What Happens When You Mix All the Colours?

When I was about ten years old, my father told me that if you mixed all the colours together, you would get white.  He was an electrical engineer and he was talking about light.  When I asked my best friend’s father what would happen if you mixed all the colours together, he told me you would get black.  He was an artist, a painter.  Two opposite answers to the same question.  Two fathers who lived on the same street.  I have pondered these answers for most of my life.

I later studied physics and the electromagnetic spectrum.  I understand about how white light can be separated into the various colours.  I love rainbows and prisms and anything else that bends light, coaxes, tricks it into revealing its strands.  I am aware that there is beauty hiding in light and that there is more than our eyes can see at any moment.  I am always on the lookout for magic, brilliant beauty revealed at any moment, anywhere.

I also studied painting and how to mix colours to get any colour you want.  I am aware of how combinations create something together which none of the colours is on its own.  Instead of using separation to reveal colour, painting taught me how combining reveals colour.  When I see the colour black, I think of what is hiding there.  Black feels full and abundant to me.  When I look at the feathers of a crow or a raven, I look for the iridescent colours of blue and purple to appear as they do on a grackle.  I am still on the lookout for magic, for what is not immediately seen with the eye.

When is see a crow or a raven flying, my heart soars to the sky and my eyes are glued to its flight until I can no longer see it.  I can’t explain this.  It just has always been true for me.  So perhaps, it is not surprising that she appeared to me in the liminal space between dream and waking.  I call her Corva from the latin genus Corvus for crow and raven. 

Corva is a trickster, a teacher, a crow, a crone.  She flies into my dreams and reveals herself as an old wise woman who gives guidance and then refeathers and flies away.  She has a sense of humour, a sense of irony.  She sees the twists and apparent contradictions that are actually part of the same continuum of life.  She likes shiny things, things that reflect the light.  She is not afraid of the light, she knows that she carries all the colours of the world in her own feathers.  She knows that her DNA emits photos. She knows that she is black because her feathers absorb all the colours of white light.  She knows that death is a transformation as is birth.  As a crow, she eats carrion and eggs.  She allows them all to fly as the muscles that make her wings beat.

Corva reminds me that in between beginnings and endings is the time to live.  It is the time to love, it is the time to hold, the time to learn, the time to teach, the time to share, the time to grow, the time to tell stories. Corva reminds me that all things end, so it is important to show up and appreciate them while they are here.  She reminds me that all things begin and new beginnings are possible every day.  She reminds me that all the colours together are white and black.   She reminds me to be grateful to life, to have an open heart, and to look for magic.

I met her yesterday, at a funeral.  I saw her in the black clothes of the family and friends.  I could feel the density of all the experiences, the stories, the love mixed together like paint.  The black feathers of Corva were adorned by silver necklaces, earrings, watches, bracelets.  She loves shiny things.  I could feel the knowledge that love is what sustains us in the embraces, the holding onto one another, the physical contact that connected us like the bones in one body, to walk together through a ceremony that felt unreal, surreal, of another time. 

Each older woman that I hugged was Corva to me.  We had all seen enough to know what love is, what loss is, to know the magic of children, the delight of new beginnings, the need to pour out love and the bottomless ability of 2children to absorb it.  We could see the darkness and all its richness and we could see the light and all its hidden secrets.  We know that we will walk together through the darkness and the light.  We know that we will transform death and that we will soar as well.

If you mix all the colours, the stories of lives lived, what do you get?  Do you get a blur of vibrant reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues and violet?  Do they compress into a beam of white light?  Do they meld into a rich dark black, full to the brimming? Two men told me that the stories were opposite, they were black or white.  Corva showed me that they are the same.