Beauty and the Browns

In the day job this week I’ve been trying to find something exciting to say about products that are basically brown.  A bit tricky even for a wordsmith like me!  Surfing around I found enlightenment on the Sensational Colour website,  which told me that brown signifies stability and approachability, amongst other wholesome connections.  I suppose that’s why humans gravitate towards the browns of tree bark, wood and soil.   Yet all those three can vary greatly, from almost black to almost pink or almost white, but wherever they come on the brown scale they are unconsciously comforting.   

It’s browns of another sort though that I’ve not found so comforting myself in recent days:  brown parcels, or rather their cost, to be precise. I’ve been trying to find ways to make it viable to send some of my yarns to the USA, via normal post or courier.  The prices the couriers quote are phenomenal, as they use a volumetric rate.  It virtually doubles the price, so those ladies kindly enquiring via my Etsy shop will have to bear with me a while longer.  There must be a way to do it somehow without it costing the earth! 

In connecting further with browns, something hopeful caught my eye involving reducing the cost to the earth of man’s engagement with it.  In the Yale 360 newsletter this week, there was a story of residents in the prairies restoring natural habitats throughtheir gardens, returning colour, flowers and eventually wildlife to the landscape “yard by yard”.  It was really cheering to read.  If, as the old saying goes, money begets money, then maybe we should try the same addage on good news. Perhaps seeing more of it would beget other good news, and so on until it becomes irrepressible and shifts the emphasis away from the adversarial, finger-pointing, blame culture that seems to reign supreme amongst much of the mass media. 

 
So why don’t we start here?  What’s your good news?  Mine is another piece of beautiful brown:  a card sent to me by a friend in Las Vegas of a Roadrunner bird in its natural habitat, in Red Rock Canyon, Nevada, beautifully photographed by Peggy Hamlen.  It’s now gracing my office wall and inviting me to give a ‘Beep Beep!’ every time I race past, like its cartoon cousin.  My other good news is finishing a huge skein of multifarious browns in Shetland wool, now sitting on my niddy-noddy waiting for further attention. Its merging stripes remind me of something the artist Manet said:  “There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another.”   Here’s hoping your coming week is full of life’s richest colours