Playing with the Blues

In my part of Devon, it rained every day for the first fifty days of 2026. From torrential, horizontal stinging rain that rattles the windows, to a soft drizzle that gently hangs in the air, and every mood in between. Everywhere is sodden: woodland paths like sticky streams, seafronts awash with stormy seas. The sky is continously grey. I hadn't realised how much I depend on the blue of the sky. We have had only the briefest of glimpses which raised a cheer, and then just as quickly, the grey returned.

By coincidence, I have been revisiting a favourite book, 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost' by Rebecca Solnit, prompted by the photographer Valda Bailey. Solnit explores the idea of blue not simply as a colour but as a condition of distance and longing:

"The world is blue at its edges and its depths. This blue is the light that got lost."

That phrase lingers with me: the light that got lost. Weeks without blue have left me feeling blue - uninspired and creatively flat, as though something essential is missing. On yet another wet afternoon, with the raindrops running down the window, I found myself turning to old images, searching for the blueness I couldn't find outside:

Blue is often described as the colour of calm and tranquility. It is painted on walls to soothe, to quieten the mood. But Solnit delves much further. She writes of the blue at the farthest edge of sight - the horizon, the distant mountain range, the place where earth dissolves into atmosphere:

"The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.”

That blue is not restful. It aches. It is the colour of solitude. The colour of desire. The colour of elsewhere. There is a melancholy to it, not so much despair, but longing. A blue that pulls our gaze outward and forward. As Solnit writes:

"Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery".

And Henry Thoreau echoes her:

"Not until we are lost, in other words, not until we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations".

Perhaps this endless rain is its own kind of being lost. The familiar landscapes altered and blurred in the mists, no distant horizons to anchor me. Without that blue, I feel unanchored too.

Yet there is also a quiet desire to be lost - to step away from the habitual, to discover that blue of the imagination and longing "The blue at the far edge of what can be seen....the color of where you can never go".

Robert Frost understood the desire for blue in this poem:

Fragmentary Blue

By Robert Frost

Why make so much of fragmentary blue

In here and there a bird, or butterfly,

Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,

When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)—

Though some savants make earth include the sky;

And blue so far above us comes so high,

It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

It is these fragments of blue that move us - like my longing for the shard of brightness between the grey clouds, the sudden sliver of sky that reveals light beyond the rain. If the sky in Devon was blue every day, perhaps I would not hunger for it. As Solnit says: "Blue is the color of longing for the distances that you never arrive in......lost in the track of time.....lost in the walking that set me loose in the moorings of time".

I find myself remembering a line from Susan Sontag's diary: “All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.” Perhaps the rain is offering me that - an enforced stillness, a narrowing of the visible world that is pushing me into inner contemplation. For now I must search for blue elsewhere: in memory, in photographs, in thought - until the light finds its way back again when winter finally loses its grip.

#susansontag; #rebeccasolnit; #searchingfortheblue; #contemplatingtheblues; #springyearning