Passing through green to reach it ...

Maureen Shaughnessy

I would like to share an excerpt from The Anthropology of Turquoise:
Meditations on Landscape, Art and Spirit by Ellen Meloy. Her book, which is a combination of memoir and natural history, is one I come back to again and again. I have kept it near my pillow, on my bedside table, for three years. It is an absolutely incredible work and I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves the land.

Sometime early in a child's life, neurobiologists speculate, light flavors the senses toward yellow, then, as we mature, sends us on to blue. Along this path, I was to pass through green to reach blue, there to feel not the press of its "enchanting nothingness," as Goethe wrote, but blue pulling me after it. But I am stuck. Stuck in between. Stuck in turquoise, the color of yearning, the color that borrows the concentric tension of green and holds blue's enchanting calm. --Ellen Meloy, 1946-2004

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