The blue of distance

Dear friends,

I’ve spent much of my life in thrall to a colour: the blue of distance.

What does that mean?

It’s the colour of this distant town:

And of these distant hills:

It’s the colour of the bruise that spreads inside you when you look out of an aeroplane window and watch a sometime home flatten, then shrink. Folding all the feelings you once felt there into flatness.

It’s the colour of things far-off, of homesickness and longing, and of a distance that can never be closed.

Nobody expresses all this better than Rebecca Solnit, in A Field Guide to Getting Lost:

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.

I’ve lived inside this bruising blue for years, maybe my whole life. Always yearning for whatever sits over there, on the horizon.

Lately, though, a strange thing has been happening.

I’m not staying up late, checking the prices of flights to far-off places. I’m not mentally constructing elaborate lives in countries and cities I’ve never visited.

The colour that’s singing in my chest this spring isn’t the blue of distance but the green of sodden Devon hills and the black of the River Dart, when I make it down there to swim before sunrise. It’s thick brown mud and a woollen grey sky. It’s the colour not of distance, but of home.

I couldn’t tell you exactly how or why this shift happened. I certainly never thought it would. But there it is: a new colour palette, coming to life.

Which colours are humming for you this spring?

x Ellie