This originally appeared as part of the Daily Sip, a website from Charles LaFond, an Episcopal Priest who raises money for the homeless and lives on a horse farm in New Mexico with his dog Kai. offering daily meditations and reflections
The Christmas morning sunrise today held the characteristic colors of New Mexican sunrises and sunsets. The sassy soil has pinks in its hues from the red clay which has, for centuries, flowed down into this valley created by a violent rupture in the earth’s crust, spotted by the lava from the many volcanoes on Albuquerque’s west side. The greens are darkest in winter, splashes from trees and the struggling alfalfa holding tight to life until Spring rains come just in the nick of time.
The clouds create the kisses of color – the baby-pinks-and-blues which, set against the oranges of nature’s fierce fire of life, set up a series of colors which are more than enough gift on Christmas Morning.
Needing new soup bowls and tea bowls for my kitchen, I worked hard this fall to create a glaze combination which, to the best of my ability, captured these New Mexican sunrise colors – the expanse of sandy ground, mottled with lava stones and finished with dark greens fading into the pinks and blues of sunrise. My pottery reflects how often I throw pots watching the orchestra of color demanding awe of the divine.
Today is a day for colors but, for me here on this little farm, the colors are not red and green. Not the light of a tree or the sparkle of glass balls, brass candlesticks, silk brocades. No. Today, Christmas Day 2017, is a day of pinks, yellows and baby-blues. The colors of a child. A baby. An innocent, falsely charged, tortured and killed as a scapegoat.
What cup might I make to offer water to an exhausted mother in a manger or a large man on a cross? A cup of simple clay with the colors of a New Mexican Sunrise.