Helen Ruggieri: NEUTRAL COLORS

Watched a show on the Home and Garden channel last night about a decorator’s use of rust, beige, tan, gray and ecru providing a neutral background against which to display your objet d’art. On the way to work rust, beige, tan, gray and ecru. Burnt sienna, ocher, cream, manila, last oak leaves, frost blown tops of goldenrod, giant reeds, wild grasses.

If you stretched a wire between two poles and plucked it, it would vibrate forever. Once a sound is made the vibrations never stop. All the sounds the world has made are out there floating in the atmosphere.

If you had the equipment you might hook up the electrical impulses of your brain to musical instruments and play them with your mind—the brain’s music, EEG’s finding a way to sing in the world. The electrical pulse of our thoughts surging through our neural pathways making a sax play “Love Me Tender.”

I was walking the dog down by the river where there are ponds formed in abandoned gravel pits. At dusk a flock of Canada geese flew over us coming in low to settle onto the pond. They were no more than six feet over my head, honking and braking, the leaders splashing into the pond. The last of the light made their white bellies ghostly glows. The dog was barking. The disrupted air from the many wings raised my hair like static electricity tingles around you. Honking, barking, my pleasure cry.

I think of that music radiating forever in the atmosphere against the neutral noise, the unsorted background sounds of everyday.

........holding a shell
..............to my ear
......................my own music

by Helen Ruggieri
Olean, New York