by SUSANNAH HOPKINS LEISHER, Source: NYTimes

Bark is not really brown. Is that obvious? It didn’t occur to me until our year in the woods.

Leaves are not green. Sun is not yellow. Water is not blue.

The woodland road I walked down earlier this week, trying to stretch my arthritic legs before starting school for the day, is not the brown-crayon scribble my kids might have drawn as toddlers. Night had left the thinnest skim of ice through the forest, and where the spring morning sun caught it, the road burned silver.

Not many leaves are left, at winter’s end, but I thought back to the fall, when we were living down on the lake. Are leaves really green? I spent hours in the fall snapping photos of leaves in every color but blue. Of course, that’s easy in New England, but even so—it’s not all candy-pink, tangerine, yellow, and apple-red. There was the pile of chartreuse leaves curled dry and dying, edged and flecked with dark brown age spots; a cluster of dead taupe leaves hanging like so many bats from their branches; and a clutch of beech leaves so long-gone the color had drained out of them like dye from a drink, leaving a milky white behind. Perhaps, Green is just a nickname for leaves.

When I looked up, the sun was murky white behind sunrise clouds that pelted us with winter’s last flurries. No yellow in sight.

Easing my hips back up the road to a day of math and English with my kids, I passed hundreds of trees, not one of which showed a brown skin. White birches speared the sky clad in bone white. Gray birches wore skins of metal. Yellow birches’ skins were shedding, revealing new and smooth golden skins beneath. In one place, a white birch and a black cherry lunged together toward the sky. Farther up, a tangled spray of waist-high maple saplings bowed and nodded, burnished wine-red.

Spring’s promise coaxed a cherry-red glow from the tips of hundreds of older eager maples. Here and there, striped maple stroked the sky with striped shoots of pale green and gray. And last fall I found an elderly maple green with moss and a beech covered with splotches of white, dark gray, light gray, and olive drab — some kind of fungus, I fear. Bark is anything but brown.

I reached the top of our road and looked out. I love to watch water. Sleds of it mix and merge like multicolored mercury. At the waterfall that morning, I paused on the bridge that loggers must have built a while back, looking downstream. The water churned black and white on its way to the lake. Later, taunted along the road by prints of moose and deer I almost never see, I arrived at the local bog, tucked up against the road on either side.

Evergreen and blue filled the quiet water. Last fall at our lake cabin, I was blessed to catch the sunset in my camera lens several times. One evening, there were shimmers of water in black wedges and ribbons striped with baby-pink, gold, pale yellow and apricot wavelets, while another brought somber blue, gold, and amaranth. Sunsets out of a dream.

I know that one-colored wild things are just shorthand for what’s real. But channeling Tolkien’s Treebeard, I wonder whether the shorthand cheapens the goods. How much value is lost if I skate on the surface of content?

Yesterday for the first time, I read “A Ring of Endless Light” by one of my favorite childrens’ authors, Madeleine L’Engle. The wise (and dying) grandfather, who not accidentally is a minister, coaxes from his teenaged granddaughter an answer to her own question: ‘What is meditation, grandfather? How do you do it?’

He  just listens as the young girl describes a sensation of oneness with all things—”the rock and the sky and the sea and the wind and the rain and the sun and the stars” — a sensation that she is “not in the way” of her perception.

Her grandfather tells her she’s got it right.

I spend a few minutes every morning meditating with my sons at the start of our home-schooling day. What a joy it has been to slow down this year, looking more closely at the everyday, trying to sink beneath the surface of things — colors included.