I Can See In Color

Week 10. Women on the Threshold

The house is quiet this morning, the way it is before the grandchildren wake. The same kitchen, the same window, the same cup of tea going cold while I write. Nothing here has changed. And yet I can see all of it — the light through the glass, the green outside, the gold pooling on the table — as if someone reached over and turned the color back on. That is the only way I know I am through the gate. Not because the world rearranged itself. Because I can finally see it.

That is what these ten weeks turned out to be about, though I couldn’t have told you so at the start. Not a new life. The same life, seen in color. I did not get a different house, a different body, or fewer people to carry. I regained my sight, my inner vision. The thing I kept calling self wealth was never out there waiting to be acquired. It was the ability to look at my own ordinary life and see how saturated with color it has been all along.

Ten weeks ago I began at a door, in black and white — standing at the threshold of a life drained of color, the grey of the silenced and the beige of the always-available. Look back down the path now and you can watch the color come up, week by week, one doorway after another, until the whole spectrum was lit. I won’t walk you back through it; the images below tell that story better than another paragraph could. I’ll only say that I learned to see by learning to want, to grieve, to speak, and to stay.

The other week I mentioned Denver — the young woman in Toni Morrison’s book, Beloved– who loved her family— but could not leave the yard, until the day she walked herself out the front gate into a world she had every reason to fear. In Week 8 I left her there, at the gate, mid-step.

Here is what I have learned since: the gate and the color are the same thing. You do not cross first and wait for the world to brighten later. The crossing is the brightening. The instant her foot clears the threshold is the instant she can see.

And Denver did not cross empty-handed. Neither have I. I have carried something for years — a book, I Can See In Color, held so long in the dark that I half forgot it was alive.

It turns out that crossing the threshold and delivering what you carried are the same motion.

That is the part I most need you to hear. The point was never to become a more colorful woman. The point was the work, the words, the witness, the thing made and handed forward. You have watched a woman walk through ten colors. What I hope stays with you is not the woman. It is what she made.

Octavia Butler has been beside us since the first day: there is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.

I understand her now in a way I did not in Week 1. The full spectrum was never a set of colors I went out and collected. It is simply what a sun makes.

Become a source of your own light, and the color follows — all of it, root to crown, the whole body lit.

I am not at the gate anymore, and I am not straining toward a horizon. I am in the field, in the Summer, looking back at a life I can finally see and down at work still warm in my hands. There is nothing left to chase. There is only this. I can see in color.

What can you see now that you could not see at the door?

The answers you seek are within you.

A prayer for this week

May you come to your own threshold and find that the crossing and the color are one. May you stop chasing a brighter life and finally see the one you already have, lit all the way through. May you become a sun and make new color the world has not seen yet. And may everything you have carried in the dark be born now, into the light.

Lineage. Truth. Light.

Amen.