Life is an Artist's Palette

By Pritha Lal
Springville, Utah, USA

A library can be filled up with books on the word “life”. Treatise and sonnets have tried to capture the different nuances. The rest of the reality of “life” itself is left upto mere mortals like us to live and breathe. Life is as complicated as you can make it, as simple as you can live it, and as beautiful as the myriad of colors on an artist’s palette.
You will never find a palette that remains in order for too long. In fact a palette that has just fresh blobs of unmixed paint looks like it hasn’t been touched by an artist’s brush yet, because once it has, you know the hues have meshed into a plethora of shades that blend in and yet stand out in their own right.
Life can be looked at with a very similar analogy. The moment it is touched by the Divine brush the different colors come to life and intermingle to give meaning and beauty to what would have been a very solitary existence in nothingness.
The hues of sunshine; the source of life itself, gets reflected in the bright yellows, oranges and ambers. There is radiance, there is birth, and there are new beginnings. The spirit of new life, a new day as pure and untouched as dawn itself leaves one with the desire to learn, grow, be and above all live.
As the wonder of living the brightness of every new day sinks in, therein comes a calmer green, sacred, virgin verdigris. A symbol of sustenance that gets reflected in a young sprig of a dewy blade of grass, or the lushness of acres of mother Earth’s hues that soothe the soul. Learning, growing and living the childhood years can be depicted by this color.
Just as the sudden onset of spring, the Divine brush touches the palette once more and we discover within ourselves a part of our soul that was yet untouched. The thin line between lust and love and trying to find solace in both and now knowing why such powerful emotions can sink you or let you soar. Kindled desires coupled with the distraught uncertainties of the pangs they carry lead to a unique time in one’s life where the brush of divinity can deliver one from grace or take us down a very different path.
The reds can be the best or worst times in one’s life but eventually there comes a point when it all stabilizes and the depth and maturity of the deepest of blues surface in our lives. Like a gentle flowing stream there is continuity, an eternal feeling of completeness, of reaching a point in life where everything that washes over you renews you and your spirit as if you were drinking from the fountain of life itself.
Like everything in this world, nothing lasts forever and the bluish hues get grayer with time and finally get engulfed into a black abyss of finality. The finality is not always death but could also mean decay, destruction, the usually un-discussed part of the circle of life.
T S Elliot says, “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
Nothing resonates more with this living idea of infinity than the renewal of life from nothingness. The journey of the soul through the all encompassing darkness of the universe to find itself bathed in light again is a concept we all believe but define differently. The ultimate renewal of the human spirit is in this churn where all the colors submerge and yet find their home in the serenity of white.
Needless to say, this journey of different hues can occur in a lifetime, or to put it differently, it can just be a day in your life that makes the artist’s palette come alive with the touch of that Divine brush...

Inspired by a few thoughts from a dear friend called Chandreyee Mukherjee.