Autumn is not a season that I typically associate with pink.
But a heightened sense of the preciousness of life in the face of a dear friend's terminal breast cancer, and the onslaught of the annual pervasive hype surrounding October as official 'Breast Cancer Awareness Month' has opened my eyes to the pink that is all around me this fall.
I call it DEEP PINK.
Not because it is a particular shade of pink, but because, for me, it is pink with a new depth of meaning. It is pink that has nothing to do with Barbie dolls or tulle netting, with fashion forward handbags or hot retail spaces. This is the outrageous live-and-in-your-face-constantly-changing pink of October dawn clouds, and the delicate shifting pink of hydrangeas on sunlit fall days. It is the graduated shades of pink of fallen leaves and fading vines, and the impossible-to-capture shade of violet-pink of an October night sky with a bone-colored crescent moon.
Suddenly, my lifelong aversion to pink is transformed and I am drinking in the life-affirming symbolism of this misappropriated color. I am still deeply troubled the lack of any real progress in a cure for breast cancer, and I am very uncomfortable with the marketing of breast cancer as a cause to buy stuff for... but the intuitive logic of the choice of pink for the Code Pink Peace Movement now seems obvious to me.
Pink is the color of life and love.
Pink in every shade. Pink - dappled and speckled and dazzling and subtle. Each pink as unique and dear as the next. Like the women - the mothers, daughters, sisters, cousins, friends and co-workers, the strangers and foreigners - who are lost to their loved ones every day from breast cancer. Each one as dear as the next...
As I steel myself for the part of my dear friend's journey where we must part, I will hold this image, taken recently, of her communing with my sweet mare. (Somehow they had never met before now - my dear friend isn't a horse-girl.)
There is a kind of love in this exchange. The open gesture of my friend's hand outstretched in greeting, and the gentle sadness in my mare's eye as though she knows this is a good-bye...
This picture of such a tender dialogue will live forever
in my deep pink heart.
