An inspiring story from Australia

“Children become attached to whoever functions as their primary caregiver. But the nature of that attachment—whether it is secure or insecure—makes a huge difference over the course of a child’s life. Secure attachment develops when caregiving includes emotional attunement. Attunement starts at the most subtle physical levels of interaction between babies and their caretakers, and it gives babies the feeling of being met and understood.” From The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

Today’s post includes a book from Australia, and a brief introduction to a podcast on attachment.

Penguin the Magpie: The Odd Little Bird Who Saved a Family, by photographer Cameron Bloom, and friend, writer and wild life conservationist, Bradley Trevor Greive, is a true story of heartache, love, courage and hope. It is the story of a rescued wounded Magpie chick and her human family, which is in deep pain and distress. The book recounts Sam Bloom’s terrible accident, which leaves her paralyzed and feeling hopeless, and her journey back from the edge of death and the depths of despair and depression, with the aid and love of her family and a small magpie.

The book begins with Eduardo Galeano’s poem: Family

As people know in black Africa and indigenous America, your

family is your entire village with all its inhabitants. Living or dead.

Your relatives aren’t only human.// Your family also speaks to you….. // in the rain that kisses you  //  and in the birdsong that greets your footsteps.

Sam Bloom was a shy, sporty Australian girl determined to become a nurse and travel across Africa. She fell in love with Cameron Bloom, passionate about photography and travelling, and together they travelled around the world, raised three boys and built a life together on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. And then, in a single horrific moment in Thailand, where the family had gone on a trip, everything changed.

During Sam’s darkest moments, Penguin, an injured magpie chick abandoned after her fall from her nest, and rescued by her son, enters their lives. Penguin becomes a focal point of love and joy, as the whole family nurses her back to health. They all forge a bond with Penguin, and the bird becomes attached to them, especially, Sam. Watching this little bird recover and grow, and eventually fly, brings them joy and healing, and serves as inspiration for Sam in her own journey. Her husband’s beautiful photographs capture this experience.

Through the love and support of her environment Sam was able to reconnect with her love for the ocean. She found a renewed sense of purpose in taking up competitive kayaking, which placed her 13th in the world. She went on to become a para-surfing champion, winning three gold medals for Australia. Ten years after the accident she and her husband were able to return to Africa, with their sons, Rueben 22, Noah 20, and Oli 18, this time. Today Sam Bloom’s activities today include sharing her journey, as a global keynote speaker for paraplegics, and her work as an ambassador for Surfers for Climate emphasizing the importance of ocean conservation.

One can see some of this material online at: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/gallery/2016/oct/13/penguin-bloom-how-a-scruffy-magpie-rescued-a-family

Also, the movie, Penguin Bloom, starring Naomi Watts and Andrew Lincol,.is based on the Bloom’s story.

Finally, a few extracts from the book:

Besides our love for the ocean, we shared a passion for travel. Whenever we could get away to explore the world and experience new cultures we would shrug on backpacks and set off for parts unknown. We didn’t have much money, but that didn’t matter as neither of us cared for luxury resorts or packaged holidays. Sam and I are outdoors people, we prefer dusty trails to city streets, mud huts to museums and street food to dining…….. By the time we’d celebrated our tenth anniversary we’d trekked around the Mediterranean and beyond, Sam’s dream to visit Africa was realized five times over….. We also explored the Middle East and set foot in places that are now completely off-limits to tourists. The further we went, the more we fell in love. The more deeply we fell in love, the further we wanted to travel.

Her injuries are such that she can never feel comfortable, regardless of the resting surface or her body position….. Even when Sam goes to bed she is denied the sweet relief of a good night’s sleep. I help her turn over three times before dawn in order to maintain her circulation and to prevent pressure sores.

Sam felt broken and utterly adrift. I saw the light in her eyes grow dim. I knew she was withdrawing from this world. That such a fiercely free and passionate spirit could now be anchored beyond our love by pain and a steel chair was too much for us to bear……

And this is where penguin came into her own. She was our fearless ambassador of love and chief motivational officer…….. Penguin had no problem speaking up on Sam’s behalf and, in doing so, this plucky bird helped Sam realize that her needs mattered….

From cradling Penguin in my hands and holding Sam in my arms I can tell you that every nerve cell, every blood vessel, every atom of our being is precious. But we are all so much more than the sum of our fragile parts. We are all our journeys, hopes, and dreams, clad in mortal wrapping paper.

In the epilogue there is a personal message from Sam, who writes about what it is really like to face life in a wheelchair, without glossing over her loss or struggles:

Becoming a paraplegic has not been an unexpected gift; the new perspectives granted me cannot be equated with a great spiritual awakening, and I don’t feel this experience has made me a better person or given me new found purpose.

It has given me the chance to see the very best in my husband and our children, even while I was at my lowest point. These are beautiful insights for which I am grateful, despite their appalling cost….. Without the support of my husband and our children, our immediate families, and our dearest friends (especially Penguin), I’m not sure I would still be here, and I know I wouldn’t be doing as well as I am.

