“C’était bleu. Complètement bleu.” said the French guy, after he had swum with the dolphins.
As soon as he had seen a big group of dolphins in the ocean, he jumped in the water and went straight offshore to catch up with them.
He came back to the beach and said that everything was blue. I found that his eyes were also turquoise blue.
A long time ago, in China, Zhuangzi looked up at the blue sky and wondered:
“If I could look down to the ground from where I am now, from behind the blue sky, would it look blue as well?”
More than 2,000 years after his death, people found out that his imagination was correct.
In Vietnam, there is a small tribe living in the mountains, who always wear blue. They dye their clothes with indigo which they collect from the forest, or maybe they cultivate.
They use a specific type of green leaves as a dye. After they ferment them, it will change the colour into the blue.
They believe that it is a sacred moment when the green turns into blue.
They dye their clothes repeatedly and don’t stop even after their fingers are dyed blue. That’s how they live for years and years.
I have visited a small factory of indigo dying in Kyoto, where I undertook indigo dying.
When they successfully ferment indigo leaves, they will have blue lumps floating in big pots. They call it “the Flower of indigo,” which doesn’t smell good (to me at least).
It was amazing to see that deep blue colour in the jugs buried in the ground. I put the white shirt in the indigo blue liquid. After I pulled it up, it became a beautiful sky blue colour.
It was an impressive moment, and I understood why people would think it was sacred.
In the Japanese language, “Ao” means blue, but sometimes it means green as well. Our ancestors might have known that the blue came from the green in nature. Or maybe, all of the colours are connected and related to each other seamlessly.
We all came from the blue, and it makes this planet something special.
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