365 Days of Earrings

Monday, May 23, 2011

Seeing Blue

Today when I walked into the school lunchroom, a 4th grader named Julia spotted me and crowed, "Yay! Blue! At least someone else loves blue!"

All of the girls sitting near her were dressed in pink, with a smattering of lime green. Julia wore blue.

"You can always count on me, Julia," I smiled. "Even my earrings are blue!"

I made this pair with some of the "tiny tiles" left over from the stepping stone number path that we made on May 2nd, combining them with blue on white beads. 

Why did I wear them? To match my blue shirt. Because it's Monday, and we made the number path three weeks ago today. Because I love blue.

I can remember rambling conversations with my childhood friend Eva about whether the blue that I saw was the same as what she saw. What if my blue was her red? What if we just learned to name things the same, but they really looked different to each of us? Later I read about about wavelengths of light and cones on the retina, and decided that we must all see the same colors. But then I learned about color blindness. The color blind learn to name some colors by comparing shades of gray, but can't truly see them as other people do...

I thought a lot today about the filters which color each person's view of the same experience. We all suffer from color blindness when those filters cloud our vision.

1 comment:

Käthe said...

Great post! You had some of the coolest tiles for your stepping stones! How did you attach them? Do they have holes in them?