Well, spring officially sprung last week, what with the
spring equinox on the 20th and British Summertime beginning next
weekend, and I got to thinking how lovely Spring feels after a long winter (and
oh boy, has it felt like a long winter!) and what it is about the season that
really seems to inject a new sense of life into us at this time of year, and a
lot of the changes in the way we think and feel eventually come down to light
and colour.
During winter, we suffer from an absence of both light and
colour in our natural environment, which means that even the colours that do
occur in our lives are often muted thanks to the grey days, dark cloud and
early evenings, which encourages us to cuddle in and hibernate.
But spring brings with it lighter mornings and evenings and
shoots of colour peeking out from unexpected places. The sky starts to seduce
us with bright blues, snowdrops peek shyly through the grass and the bluebells
dance alluringly on the woodland floors. The light seems brighter and
everything seems to have more impact.
Our clothes seem more vivid and leave us feeling more
vibrant, our décor seems just a shade more vivid than it did before. It all
seems lighter and brighter and that tends to wake our brains up and become more
aware of our surroundings, especially now that we can see more of it!
The colours of spring can all be thought of as fresh.
They’re light, bright and invigorating. They have the same effect on our
psychology as sorbet has on your palette. They induce feelings of revitalising,
freshness, brightness, and energy. So what sort of colours are spring colours?
Sky blues
dominate the spring landscape as we start waking up to skies where we can see
the sky instead of waking up to cloud cover, rain, snow or fog. Blues
traditionally inspire comfort and a sense of continuity, reliability, loyalty
and constancy, and within the context of the vivid colours of spring, those
traditional colour traits become representative of life continuing on, of the
dawn of a new season and the cycle of life.
Tender greens are
the colour we traditionally associate with spring, as we begin to see shoots of
new life coming through the ground, and plants beginning to slowly bloom.
Whilst greens are traditionally representative of nature, interpretations of
the colour green run the gamut from emotional stability to healing to nature.
In Spring, however, we seem to predominantly focus on the tender, fresh and
more vivid shades of green to represent life and renewal.
Primrose yellows
and nectarine oranges often come
with the new blooms like daffodils, black-eyed susans, shasta daisies and honeysuckle and offer a
cheeringly optimistic bloom of colour after a stark winter. Both bright, but
strangely delicate colours, they provide a positive accent to the greens and
blues that surround us and remind us of the warmth that is seeping back into
the world around us, giving us energy to begin new things and push forward
towards to a sense of being able to thrive in our environments once again.
White is a colour
that we often see during Spring, though rarely associate with the season. In
fact, Spring is often heralded by a blazing display of white through the
snowdrop. When we see white in winter, it can seem very bare and stark, but
when we see it amongst the fresh and positive shades of Spring, it appears as a
blank canvas, an offset for all the colour that surrounds it, making them and
itself all the brighter for the contrast.
This time of year is a chance for you to spring into colour,
inspired by nature.
Enjoy yourselves!
Sarah Clive is an Inspirationalist from Sarah Clive – Life’s Too Short where she
helps people to follow their dreams and live life outside the box, on their
terms. Sarah's a specialist in thinking outside the box and uses her unique
skill and enthusiasm for life by helping people find ways to make life work
for them so that they can focus on doing what they love.
She can be contacted through her
facebook.com/sarahclivelifestooshort, twitter.com/inspired_sarah or
website: sarahclive.com. Or you can always get in touch the old fashioned
way and give her a call on the phone on 01228 513134
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