Noticing (Brown)
Ok, universe/God/divine... I’m listening. The last 48 hours or so, it has been reminder after reminder about “paying attention” or “noticing” or “savoring.” I know that this has been at the heart of what I’ve been doing with color but seriously...the last few days it is like, “Hello, McFly!!!” Here’s what has happened:
Several days ago, Lindsay L. O'Connor posted this amazing reflection - beauty as sustenance - on her Words from Silence page - focused on the practice of savoring moments. She defines savoring as “the practice of slowing down to notice and be present to beauty and goodness.” The whole post is totally worth a read
Over the weekend I listened to a podcast from RadioLab called “Forests on Forests” that shared about some of the wonders that we are only now learning about forest canopies (including large amounts of humus piled up on branches high in some of the tallest trees out of which are growing new trees and within which are entire ecosystems! - Many of them brown!)
Then Monday, I read this from Arianne Braithwaite Lehn in her Monday Manna - All about paying attention as she focuses on a recent novel and also the wisdom of Mary Oliver whom she quotes with: “Attention is the beginning of devotion….” among several other bits of wisdom from Mary Oliver. She closes her post with one of her own prayers - When I’m Completely Scattered. Again, whole post worth a read.
Then Monday afternoon, I met with my spiritual director and the majority of our conversation shifted to this sense of paying attention (sorry no link for a transcript of our conversation).
Tuesday morning, I queued up my Daily Calm podcast and it was entitled “Vividness” but was about a technique to deepen awareness. The closing image quotes Jon Kabat-Zinn... “Mindfulness is about being fully awake in our lives.” Here’s the free share link if you’d like to listen.
Not done yet...The Strands puzzle from the New York Times on Tuesday had a theme of “Attention, Attention” with the words in the puzzle being behold, watch, witness, eyeball, monitor, observe, and then the “spangram” of “like a hawk,”
And finally...in the Pop Culture Pastor’s Hour that MaryAnn and I recorded about Nature with our special guest Fr Pete the Wilderness Priest, what does MaryAnn mention with her first “pop culture item”? She talks about how nature calls us to “pay attention to little things.”
So yeah... I’m listening... I’m trying to pay attention!
This week I’ve been seeking to pay attention to my next color... brown.
Full disclosure, I had a bit of a reaction about the fact that my random list of colors for this came to brown for this week. After all, Spring is in full bloom around here. Vivid greens, purples, oranges, reds, yellows, and so forth. And this week is... brown. Some of that feeling goes back to something I heard in a message shared at an event in college over 30 years ago. The speaker was sharing about a moment with his wife while driving and he began to sing along with a song that came on the radio. She stopped his singing when she noted that she felt like his singing wasn’t bad but it wasn’t very good . As she tried to describe it further, she talked about how, when you make a fruit smoothie you put all these vibrant colors together in the blender and when they are all mixed up - they come out brown. She said, “your singing is brown.” If we were using 2026 slang, she might have said that his singing was “meh” or “mid.” For some reason, I’ve never forgotten that part of the message (honestly I don’t remember what the rest was) and it is probably because my singing is meh/mid (at best).
In the years since, however, I’ve become more aware of how someone who was not white skinned might have heard that when it was shared. Someone whose skin tone was more brown or black who heard that color described as not bad but not very good either - just brown. Good chance that it didn’t sit too well with them. I have come to understand this more with what I have read and learned about how often darker colors are associated with badness or with evil. And looking right now at the United States...who are those who are being most often targeted for arrest or put under suspicion or are victims of hate crims? People whose skin tones are darker. It is why I try to be aware and pay attention to the ways in which I speak of light and darkness, black and white, and so forth.
I am grateful that the last seven days have reminded me and shown me that brown is an amazingly vibrant and wonderful color. One example…Something my spiritual director said on Monday as we talked about this was that you don’t have a tree, any tree, without the color brown. She’s right. Brown was there in the trunk of my favorite tree as I placed my hand on it on Earth Day. Brown was the color of the bench that was the inspiration in 2024 about finding wonder in the everyday which led to my book, Ordinary Benchmarks. Brown was the color of the twisted tiny branch that I photographed with a macro lens that could have easily been overlooked. Brown was the color of the train tracks and rail spikes that held them together that I photographed on Saturday. Brown was the color of the water but more so the two turtles that I saw swimming as I looked into the lake on. Sunday. Shades of brown made up the intarsia wood piece of a heron that my dad crafted years ago that stands on a shelf in our house. Brown was the color of the snail that was so tiny that I noticed while walking on Tuesday morning after a rainy overnight.
