Color Where There Is No Place to Put It

A couple of nights ago I stayed over at church as one of the hosts for an IHN week. If your community has an Interfaith Hospitality Network, then you know it's a program designed to offer a tiny bit of a homelike atmosphere to homeless families. Shelters are usually segregated by gender, which tends to split up spouses and divide parents from children. Through IHN, families stay overnight, in their own rooms as much as possible, in participating churches and synagogues for a week at a time. They spend their days at the IHN center, from which children are delivered to school and where parents find phone banks and other resources for housing and job searches.

Most religious communities host IHN families about four separate weeks each year. It's a high people-intensive committment: volunteers are needed to set up and take down, welcome and say good-bye, provide breakfasts and dinners, act as hosts during the early evening hours - mostly to supervise the younger children so the parents can have some privacy, and stay overnight. I figured I could about manage an overnight, with the minimal interaction it would require with either the families or my co-overnighter.

I didn't miss the irony that I was spending the evening with four families who have no homes at present at the same time that I was writing about extravagant home decorating ideas. An odd thing has happened recently in that several possibilities for serving the homeless have suddenly materialized in my life. A friend and former colleague is taking me with her next week to a huge men's shelter where she does poetry workshops. A man is my spiritual direction program is planning his internship around offering spiritual companionship to the homeless. This Saturday I'll be spending some time at the church where I'll be doing my internship this year, on a day when lunch is provided to the homeless. And if I get my act in gear and send an email today, there may be an opportunity for me involving spiritual direction and the homeless in the city in which I attend seminary.

In the very dark days of last winter, my own former spiritual director, working in another city these days, sent me without commentary a short article about Jean Vanier and L'Arche, the communities Vanier founded in which those who are developmentally disabled and those who are not share homes together. Why did you send me this? I asked. I don't know, he answered. I thought about writing something, but I decided to let it take its own course. I can't say that I felt suddenly inspired to anything beyond my own survival, but it did occur to me then in a vague kind of way that perhaps he was trying to tell me that my own life having crashed and burned did not mean that I was forever lost and precluded from helping others.

It's probably premature even to speculate about this turn of events, since all that has happened is that a few seeds have been scattered into my life. But it does make me wonder whether I am moving in a completely unexpected direction. I have a roof over my head and a loving family living in it with me, and yet in some ways as a consequence of the past year I feel completely adrift and homeless. New qualifications, perhaps.

Colors - Third Post, and Almost the Final One

It will probably be no surprise to long-time readers of this blog, although it was to me (isn't that always the way?), that when I began to look at the colors I like now, the words that popped up in the various descriptions were along the lines of retreat and reflective.

Some synonyms for retreat (as a noun), thanks to thesaurus.com:

haven, hermitage, hideaway, hiding place, port, privacy, refuge, retirement, safe house, safe place, sanctuary, seclusion, security, shelter, solitude . . .

and for reflective, via its synonym contemplative:

cogitative, introspective, lost, meditative, musing, pensive, pondering, ruminative, speculative, thoughtful.

The colors ~ all variants on blues and greens and purples, all the colors of the ocean which you may not fully realize, if you haven't stared at is as often as and long and in as many places as I have, offers an endless variation of hue. What I don't know (and as Ruth wisely pointed out in the comments below, I should take my time (even if finances did not mandate a leisurely pace!)) is: do I mean pale tones, colors reflecting the beginning and end of the day? Icier tones indicating a certain degree of reticence and withdrawal? Or do I mean the deeper jewel tones, the ones that work best for my wardrobe?

Wardrobes and homes are different venues for color, of course. Despite my (originally) dark hair and eyes, my skin is quite pale, and so deep colors rather than washed out tones look much better on me. (My daughter's skin is pale as well, but her blue eyes and blond hair practically mandate pastels.) I'm not in the least enamoured of today's multi-print styles; my idea of a great look is something more a la Kate Hepburn ~ tailored black trousers and a cobalt blue shirt. For my home, though ~ I'm not sure. As I was reading blogs the other day, this wonderful mix of colors on Mary Beth's blog caught my eye and I thought: the perfect interior. Then I thought: too much. Maybe the perfect interior would be a paler version of same, with the deeper colors for accents via glass and artwork and the occasional pillow or even chair.

In the everything-is-connected department, the cooler, icier, paler colors are clearly reflective of my personal life and movement toward ministry. The former hostess of Christmas dinners for 40 is no more; these days, I struggle mightily in conversations involving more than a few people (and I say some of the most astonishingly inappropriate things when I get confused about the tenor of the group), but I do love to spend time with a (very few at a time) friends. The preacher and teacher and public speaker are still here, but I am told that I am very present to people one-on-one in a way that I think is not possible for me, at least not now, from the front of a sanctuary or meeting room, and so I feel a definite move toward a focus on chaplaincy and spiritual direction manifesting itself.

