Tangled Up in Blue

What happens when you just start writing

One our goals at Grove events is to provide creative play, activities that allow people to be less precious about what they’re creating and, in doing so, to let creativity move them to unexpected places instead of trying to force their creativity it into pre-determined shapes. This blog brought me back to this specific idea of play.

What happened was this: Because we have this wonderful Tangled Up in Blue workshop coming up, I offered some time ago, to write a blog post with the word “blue” as its theme. At the time, I’m pretty sure I had some idea about what I was going to do. But then, well, stuff happened, and the idea vanished. And yet, there it was, the blog I’d promised on “blue…”

Having managed to give myself a very Grove-ish task (that is, an activity with no pre-determined shape), I decided to follow our own directions, and let the word take me where it wanted to go—which is to say I decided to play.

So, I put down the word itself: Blue. And then, because, why not, a verb. And then another word and another. And then, because it had come to feel like the word blue was a sort of beacon shining through my body, I followed the light. The places that word took me are below. I hope you enjoy the ride.

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Blue is the winter twilit night, a line of dark advancing across the prairie after the sun took all the streaks of orange and pink and yellow down behind the mountains.

Blue is the huge, misshapen box I carry with me through the entire spring, a box that keeps slipping from my hands so I have to stop, set the box down, readjust, then pick the whole thing back up just to keep walking.

Blue is the shawl I find on a wet day in June when my heart is the color of cast iron, a day I have to force myself out to the farmers market in the cold rain where, standing there with cold feet, cold hands, cold skin, I see the shawl, and I’m sure I will never be cold again.

Blue is the great dome of daylight that makes an ombre of midday so that, lying with my back in the July grass, I know I could be there the whole day and never count all the shades of blue.

Blue is the sky above the lake and the lake below the sky until I look down and see that, somehow, the lake is actually green and the blue of the lake is a trick of the eye or the mind or, maybe like beauty and joy, a trick of the heart.

Blue is the new color of my bedroom. In the night, I sit on my bed, writing in this cocoon of blue. In the morning, I wake to blue. In between I dream that Janis Joplin is wailing “Summertime” into the night air, and the sound goes out as a silver shimmer into the world.

Blue is the space between the leaves, the spaces in the leaves, and even the precious space between me and every other being as I walk through the sweat-soaked heat of the hottest day this summer.

Blue are the words my father says to me as we walk in the woods, words that for reasons I can’t explain, come to me like the early morning light that re-blues the sky at the edge of the world.

Blue is my eye looking back at my eye, a ring of navy that bleeds to pale slate, touches of yellow-green, an eye that dreams and wakes, that sees the night and the day, that is made of light and water.

Blue is air that breathes all the way to the bottom of my lungs and, when I release it, sends aloft a whole flower’s worth of dandelion seeds that slip through the illusion of matter and find their way out into the blue.