Brown in all of these ways was beautiful, wondrous, and full of life and memory and love in what I received from this week of paying attention to this dear color.
One more thing before sharing the photos. This week also had something take place that could easily have gone unnoticed for many. Congress passed and the President signed an action that removes a long-standing protection for the Boundary Waters Wilderness area. The Boundary Waters is one of the last fully protected areas in our country. But no more. The action signed will allow for copper mining by a Chilean company that will likely disrupt if not destroy areas of this pristine wilderness. I don’t know what else can be done beyond direct action when the work begins (I am sure that there are organizations already filing suit against the actions) but still contact your representatives to express your feelings about this. To read more about this, click here.
Onto the beauty and wonder of noticing Brown this week:
Where did you see brown this past week?
This next week? Yellow!
I did want to share a few more images that were not brown per se but just were really beautiful and fun to receive including Scout from a really unique angle.
Grace, Peace, Love, Hope, and Joy,
Ed
I like the idea of you “receiving” photos rather than taking them.
Ed,
As a Vietnamese person, a brown person, and a minority, I find your thoughts on the inherent beauty of this color to be deeply validating. I wish to offer my support for your theological premises by drawing upon ancient Judaic thought and modern scholars who celebrate the sacredness of the earth and the marginalized.
In the Hebrew tradition, the creation of the first human, hā-ādām, is linked to the Hebrew adamah (Strong #127, the reddish-brown earth) and, as a note against patriarchy, adamah is a feminine noun and adam is masculine (I have argued in other writings that this tension should be viewed as humanity, the first human, as being non-binary/non-gendered!). The midrashic commentary, Pirke De-Rabbi Eliezer (Chapter 11), describes God gathering dust from every corner of the world to form the first human. The Jewish spiritual insight here is that the color brown is not the result of a muddying of colors but, rather, it is the synthesis of all colors. The Hebrew hā-ādām is used as a wordplay on the word adamah, which means the ground or the earth. This reddish-brown soil is the source of all life and not just us. The scholar Phyllis Trible, in her opus magnus, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (1978), advocates strongly for this understanding of a non-gendered hā-ādāmas, by translating the phrase as the earth creature. Before gender or race were defined, we were simply of the brown earth. To be brown is to be fundamentally connected to the very foundation of creation. It is the color of our shared origin.
In wrestling with the story of Jacob found in Genesis 30:40, the Midrash in Bereshit Rabbah (73:10) focuses on the chum, the dark colored (brown) animals that were the anomalies of the flock. In the classical commentary of the Ramban (not to be confused with Rambam, who was known as Moses Maimonides) on Genesis 30:32, Jacob choosing these sheep is seen as a profound act of faith. He took what was common or overlooked and trusted the Divine to multiply it. This supports your premise that there is wonder in things that could easily be overlooked, such as a rail spike or a tiny snail.
The practice of savoring and paying attention mirrors what Abraham Joshua Heschel called radical amazement. When we engage in this, we discover a unity that dispels the illusion of disunity. By paying attention to the color brown, you are performing this sacred religious act that unites what prejudice tries to sunder. Or, in the words of Rabbi Hechel (one far wiser than I): Religion and race. How can the two be uttered together? To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart, to remember that humanity as a whole is God’s beloved child. To act in the spirit of race is to sunder, to slash, to dismember the flesh of living humanity. Is this the way to honor a father: to torture his child? How can we hear the word “race” and feel no self reproach? (Religion and Race, January 14, 1963)
As a Vietnamese American, I am also guided by theologians like Peter C. Phan. He emphasizes that our native culture and the geography of our origins define our identity and show unique characteristics of the Divine. To love the brown of the earth and the brown of our skin is to honor the family and ancestral values that are deeply embodied in our physical reality. This awareness is a safeguard against the destruction of places like Boundary Waters Canoe Area, because when we treat the land as a mere resource for copper, we ignore the principle of Bal Tashchit (do not destroy), the command to not destroy the world that sustains us. This Jewish principle is drawn from Deuteronomy 20:19-20. I would recommend Judaism and Environmentalism: Bal Tashchit by Yonatan Neril as found at Chabad.org website.
I believe that God’s intentional act of infusing divine life into the reddish-brown soul of the earth is, what I argue, the First Incarnation, the fusing of the earth-creature with the Divine. Because, if the source of our physical being is the adamah and the ruach is that which gives Adamah life, then Adamah (we reddish-brown creatures!) are not secondary to but essential to the First Incarnation.
Blessings,
Steven Joseph John Bruening
P.s. I envy your ability to capture the sacred in your photography 🙃