The Texture of Yellow-Green

Bright, sunny day - the hickory tree leaves, redbud leaves, and oak leaves find their warm, temperate zone days drop from a boil to a simmer on the pot of Earth's crust. Photosynthesis and chlorophyll fade in level of importance. Dormancy soon dominates. Life in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere turns to thoughts of winter.

Outside my window, redbud seeds hang signs of hope, unaware of themselves waiting for a strong wind to release them from their storage boxes and become themselves anew.

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I am myself today, which means I am aware of myself as you in all our forms, in all our locations. I see the guys with long locks of hair, Ted Nugent style, moving from seat to seat at a college football game. I see the father in his National Guard jacket escorting his beautiful daughter to the football field. I see the men in stripes, whose jobs they take seriously, requiring them to memorize a book-sized set of rules and endure the anger of players, coaches and fans, all to maintain a balanced sense of fair play on the field of battle that life rarely grants us - I salute your neutrality, grit and determination. I see the mothers cheering their sons knocking each other down to help their team win. I see the police officers and security guards directing traffic and pulling aside raucous, inebriated fans, all to ensure the safety of a community in movement. I see commerce in action, too, from the hand-painted adverts on fence walls to zeppelins floating overhead, talking heads with microphones on the sideline and in the media booth facing camera operators all tuned to the hidden voice in their ears talking from the producer's or director's command post (a nod, as well, to the IT folks behind the scenes, running cables and setting up information networks in today's Internet world - how else would we get our instant handheld media device updates?).

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Today, I look at the colour streaming through the trees, visible particle-waves bouncing off my eyeballs, and feel the colour yellow-green. Not silky smooth. Not sandpaper rough. A slight resistance when I rub the colour between my fingers. Velour. Velveteen. Sometimes this side of yellow. Sometimes that side of green. The colour of a deciduous leaf about to fall to the ground. I hold the colour in my head, a concept I still find amazing many decades after I said my first word and recognized my first fellow member of our species.

They say that science is destroying the sense of wonder of our place in the universe, turning our millennial-long development of religion and god(s) into an atheist mindset. I disagree. No matter what we believe, or which god(s) we devote our lives to, every waking moment is a miracle and every thought/sensation a new discovery, regardless of our scientific community's desire to dissect minutiae down to slices of infinitesimally-small bits of iota.

I smile. I relax my shoulder muscles. I am alive. I may have been created by a god or may be a god for all I know. What I know doesn't matter. Knowledge is not all. A tree cannot see me. A tree cannot prevent me from knocking it down or understand my knowledge of xylem and phloem. A tree and I don't have to have that knowledge. We exist.

Last night, while I let my thoughts wander and my body slip into a sleep state, a thought bounced around, humourous but insightful. What's in a label? Local inhabitants of this area where I live have been called American Indians and native Americans but they are neither. They never knew Amerigo Vespucci - they owed no allegiance to the European leaders of their time. They, we, are of one species. We are not Americans. We are Earth-bonded creatures. The land does not owe us anything. We are not riveted into one place (although private ownership laws allow us to claim a place on land for a set period of time). Thus, we can wander wherever we want and toss labels aside like a combine cutting wheat.

I am just one person. I happen to be male. I happen to have a low amount of melanin in my skin. I can choose to reinforce stereotype labels associated with melanin levels and I can choose not to reinforce stereotypes. I choose the latter. What I reinforce is others' behaviour, the only sure thing I know via what I see, hear, feel, taste and smell, recombined by what I process in my thoughts. I know it's not always easy to overcome stereotypes, especially ones where feelings of superiority or inferiority have formed one's personality, but we can toss aside these feelings if we choose to believe we're truly free and truly one species on one planet set to explore the rest of the universe together.