Light

So, I'm driving today to Carlsbad Flower show thingamajigger with Karla, her sister, and nephew Isaac, who's six months old. We see some flowers on the side of the road, purples, pinks, yellows. And I'm wondering how his little mind is perceiving it. He's still in an oral stage, sticking stuff into his mouth and fascinated with novel sounds, particularly, it seems, trying to make the connection between object movement and sounds. His little brow furrows if there's a sound he hasn't heard before and he wants to investigate. I'm watching the other cars drive by, reds and whites, and silvers, and I'm thinking of how we process color. Essentially, as far as I understand the physics of color, each object absorbs each color on the light spectrum except for the frequency we finally perceive and associate with the object. So, a red ball absorbs all the rest of the light except red. It's like the world is comprised of rejected light, the color not absorbed by the object bounces off and we perceive it. As if the physical world is the negative image of reality. Each object accepting so much light. I'm also fascinated by the idea of the evolution of the use of color, the many metal cars painted with modern methods, mixed, selected, synthetic. But the origin, of course is in nature. We perceive colors in nature, in the body, in animals, in plants, in rocks. In ground up rocks and minerals. There's an earthiness to color in its origin. And it's as if the colors of the objects we see around us are distortions of that nature. In essence, then, a distorted negative image all around us. As if the world is inside out. And I'm wondering what we would see in the objects if we saw them for what they accepted. Although what little understanding I hhave of the psychedelic or spiritual vision suggests that even the way that's phrased is too static. Things are vibrating, processing, changing, even as we perceive them as static. The need or desire to keep them static is the result of limited mind, of narrow mind. Just as the mark of maturity is to allow things to change, evolve, grow, to recognize process and impermanence, so too the mark of mature mind is to perceive change, process, fluidity. To be sensitive to it.