Anybody can do this–I call it wallowing in color. Take your camera and go outside. Turn off your discursive mind, the one that is busy narrating the story of your life as you live it. You are going to be visual now, and the camera lens is your portal. Pick a color and go hunting. When you find that color, frame a photo. Look for the quality of light that makes that color glow from within. Let your eyes drink it in, feel the color soak into your flesh. Snap, and move on.

My pears grow on a scumpy little dwarf tree, and I don’t do anything to them. The bees pollinate the flowers and the tiny green fruits form. Sometime during the summer they self-thin, and excess little pears fall to the ground and turn black. The rest swell into full-grown fruit so that by September I can pick two full fruit boxes. I can them, dry them, eat them fresh, give them away. For a couple weeks, I wallow in pears and the lovely yellow fragrant ripeness of them.

Sunflowers continue to bloom, heads nodding and drooping. These are the side shoots and auxiliary buds emerging below the main flowers. Some are deliberately planted, and some come up randomly from last year’s flowers. They add a pleasing vertical element to the garden, blown out and overgrown by this time of year. A little bit chaotic, like the rest of my life. Swarms of goldfinches and chickadees visit the sunflowers and hang sideways to pick at the seeds.

Even though there is still prepping and priming going on, I couldn’t resist opening the bucket of yellow house paint. It’s so rich and creamy brushing onto the wood. I like to watch how the color changes as the sun moves around during the day. This yellow can be so pale it looks nearly white, or it can be as cheerful as a smile in the afternoon light. Will it make the house look as if it floats in a billow of flowers in the summer? Will it gleam through the fog of an icy winter day? I’ll find out.

What color are you wallowing in these days? (And the camera is only a trick to get you outside–you don’t really need it to wallow.)