Just yesterday, I bought two New Guinea impatiens, carefully chosen from among a colorful array of blooming Impatiens hawkeri. There were whites and scarlets, salmons and pinks, oranges and bi-colors, but I chose two exquisite SW 6973’s. Only, yesterday, I did not know they were SW 6973’s. I only knew I loved them above all the rest, adorned with ovoid petals of a most lovely silken lavender, not “Lavish Lavender” (SW 6975), not “Joyful Lilac” (SW 6972), not “Plum Blossom” (SW 6974), but SW 6973 … “Free Spirit.”

Free Spirit. A curious name for a color, but many colors on a painter’s palette have curious and often playfully suggestive names. Free Spirit. Is lavender the color of spirit? Not brash and bold and boasting, but subtle and soft and unassuming: humbly, exquisitely, timelessly beautiful? Free Spirit. Without edges, without boundaries, without borders, without walls, either to shut in or to shut out. No, free, filling the space it occupies, but also filling, infusing, beatifying any and all in its surrounding environs.

Lavender was not always my favorite color. From childhood, my favorite color was green, the color of an earth bursting with life, vibrant and soothing, luxuriant and intoxicating, a color to rest in, a color to revel in, a color to live in … forever. I am still in love with green, but lavender now commands first place in my heart, perhaps reflecting an ascendance of spirit over body, though, even as I write this, I recoil from any notion of wrongly bifurcating the two. Body and spirit are inextricably intertwined, me, not a soul trapped in a terrestrial costume, but me, as I seem to be, as I am, animated flesh, sentient protoplasm, a creature made from dust in the image of God. I am green. I am lavender. I am luxuriously and joyfully alive.