am: 20 minutes
neighborhood
45 degrees
Sun! Birds! Puddles and earthy smells.
pm: 45 minutes
cooper school / 7 oaks / edmund
51 degrees
More sun and birds and warm air. Lots of people and dogs also walking, runners too. A woman running in bright pink shorts. A woodpecker softly knocking, or knocking loudly but at a distance. A biker whizzing by then turning into an alley in front of us. A man coughing thickly. We talked about our kids and their futures, a possible spring break trip, Scott’s plug-in, the Brooks Ghost 16s I’m thinking of buying with our REI refund.
My back is feeling better, but is still sore. I probably won’t run again tomorrow. Maybe I’ll bike on the bike stand?
excerpts from Indigo Insomnia/ Monica Ong
Indigo insomnia is the great waking, this birthing of the world anew. From the indigo, an even deeper blue, is it said.
This line reminds me of a Maggie Smith poem, How Dark the Beginning:
We talk so much of light, please
let me speak on behalf
of the good dark. Let us
talk more of how dark
the beginning of a day is.
. . .The mouth holds many things except the language of the new, still forming between the lungs. The spoken vow we breathe, but don’t yet know how to defend.
. . .Wondering if your voice is in the wrong chord, the wrong song, the wrong language, or just a painting of the ocean, its roar muted by a gilded gaze that see but doesn’t listen.
Indigo insomnia is diving into the deepest waters of memory to uncover the bodies hidden by our bad inheritance.
Thinking about traumas we inherit, despite others’ best intentions. I was pregnant with RJP when I learned my mom was dying. What impact did my overwhelming grief have on RJP and her mental health?
—
Reading about indigo in On Color, here’s something I’d like to remember about the difference between dyes and pigments:
Technically, a dye is a coloring agent that bonds with the molecules of the material to be colored. Pigments are also coloring agents, but they differ from dyes in that they don’t bond with the material; they are small particles of color held in some suspension, forming a film that attaches itself to the surface of the substance to be colored. Pigments, one might say, are applied to materials; dyes are absorbed by them.
On Color / David Kastan
Another important thing to remember:
. . . the slaves who worked on the indigo plantations in the Americas really were dying. A soldier who had served under George Washington in the Revolution afterward wrote about the “effects of the indigo upon the lungs of laborers, that they never live over seven years.”
Nonetheless, the worldwide desire for the remarkable blue dye allowed indigo plantations to thrive anywhere the conditions of climate and soil permitted indigo-bearing plants to grow. In the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies the plantations of the New World satisfied most of the world’s desire for natural indigo.