Miracle. All of it.

~ Live & Learn

Spring has finally arrived, and it makes me smile every time I step outside. New green leaves are pushing themselves into the sunlight as plants build the solar panels that will fuel them throughout the year. The first spring flowers are already in bloom, and a bright showcase of cheerful rainbow color is rapidly replacing the gray-brown palette of late winter.

I love the constant small surprises as new flowers appear. But each new sighting makes me wish for a superpower: the sort of expanded vision that could show me all the colors these flowers have to offer. Human beings can see some of them, and birds and bees can see a little more. But the potential range of invisible colors is mind-boggling, and science is only just starting to get a grip on it.

Our color vision is neatly summed up in our perception of a rainbow, sweeping from red, the longest wavelength of light that our eyes can detect, to violet, the shortest. But we can’t detect each shade individually; in order to make sense of this continuous spectrum of colors, we use a clever shortcut. Our eyes have three types of cone cell that respond to different colors—red, green and blue. Our brain figures out how much of the light that we see falls into each category, and it recombines that information to construct the myriad colors that we register. It is both beautifully efficient and frustratingly crude…

~Helen Czerski, from Colors That Only Bees and Birds Can See

Notes:

  • Photo: Spring Flowers by Paul.
  • Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
  • Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

34 thoughts on “Miracle. All of it.”

  3. Awesome!! Always … love it. I’ve encountered a problem .. in yours and several other blogs!! The ‘reblog’ is there …. but I can’t reblog some post anymore. Do you know anything about this? Can you illuminate my mind!? Thanks … ❤ ❤ …
    I'm not happy with losing this option with the blogs I like to share!! 😦

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          3. Thanks so much! If you check, I was able to reblog post from ‘Repeating Islands” …. see? It’s some of the bloggers … and you are one! 😦

            I can’t miss sharing Caleb!!

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  4. Spring has begun it’s reboot here as well! Although it has been a rainy, wet weekend, it’s allowed us to do most of our spring cleaning in the house so I can now concentrate on the yard as soon as the sun warms the wet earth again with its rays. And I love the colours as the tulips begin to bloom once again, with more promises of miracles coming with spring’s arrival. Happy Sunday, Dave …

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  5. At the risk of nailing the obvious, the way things grow here in Florida is *nothing* like I was used to in New Hampshire. My planters are exploding with blooms and the flowers just keep multiplying. It is so exciting. I smile every time I walk out on the patio…. Happy Sunday, pal.

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  6. The rest of the article is a great read, thank you for sharing!

    Amazing how much of what seems complex, boils down to frustratingly crude!

    I’m sure you’ve come across the many stories online of someone being color blind all there life, and experiencing color for the first time through the new glasses. I saw one the other day of a gentle man seeing that his three kids had red hair, for the first time in his life.

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  11. I love this David. It speaks to how wonderful and mysterious and complex the world is! Seems we have all evolved to function within our given parameters which leads me to believe we know so little about other species and make so many assumptions about them based on that ignorance. Thanks for stimulating the old cortex today David. Happy Spring.

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  12. Reblogged this on It Is What It Is and commented:
    There’s a crispness in the air … ‘pring has finally arrived, and it makes me smile every time I step outside. New green leaves are pushing themselves into the sunlight as plants build the solar panels that will fuel them throughout the year. The first spring flowers are already in bloom, and a bright showcase of cheerful rainbow color is rapidly replacing the gray-brown palette of late winter.’ … Helen Czerski, from Colors That Only Bees and Birds Can See …

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