Madness Part 1:The Color Green

This last week has indeed been a whirl of glorious madness, of much writing, not enough thinking, and very little sleep, St. Augustine, anberlin. . .and the color green.

To be quite honest, I'm having some difficulty recollecting the exact order of events. Suffice it to say that every shred of my "spare" time was consumed by my efforts to complete my Term Paper and college applications. . . and all the random tasks that are a part of normal life.

The trouble with the Term Paper is that it was also my writing sample for the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola. . .and, as I was told by Mr. Bartel, this "should be the best thing you have ever written" and I should "make every word beautiful".

Talk about pressure.

I survived though, and in the process, gained a deeper appreciation for St. Augustine than I could have gained any other way. Still, as I suppose I always will, I wish I could have done better. The harder I worked, the more I realized how utterly incompetent I am. I guess that's just how life is; we are always striving for a perfection we cannot hope to reach.

One afternoon, waking from a much needed hour-long nap, I had a curious revalation.

I saw the color green for the first time.

Now, clearly, I have seen the color green before, but. . .I had never seen it, if you take my meaning. That is to say, I had never before seen anything inately beautiful about green. Not so with other colors, such as deep, vibrant reds and natural, rustic browns. . .

ok, so call me crazy, but I like color. . .maybe it's left over from my failed attempts at painting.

Anyway, I never really saw what was so great about the color green, never understood why anyone would want an emerald. Any aesthetic appreciation for the color was bound up in associations; for example, "Green reminds me of beautiful Irish hills" or "Green reminds me of beautiful pine trees on the mountains", etc. It's not that I didn't like green. . .I just didn't see what was so great about it. . .It was a color to be used when other colors were used up, when you had already squeezed all of the glorious maroon and electric teal out of the paint tubes.

I'm beginning to see how ridicuous this is. Maybe I was just still sleepy.

Anyway, I looked out my window and saw my world in the fading sunlight. . .

The scene itself was beautiful, the commonplace backyard and poorly kept houses bathed in golden light, as if some abundantly wealthy King, in a fit of luxury, had ordered them so gilt.

But it was not the scene that grabbed my attention. It was the color green that flowed, from the groups of palm trees to the plastic bucket to the tangled vines on the woooden fence in disrepair. . .for the first time, I saw something beautiful about the color green seperate from nature scenes, without resorting to such adjectives as "bright" and "living". . .

okay, maybe it's not such a big deal as, maybe not worth telling anyone about, but in the midst of the madness and stress of the week, any glimpse of beauty was welcome, especially a beauty I had never tuly appreciated before. I ran to the other windows, staring out them to marvel at this new wonder, this new sight I had seen a thousand times before.