Man makes all sorts of bizarre colors in his laboratories--blaring blues, unnatural purples, painful yellows, harrowing greens, exhausting reds, etc. All day long our eyes are bombarded with these colors. We see them on our computer screens, on television, magazine covers, and synthetic clothing. We get used to them. They seem normal. When they’re almost unbearable, we call them “electric” or “florescent.”
Unbearable is right.
I wonder what people might have thought of such colors only a hundred
years ago. Then go back two hundred and
three hundred and four hundred years.
What might the people have thought?
I’ll tell you what. They’d have
thought it was strange. Unnatural. Uncomfortable. Weird.
Frightening. Bizarre. Untrustworthy. Bad.
And on and on.
 |
| One second of one sunset out of several trillion. |
I’m not sure the human eye was meant to be assaulted in such
a way as is commonplace today. Clearly
we can “see” the colors, so our eyes are equipped to “digest” them, but that
doesn’t mean we should bombard ourselves with them. Our stomachs can digest some tree bark as
well, but that doesn’t mean that we should have it for dinner every night.
But no matter what the manufacturers do, they can’t beat the
true colors of nature. Even when they
photograph something and completely analyze the color and create a color in the
lab “exactly” like nature’s color, it’s still not the same. It’s just a dead color. The secret nature has, that none of the
manufacturers have figured out, is that all of her colors are alive. They are living, breathing colors, and since
they are living colors, they move. They
are fluid. You might not catch the
movement with your eyes, but your brain catches it. Your brain knows if it’s the “real deal” or
not.
Subtle, shifting, living colors that change. They start, they grow, they climax, they
decline--sometimes slowly, sometimes all in a few seconds. We sit back even in this “modern” day and
gasp--we gasp!--at the sheer beauty of nature’s colors, at their shifting,
shimmering light. Not a thousand
lab-created colors could do what a single sunset does in the blink of eye. We know it, and so do the manufacturers. Perhaps that’s why they have gotten so “loud”
with their announcements.
I just turn them off.
It’s best that way or you’ll miss the sunset. Like a snowflake, no two are the same.
