steeped in a bowl of summertime

Shed reason and frets so that what is left is a lean asceticism, a looking not at the world but into it.
~ Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise

I used to wonder why the sea was blue at a distance
and green close up
and colorless for that matter in your hands.
A lot of life is like that.
A lot of life is just a matter of learning to like blue.
~ Miriam Pollard, The Listening God

Colors challenge language to encompass them.
~ Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise

Turquoise is the stone of the desert. It is the color of yearning.
~ Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise

In some prayers the words for turquoise and water were interchangeable.
~ Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise

To protect yourself from lightning, the Navajo say,
wear a bead of turquoise in your hair.
The Navajo divinity Changing Woman,
so named because she is life springing from nothing
and a woman who renews her youth each season,
lives in a house with a turquoise door
and four footprints of turquoise leading to a turquoise room.
Changing Woman looks through binoculars of rock crystal,
the stone of light beams and fire
and a natural ally of turquoise.
~ Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise

I have always kept ducks, he said, even as a child,
and the colours of the plumage,
in particular the dark green and snow white,
seemed to me the only possible answers to the questions that are on my mind.
~ W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn