Green.

I need to think about green, always the color of life and rebirth. I can believe that green is a color you could jump into. I wouldn't want to do that with red, which would be too hard. Or with blue; there would be no stopping place, and it would go on forever. But I can see jumping into green. It would be cushiony and the right softness, the right temperature, and neither too dry nor too wet. You would settle into it, and it would hold you. (from a letter to a friend)

I CARRY IN MY HEAD A MAP of our woods. I know where the forest floor is rocky and where the soil is deep. I remember where the colonies of may apples are, even when they're not there, which is most of the time, because they spring up in late March and are yellowing by the end of May. I know the contours of all the hollows, and I know where the landmark trees are. In our woods, there are hardly any trees that I do not recognize individually as I pass by on my walks among them.

There is great reward in this familiarity, because attentiveness makes it possible to see more clearly what is well known than what is not, and, lest it be thought otherwise, the mystery of what is loved is not dispelled by familiarity but grows deeper because of it.

But I am perennially struck by the differences between the still, quiet, resting woods of winter and the growing woods of spring and summer. In winter, the woods is open, and sight is not hindered by crowded leaves and undergrowth and thick color, so that it is possible to see over unobstructed distances. The light of the winter woods feels bare and weightless and unresisting.

And so every spring surprises me. The sudden color of the light and the loss of distance and space take me eerily aback and cause me to feel, as the season begins, that my woods is not quite as well known to me as it had been in all the months before. I have become momentarily disoriented in our woods as the new leaves were coming out, when spring changed the color and the shadows of the forest. What I had thought was memorized has seemed abruptly different, and I have been startled to find myself in places I remember and know but that I entered without realizing where I was. The transition to fall and winter has never affected me in this way.

In the new of each season, I am tempted to think it my favorite of the year. But I know better. Lists could be made of every season's advantages, but every season's list would be as long as the others', and there would be no point in the exercise, because no season is relished except in contrast with what came before and with what will come after, so that no single season can fairly be perceived apart from the others but only as a recurring, fuzzy-edged segment of the cyclic whole.

Just as it makes no sense to me to have a favorite season, I am similarly bemused by the common notion of having a favorite color.

I have been drawn all my life to fleshy, visceral salmon hues and to the cool depth and aloofness of a range of blue-greens. I recognize the legitimacy of being intrigued by a single hue or set of hues. But I can understand and feel color only in relation to other color. I can perceive red and the significance of red only in relation to other hues, just as the response to a season can have fullness only by perceiving that season as a segment of the full cycle, as red is a segment of the total spectrum.

But it has been held that green--which, more than red, is the color of life and which has been magic in ancient myth and romance--is different.

In the very early spring, when the emerging leaves are fresh yellow-green and luminous and glowing, the diffused light that passes among them and through to the space above the floor of the woods where I walk seems to burden the very air itself with palpable green, as if it were a physical, breathable substance that weighs in the firmament of the forest at the beginning of spring after every cold winter.

It would be easy to suppose the green of the woods I walk through in early spring to be no mere color, no mere ethereal peculiarity of the perception of light, but a heavy, incarnate property that is suffused in the air and that is the power of renewal that touches me when I enter the woods and that I breathe into my body as I move through it.