I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work? Who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove already too late?

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me—he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable;
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me;
It flings my likeness after the rest, and true as any, on the shadow’d wilds;
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air—I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself