My Life in Color

Everything flourished, everything alive, everything colorful. An endearing sight to be seen, in contrast to where I have been and where I am from. The sun seems like a long-lost companion to me, it warms my face while simultaneously illuminating the baby blue sky and crisp cotton clouds. The sun is vast and powerful, it shines its radiance upon everything below.

The extravagant green palm trees with alternating brown tones, ascending from roots to leaves, remain sturdy as they defend the invisible coastal winds. The eccentric and fluorescent buildings, decorated to stand out remain strong and alive, providing temporary sanctuary to the wondering travelers. The structures continue upright in the same place, in their original construction, with grounded foundations, prepared to defend against the elements of nature.

The blooming yellow beach sunflowers walk along each side of the slightly weathered beach walkway, providing the perfect backdrop for this two-star flamingo colored hotel that I happily get to call home for the next three days. This is my “home”. A home that contains every color, a place that is so brightly and so vibrantly painted, that it glows- even when the sun says goodnight to the moon.

This is a great contrast of what life looks in the place I am from. Living in the subdued north, the endless months of bitter cold and sunless skies, it is easy to become colorless. The place where I am from is lack-luster; everything is dull, everything is blank.

I know that this colorful life would be unrecognizably beautiful to the insensitive eyes of those from where I was born. There are many who refuse to step outside of their four-familiar gray, white, and beige walls, because they live in fear of exclusions.

People who remain so blissfully unaware that they are absent to living at all. Where I was born is a place where nothing and no one stands out. For in order to see color, one must also be able to perceive it. For without perception, the enchantment of the colorful is dissipated and faded against the gray and colorless backdrop of the common and inattentive.

But that is there, and I am here, I am home. Because it is here that I always return to me. I am here and the colors are endless and outstretched. They are all different from the other, all beautiful, all colorful, all fitting, all collectively perfect. I return to observing the contrasts of color in everything and everyone. I perceive my world as it exists to me; more vibrantly and more intrinsically than ever. This is where I continue learning lessons of life and love with a new treasure after each and every visit. The memories of me that I will always cherish. To be grateful for the never-ending journey of enlightenment.

I take this colorful life with me, as my keepsake, my own personal reminder to be alive. If only I could use these souvenirs and secrets to splatter and smear the blank canvases of those too blind to perceive this notion. This notion that life is not enough to just be lived. Life is meant to be lived alive and it is meant to be full of color. Fill your life with everything brilliant and luminous as it represents you. I must remind myself that I cannot make others see what is colorless in their lives, especially if they are not ready to perceive it. And with that, all I can do is paint my world with all the colors that make me different from the others; all beautiful, all colorful, all fitting, all collective, all perfect.

We were born to live a colorful life. Even if we must remain among the colorless. My life is mine as it relates only to me. Your life is yours as it only relates to you. We are all colorful and we are all unique to each other. Without fear of acceptance, we must refuse to become camouflaged in a colorless society. Be alive in your life, perceive the colors of your life, and always live it colorfully.

-Jamie LeFebvre

“Nature always wears the colors of the spirit” Ralph Waldo Emerson.