A Letter to Lemon Yellow, Ruby Red, Forest Green, and Cobalt Blue

 

My dear friends of the Rainbow,

I have addressed this letter to you in particular, but my desire is for all your friends and relations in the rainbow to hear me out for a few minutes. I love you dearly, from the first chunky eight of you I held in my chubby hands to the impressive 128 deluxe version with names we mispronounced but delighted in: magenta, puce, turquoise, wisteria, and fuchsia. Oh you are a multitudinous treasure to behold. 

Today I would like to say how much I love orange. Plain simple old orange. Please, don’t take offence when I tell you how precious orange is. I love you all. Some of you have been standing out in brilliant ways for millennia and getting quite a lot of attention: Blue, heavens, you have the sky in every hue you choose to wear. Green, my goodness, you’ve got photosynthesis going for you after all. Almost anything with a leaf is going to have a smudge of green somewhere. Let’s face it, some of you have a wide palette and massive family.

Orange has a number of relatives, but today I was thinking about how orange plays her role. Think about construction workers: their orange vests, orange helmets, and orange cones all remind us to take care. Orange is the colour for caution and care. But unless we’re talking about traffic signs or constructions sites, she doesn’t usually get first billing. She frequently ends up as a complement to someone more visible. 

But what a complement she can be. Where would autumn be without orange? We need her orange leaves among the browns and reds and golds. We glory in carving orange pumpkins to wear an orange flame and create a weird flickering face. We can’t forget orange chrysanthemums to bring a sparkle into the dying longer and darker days. What would a fireplace be without those streaks of orange in the flame? Or imagine a sunset that had to make do with all the other colours but without orange and her family for contrast. 

I think about orange every now and then because I have an original and quirky nephew who is colourblind in an interesting way. He cannot differentiate among most colours, but he can see orange. When he was married, his sweet and thoughtful bride, although definitely a woman on the cooler side of the spectrum: blues and lavenders, remembered orange. And right in amongst the blue and white flowers of her bouquet nestled a bright orange flower so her sweetheart could see it. And he wore an orange tie. It is pretty much his whole rainbow.

So please, dear glamorous, brilliant, and showy friends, when someone says “let’s hear it for orange” or “orange matters”, don’t make the fallacious assumption that suddenly you all don’t matter and no one cares about you. Of course you matter. You always have. Saying that orange has significance today is not to undermine yours. It’s a way to celebrate orange and see what she brings to the world of light.

After all, every last one of you is really only a reflection. Our human eyes don’t “see” you, we have light receptors in our eyes which communicate with our brains and we then get sensations of colour. In fact, the things we look at are not colours as you think of yourselves. The surface of the things we look at reflect the light of some colours and absorb the other colours. We see an apple as red or green depending on which light is reflected and which is absorbed. In an extremely simplistic sense, you are pretty much just reflected light in our brains.

So let there be no competition among you. You are all part of an amazing spectrum, quite a bit of which we humans cannot even see with our light receptors. When we delight in one colour, it is not at the expense of the others. 

Just bask in the light and get on with it.