The touch of an infinite mystery
passes over the trivial and the familiar,
making it break out into ineffable music…
The trees, the stars, and the blue hills
ache with a meaning
which can never be uttered in words.
~Rabindranath Tagore

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water.

Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue.

The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance.

This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue. ~Rebecca Solnit

In the eyes, windows to the soul, of some and even in the color of our unique, blue marble of a planet one comes upon the divine mystery that “can never be uttered in words” at the “edges and in the depths” of the “deeply, beautifully blue” of which Byron, Tagore, Solnit, and “Holy Writ” speak.

They are to take a blue cloth and cover the lamp-stand that is for light, together with is lamps, its wick trimmers and trays, and all its jars for the olive oil used to supply it. ~Numbers 4:9   ✝

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