Snow is falling. I can see it out my window. It is falling so slowly that it seems almost to be not falling at all but rather painstakingly and intentionally making its way toward earth as if on a journey or mission of some sort. Small crystalline packages of white dropped from the unknown heights. Everything is a whitish gray (or a grayish white) depending upon your perspective.

 

I have been thinking about gray lately. The colour (and perhaps the state) and wondering about its make-up. Gray fascinates me because in some ways it seems as close to the human condition as one can get on the colour wheel…not quite white and not quite black but some enmeshment of the two. But of course when speaking of the human condition one recognizes that even with gray their is a spectrum that one is dealing with…we are many things we humans but one of them is not simple.

 

I think of gray this way – take a glass of black and shine a bright white light behind it…one sees the white bleeding through and creating this washed out gray. Now take a piece of white glass and place behind it a source of black…nothing happens to the white. Black in and of itself has no power. It does not cast photons into the universe. Black is nothing. In the realm of colour black is a non-entity. It is absence and emptiness. White on the other hand, white is everything, all-colour blended together to make one of brilliance. White is the light cast from the purest of sources. White is active…it goes out and is variously absorbed and reflected giving other things and surfaces their identity. Where black creates hiddeness white creates revelation sweeping aside all shadows and showing things for what they are.

 

When I see gray what I imagine I am seeing is the impending defeat of black by white. When I see people, I see the impending defeat of black by white. I see the not-yet-but-soon-to-come. I used to dread the gray southern Ontario winter days where sky and horizon met who-knows-where because the two had become one endless monotonous sea, but in the most latest of days gray is no longer the encroaching black but rather the approaching white.

 

The Approaching White

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Gray falls the day

that swims in crystalline manna

as stars bow down from heaven

blended earth and sky

a ticker tape parade launched

from on high

but no more do I and eye see

impending black encroach

but rather white and light

sing softly through the night

and speak of dawn’s approach