Blue

Twelve dollars buys you 10 pounds of raw peanuts at Costco.  John says they don't deserve it but my jay boys are getting really spoiled. They make a rude squawking noise when they see me in the kitchen, and if I put the peanuts on the rail and don't move away fast enough, they bang their beaks on the arbor like woodpeckers.

Jays travel in pairs and family groups, and I think these are probably juvenile siblings because their head crests haven't quite grown in and they are pretty fearless. Anyway, they found the welfare office here.  Jays are crazy for peanuts and they're stashing them all over the yard as fast as they can for winter.  Some jays are so smart they pick over the nuts and weigh them with their beaks to see which is the heaviest.  The best can grab two at once.

When they fly off,  their wings are the most beautiful blue found in nature-- a sight worth many bags of peanuts to me.

Blue is the overwhelming favorite color of people everywhere. Blue is nature’s color for the vast sky and waters and is found in flowers, animals and insects, but rarely in fruits and vegetables.  Blue is the color of trust, honesty and loyalty.

Here's something to wrap your mind around on Monday morning.  The color blue certainly existed in the Greek world, and what could be more "blue" than the Aegean Sea? However, there was not a word for "blue" in the ancient Greek language. In fact, none of the ancient languages had a specific word for blue, and it is never even mentioned in the New Testament.

The Greeks classified colors by whether they were light or dark, rather than the hue. The Greek word for dark blue, kyaneos, could also mean dark green, violet, black or brown.  When he wrote The Odyssey, Homer didn't have a single word for what we know as "blue."

Because he lacked the concept of "blue" he couldn't perceive the color itself.  Really. He often describes the sea as the "color of wine" and the sky as "bronze." The thing is, if we don't have a word for something, it might as well not exist.

How many other things are right in front of our eyes that we can't see, only because we don't have a word for it?  There was an interesting  Radiolab podcast recently on this subject, called "Why Isn't the Sky Blue?"