Karen Speerstra - Color: The Language of Light

Karen Speerstra tackles the ineffable in her wonderful book, weaving her lifetime of experiences and insights together with prehistory, science, art, religion, and much more. She is just the trusted author to share depths and wisdom with skill, erudition, and heart.

Lillian Habinowski, artist

This book explores and reports through a very deep, thorough, and thoughtfully documented journey Karen Speerstras research and interpretation of color and how it impacts our total existence from birth to death and beyond. Color to me is the silent equivalent of music, the mysterious magic that totally surrounds and penetrates our being. Speerstras book covers so much territory so well that it is something one will want to read again and again and again.

Karen Petersen, sculptor and painter

A fearlessly personal account of a lifetime spent in the emotional pull of color.

As a painter, and a teacher, I find this book especially memorable in that it brought to my ears the voices of historically known scientists, philosophers, mystics, and artists, all giving their firsthand accounts of personal experiences and thoughts about light and color. Delightful to read as well are the first-person voices of the colors themselves.

This is both a reference book for further investigations into this hugely fascinating subject and a reminder to me, as an artist, to be fully mindful of my love for and daily use of the always mysterious gifts of sunlight and color.

Bunny Harvey, painter and Director, Studio Art, Wellesley College

The invitation to let our imaginations blossom with Speerstras meditative exercises and Julia Blackbourns luminous watercolors will change the way you see the world. Ive read many books on color, but none of them leaps into the ecstatic realm as this one does. Like a prism revealing the rainbow waiting in white light, this magical book opens our eyes to the hidden dimensions of color waiting to amaze us.

Sharon Bauer, psychotherapist and artist

I have long felt the power of color in a muted, general sense, but now the doors have been openedI will not be able to look at flowers, fields, or my own paints without allowing them to touch me on a deeper level.

Katie Runde, artist

Karen Speerstra leads the reader on an expansive but playful journey of Planet Earth and beyond through the investigation of color. A full spectrum of colors connection with philosophers, inventors, scientists, artists, healers, writers, and poets becomes food for the soul.

Sherry Rhynard, stress management and health coach

Color: The Language of Light could also be called An Ode to Color and Light. I particularly love how Speerstra weaves her personal stories about relatives and friends who influenced and supported her creativity and spirit throughout her life.

Anne Gilman, author and artist

When Speerstra becomes someone else and speaks in narrative, she does some direct channeling. I am still hearing her words in my head. How wonderful!

Ellen Allen, color production editor, designer, and artist

After reading Color, I will never look at a sunset the same way again.

Penny Hauser, author and psychiatric nurse

Speerstra is able to write about spiritual concepts that we can all understand, digging deep inside us, and pulling out what we felt we knew but couldnt express certainly not the way she does.

Debra Marckres, librarian

COLOR

THE LANGUAGE of LIGHT

KAREN SPEERSTRA

Published by DIVINE ARTS

DivineArtsMedia.com

An imprint of Michael Wiese Productions

12400 Ventura Blvd. # 1111

Studio City, CA 91604

(818) 379-8799, (818) 986-3408 (Fax)

www.mwp.com

Cover design by Johnny Ink www.johnnyink.com

Copyediting by Gary Sunshine

Book layout by Gina Mansfield Design

Printed by McNaughton & Gunn, Inc., Saline, Michigan

Manufactured in the United States of America

2013 Karen Speerstra

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Speerstra, Karen.

Color : the language of light : how color feeds the soul / Karen Speerstra.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-61125-018-3 (pbk.)

1. Light--Religious aspects. 2. Color--Miscellanea. 3. Colors--Religious aspects. I.

Title.

BL265.L5S66 2013

203.7--dc23

2013015289

Printed on Recycled Stock

DEDICATION
AND
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction:

to Ellen A., Sharon B., Jan F., Carol F., Annie G., Mary Ann G., Jonna G., Penny H., Betty L., and Judy W., all friends who from the beginning, walked this colorful journey with me.

Chapter 1:

to Nate, whose birth story and subsequent life stories continue to bring humor, light, and color into my life.

Chapter 2:

to Josie, whose rainbow presence brightens the world.

Chapter 3:

to Joel and Laura, artists both, who helped me stumble and catch my breath and were there to inspire (and edit) the work.

Chapter 4:

to Traci, who as a chemist has actually created color and whose clear and grounded insights anchor my perceptions.

Chapter 5:

to John, my loving spiritual mentor and guide.

Meditative Palette:

to Julia, whose creative ventures have brought so much joy into my life.

Index:

to Carol, who is my dear Sophia Sister and a professional indexer.

Thank you, all.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Color is the language of light;

it adorns the earth with beauty.

Through color light brings its passion,

kindness and imagination to all things:

pink to granite, green to leaves,

blue to ocean, yellow to dawn.

John ODonohue, Beauty

What did Jesus really mean two thousand years ago when he told a small group of ordinary people sitting around him on a remote Middle Eastern hillside: You are the light of the world? What did those fisherfolk know of physics? What do I, for that matter? Or you? Or even physicists, come to think of it, because our scientific understandings of color and light change over time and color theories shift as surely as moonbeams. But if, as this book claims, color is the language of light, and we are light, then you and I and those scraggly Galileans lounging in the grass as described in the fifth chapter of the book of Matthew embody all the color that fills this world.

Colors tap down deep into the very roots of our archetypes of who we are and offer truths that need no persuasion to be real. Colors pull the heart along a rainbow path familiar to anyone who has ever stood in dripping sunshine and looked up.

I walk my Vermont pathways and marvel at tiny neon-orange mushrooms electric-orange aliens perched on a stretch of moss. Im in awe of metallicgreen wings of insects and the deep pinks leading to black seeds hidden in peony petals. I count the shades of gray in the sky. But what if, in addition to taking color in, we also give color off? What if we are transformed from color observers to color emitters?

While writing Sophia: the Feminine Face of God, I read a great deal about one of the nineteenth-century Russian Sophiologists, Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov. From his poetry and essays I realize that color and light are integral to the understanding of the Divine Feminine Force that inhabits and colors our lives. This understanding can bridge all sorts of dualisms (men vs. women, liberal vs. conservative, light vs. dark) to create rainbow-circled wholes. Yet even in unity, each colorful soul maintains its unique distinction. We, too, remain who we are, but by melding of opposites into one, we discover that we are so much more than we once thought we were. And, best of all, were free to color outside the lines! The Bible calls this feminine divine figure Lady Wisdom a reflection of eternal light fairer than the sun.