Jamie Kay rolled out of bed one day to find a blue bird perched on her bedpost.
This was no ordinary blue bird, mind you, but one with long, exotic tail feathers straight from the myths of ancient Egypt.
It seemed to Jamie that each feather bore a different shade of blue: velvet blue, midnight blue, sky-after-rain blue, saddened-soul blue. They merged and shifted, casting green specks onto her yellow wall in the drifting early light.
The bird cocked its head at her (sending a single plume bouncing) and asked if Jamie had discovered any new colors in her time as a human.
Jamie answered that no, she only had found different shades of the same colors, over and over again. She asked the bird the same question.
He shuffled his purple feet into a better position, preened an errant feather, and answered her.
"In my flight around the in-betweens, among the nevers, and through the nots, I have only found a few new colors. They grow on the ocean trees once a year, on the last day of the sun's orange smile." (For after that day, in the autumn, the sun's smile becomes a mature copper).
Jamie asked if the new colors look anything like the old ones. The bird said that they are only similar in feelings. Red, for example, feels important, and green feels awake. These new colors have feelings too, but they are not as obvious.
"For example," said the bird, "take the color I found immersed in the corner of a thundercloud on All Saints' Day. It smelled like sacrifice and looked like uncertainty, but the feeling of it was absolute joy. How does one find joy that smells like uncertainty? Ask the thundercloud if you really must know, for apparently she had the musical key of Aâ™ as a great-aunt on her father's side.
Jamie scratched her head and remarked that these new colors seemed much more important than the other ones. Laughing, the bird flitted to Jamie's light-rimmed windowsill and agreed, saying,
"You are quite right, dear. Once on my regular flight from the Seine to Arcturus, (during a stellar eclipse and another moonrise), I once heard the color of the stars' singing, trickling down from the farthest points in the night sky like confetti.
(They are always singing, you know, but the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere tends to drown it out in the troposphere.)
"If you can imagine a drop of water bursting with enough laughter to last two hours, then becoming a snowflake and being swept away to settle on the pointiest edge of the moon, you can imagine the color of the stars' singing."
"And what about the color of kindness?" asked Jamie. "Have you ever found it? Or perhaps the color of together-ness, or of the speaking voice of my piano teacher, or of the earthful joy I feel when I watch the sun rise?"
"Ah," said the bird, "you have learned to look for the right kinds of colors. Now when you walk, listen for them and you may begin seeing them yourself." He hopped onto the green branch of the tree just outside her window. Jamie sprang up from her bed and leaned partway out of the frame, protesting, but the bird held up one shimmering blue wing and said,
"Remember this: kindness sounds like difficulty and smells like foolishness, but it feels, oh it feels like the very presence of the best Color of all. Keep looking." With that, and a flashing wink from one of his round golden eyes, the bird vaulted from the green branch into the burning white sunlight.
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