Monochrome

There's an Ani DiFranco song that starts out like this:

The sky is grey, the sand is grey, and the ocean is grey...

That's the view from my window. Well, not quite. There's no sand. There's no ocean. But there's endless sky. And it's all grey. There's plenty of water. Grey grey grey. The city's glass skyscrapers reflect all of it. There are splashes of green on the tree-lined streets, and down on the docks there are cargo containers of blue and red. But the overwhelming color here, the overwhelming feeling, is grey. Which isn't even a color, not really. I mean, sure, technically, it's a color. Color is "the quality of an object or substance with respect to light reflected by the object". And there's plenty of light sifting through the cloud cover. Not so much as to require sunglasses, but enough so that my rose-tinted shades take the squint outta my eyes. But the light that's being reflected here, by the buildings and the water and the tar-black roads, is as bland a light as one can imagine. There's no depth to it, no imagination. It's flat. It's sterile. It's dull. And as an object, I am soaking it up. I am reflecting this dullness back to the world. Or that's how it feels anyway. That's how I feel. Grey.

And it's only September. Holy shit. This is gonna be a loooooooooooong winter.

I had dinner with Zoe last night. Zo has survived 12 winters in this town, and she's managing just fine. She's been taking classes at a hot yoga studio (not straight Bikram, for you yoga enthusiasts out there). Hot yoga is pretty much what it sounds like: a yoga class held in a hot room, generally about 100 degrees. I've had a number of friends rave about this type of practice, though I've been too timid to try. I mean, yoga is challenging enough without having sweat pouring into my eyes within the first two minutes. But I'm told it can be uplifting, revitalizing, detoxifying, soothing (afterwards). And, obviously, it gets rid of any chill you might walk into the room with. Which is a constant state of being for me during the Seattle winters. It doesn't often get below freezing here, but the never-ending drizzle, the overwhelming dampness seeps into my bones and hangs there like a wet blanket. So, I'm thinking that maybe I'll tag along with Zoe and get over my timidity of the sweaty downward dog. Because if I can find a way to warm my body, perhaps that warmth will filter into the rest of me. And then I can reflect something other than grey.