That Shade.

I love travel---there is no feeling like going to a place you have never been before and yet finding pieces of me in the scenery and life in an unfamiliar place.

I've been back in the United States for two months now and yet.....that blue of the Mediterranean Sea continues to soak in my soul.  One of the three lovely ladies I traveled with asked us what we could call that shade of blue that the deep water is; none of us could come up with a proper word (though one of them did try just the word blue and we giggled about that).

One of my favorite parts of being on the island Santorini was walking through the stone and marble walkways of Oia.  There is a central square that provides a great space to look out at the cliffs and into that deep shade of blue.  I found myself pausing every time I was in this square, trying to capture this moment as long as I could.  My eyes could not stop pouring over that blue; I felt like I was at the edge of the universe.

Coming home, my heart ached to be back in that place of infinite deep blue and views of the wide open water (dotted with other islands and a volcano, of course).  I want to share with you, reader, a poem that my Greece-sick heart wrote a week or so after arriving back in Berkeley.

That Shade
You are the blue
I am blue.
You are deep, cobalt current
Pure and dark,
the concept of your mystery
is a given.

You are the blue
as I am the blue.
I am the bubbly, leaping turquoise
lapping eagerly unto the sand,
pulled back into your consistent
layers of the Truth.

Together, we hold the pieces of blue.
You are constant unchanging,
I am the fickle and decaying.
Yet you hold unto me in that
deep, cobalt blue
You are my anchor and author
You are my blue.