And so, I think that I am seeing our home more as a place of refuge and reflection, as a place for quiet conversation and small and simple gatherings, for others as well as our family, than as the place through which soccer players tromped and in which multiple chefs spread massive Christmas buffets. Those days were wonderful, but we have been quite changed, and perhaps what we have to share has as well.

(Illustrative colors courtesy of the Atlantic Ocean off Iona.)

Colors, Part the Second

I can see from the dearth of comments on the post below that no one is interested in my reflections on color. Unlike Portia, who received 14 comments (including mine) on the post that inspired me. Does that reflect something about the age and life experience difference ~ she and her friends are at the beginning, full of optimism, moving from the bridal shower to baby shower stages, while I and mine are in the middle, reeling from life's disappointments and trying to rebuild? There is not a single one of my close group of ten or so friends who has not faced a life-altering confrontation with loss and, in several cases, true disaster, in the past decade. Why would we care in the least about bedroom color or living room decor, you ask?

Well, after reading Portia's post, I spent several hours playing around on websites related to color choices. (Where did I find the time? As it happens, I accomplished a great deal earlier this week but, as I have related and has been repeatedly affirmed to me, grief is exhausting. I have spent the past four days in something of a stupor, recovering from the previous three. Online playtime was practically a necessity.) The information was fascinating and, indeed, therapeutic. Possibly also boring to others, since it's about me me me, so I'll shave it down to three quick observations, with some conclusions in another post.

When we bought our home 25 years ago, the decor consisted of then very-fashionable colors and wallpaper in muted country colors and patterns: rusts, beiges, and sage-type greens found in an endless sequence of tiny prints. (You might notice that none of these colors are featured in my previous post, except as rejects.) But during those early years, as we began to recreate the house in our own image, we deepened but did not steer far from those colors, going toward yellows and blues and some reds. Not being Portia, I gave no thought whatever to any of this, but it seems clear now that my subconscious was steering me toward the creation of a home that beckoned with warmth and welcome. My personal wardrobe, interestingly, was based upon navy (interestingly, attorney Portia's favorite ~ and yes, I know the origin of the name Portia). A website tells me that "Navy carries the blue symbolism of importance, confidence, power, and authority. Darker blue, like navy, is associated with intelligence, stability, unity, and conservatism." Leave out the conservatism and you've got it ~ my approach to life as a young lawyer and then stay-at-home mom and community volunteer.

A few years ago, having recognized that our home no longer reflected our lives, I did a previous set of those House Beautiful type quizzes, one that asked about favorite clothing, geography, art, etc. It became clear that the beach and its colors should be my decorating focus. I thought that perhaps my ideal would be something light and airy and colorful: think Carribean and the covers of Coastal Living. However, we live on the Great Lakes in a home closing in on 100 years old, a home which features dark mahogany and oak woodwork and brass fixtures. I decided we would be better off focusing on the blues and greens of the coasts and waters of the north, Maine and Oregon ~ and even on the interior woods and lakes of Algonquin. I was still thinking warm and welcoming, however, as I was beginning to imagine the utility of this far-too-large-for-us house in terms of adult children and their spouses and children.

The past year has been an excursion into another realm entirely. I wrote a post last winter, I think, about my difficulties in choosing clothing, a dilemma echoed by one of my newly-widowed best friends. Who are we now, we wondered, a son and a husband missing from our lives? The houses raise the same questions as our wardrobes do. Our living room is the one room in our house that has undergone no changes at all in the time we have lived here, and I've been gazing at the walls in increasing desperation. That tiny rust print has no place in my current identity, and it's out of date and dark and not clean. This past week, unable either to stand it or to trade it in for a beach cottage, or even to afford to paint it (maybe soon), I went off to Pier One and purchased some dried plants to add some height and interest to the mantle arrangements. It now looks like someone gives a damn, but the colors are still all wrong. What am I to do? I don't think I'm a warm and welcoming person anymore. What kind of person am I? What kind of home should I keep?

Enter Portia's post, House Beautiful, and this week-end's obsession with color. More to come later, but let me add one thing: if it seems as though I am channeling QG's daughter, I want to say that that girl, without a word about church or prayer or God, has performed a serious ministry to me this week. In writing about something that at her age I would have found baffling and somewhat frivolous, she has opened the door to some serious reflections about identity, loss, and self-expression. Who knew?