Life is Green

To walk through woods today was to pass through a sea of green light, shifting all around me, mesmeric. Every colour, every shade, drawing me in, drawing me on. I could have been lost had I not known these trees so well.

There are two things going on. First of course colour. Green lives deep within us, restful and calming. Medical studies have documented the cognitive and physical benefits of exposure to the colour green, its measurable ability to enhance healing and well-being.

This morning there was every shade. Those yellow greens that are like toddlers, so bursting with life you can almost see them growing. Light greens, dark greens, blue greens, brown greens and grey greens. And somewhere out there is a purple green. You can see it in your peripheral vision, but never quite get it into focus. Maybe it's sitting beyond the bandwidth of our visual perception and we just sense it there. And then it is there, on the upturned underside of the Scot’s Pine needles.

Beyond this, there is the pattern of shapes, endless repetitive leaves, yet no two exactly the same three-dimensional form. Our minds are programmed to find patterns, yet we find these natural variations much less stressful, easier on the eye, than the identical repetitions made by machines. Communities of infinite variation are what our eyes evolved to make sense of, how we spot the deer, berry, nut or the wolf among the million leaves.

And the shifting layers of light running through and the gentle movement of the breeze, the only marks of time to lift me from my trance, this day of green.