In this week’s (19/05/2025) Being Well podcast, which you can watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4hhBkOFfwU, Forrest, and his father, Rick Hanson, explore disorganized or what is also considered the more “fearful” attachment style, which typically arises as a result of trauma or / and difficult life experiences, especially early on in life, and involves both anxious and avoidant modes of insecure attachment, where both emotional intimacy and distance can feel uncomfortable. They touch upon various aspects and questions concerning attachment theory** , developments in the field, and suggestions on how to heal through integrating parts of ourselves that carry uunmet (emotional) needs.

**British psychologist John Bowlby was the first attachment theorist, who was interested in understanding the anxiety and distress that children experience when separated from their primary caregivers. Bowlby saw attachment as the secure base from which a child moves out into the world. He believed that the earliest bonds formed by children with their caregivers have a tremendous impact throughout life. Bowlby and others, viewed attachment mostly as a product of evolutionary processes, and proposed that children are born with an innate drive to form attachments with caregivers. Throughout history, children who maintained proximity to an attachment figure were more likely to receive comfort and protection and, therefore, more likely to survive to adulthood, and so through the process of natural selection, a motivational system designed to regulate attachment emerged. The central theme of attachment theory is that primary caregivers, who are available, consistent and responsive to an infant’s needs allow the child to develop a sense of security, and to learn that the caregiver is dependable, which creates a secure base, that allows the child to explore the world.

What we now know about attachment has evolved, and the ways we tend to attach to others can shift over time, both for the best (earned secure attachment) and the worst, depending on our experiences and relationships. The neuroplasticity of the brain allows for changes to occur throughout our life, and allows us to shift from insecure attachment styles to a more secure state of being and relating. It’s also useful to remember that we probably use different styles or combinations of secure and insecure relating with different people, and in different contexts and phases of our life. A more contemporary attachment theory views attachment as dynamic and less static, a process also shaped by nervous system states moment to moment, as well as, circumstances.

During this episode Forrest and Rick talk about attachment theory and styles, and the influence of both our temperament and broader social environments beyond family; leveraging coping mechanisms, even seemingly dysfunctional ones, for healing, through firstly understanding which coping mechanisms we used as children, but also later on; why “boring” relationships can be transformative, and more.There are references to Mary Ainsworth’s research, and Kim Bartholomew and Leonard Horowitz’s 1990s model of four prototypic attachment patterns, which are defined by using combinations of our (positive or negative) self-image and our (positive or negative) image of others. There’s mention of Margaret Mahler’s, separation–individuation theory of child development, in which rapprochement is a crucial phase where infants, typically during their second year, begin to navigate their growing independence while maintaining a sense of closeness with their primary caregiver, as they develop greater awareness of self and separateness from the mother or other caregiver.

Finally, what we call disorganized attachment is often closely linked to [complex] trauma, so the last part of the podcast focuses on the more trauma-informed therapeutic approaches, what good, healthy, reliable relationships feel and look like [they include predictability, and consistency, and emotional validation, and they aren’t punishment oriented], and the questions and steps one could ask and take in order to embrace the more anxious, avoidant or ambivalent parts of oneself, so as to reach a place of more agency and choice. They suggest ways to develop more secure attachments through self trust, self respect, and through embracing our unmet needs, giving a voice to the aspects of ourself that were voiceless, and actually feeling free to fully embrace what we really want and to pull for appropriate social supplies from others. Rick says: “You’re giving voice to the despairing child inside, who watched the caregiver just walk out of the room….. You become integrated through self-expression, your own expression….. Τhere’s kind of a paradox that the more that we are full-throated and wholehearted in what we communicate, the less we need perfect attunement from others.”

A box of colours                                                              Edited 18/ 05/ 2025

Extract from my more personal writing:

“‘The colour blue – that is my colour – and the colour blue means you have left the drabness of day-to-day reality to be transported into – not a world of fantasy, it’s not a world of fantasy – but a world of freedom where you can say what you like and what you don’t like. This has been expressed forever by the colour blue, which is really sky blue’ Louise Bourgeois

The season had come for me to lift the curtains and look at the light and the darkness and the colours and shapes of things from a place of new knowing of what I had implicitly always known. The white light, which at the time seemed as ‘the end of a tunnel’, when my breathing cracked, was not of a blinding pure fluorescent white, it was a milky, softer white. It is believed that white light contains all colours, whereas the white of pigment could be described as the absence of colour.  You can’t mix colours, you need to start with a white pigment. Thoughts about colour and art occupy my mind every now and then, and sometimes even during moments of duress.  Once as I was sinking from anaesthesia before a removal of fibroids surgery, favourite paintings emerged in my dazed awareness. I woke up accompanied by a particular painting with vibrant oranges and reds by Tetsis.

As a child I liked looking at pictures and the shapes light created on the surface of objects. I was fascinated by the dance between the shades of green and the sunlight on the porcelain tiles of the fireplace in the living room, and I wondered if there was a way to paint the light on surfaces. I found that grey produced from white and black seemed clean, strict and authoritarian, even though I did not know the word authoritarian then, but when it came about from mixing leftover paints one ended up with ‘dirty greys’, or the colour of quick sand and mud. The same happened to plasticine once I had mixed enough colours enough times.

Francis Ponge writes: Our soul resents it. Our feet and wheels trample it. “Mud” is how we address those we hate, paying little attention to the injustice done to the mud. Does it really deserve the constant humiliation, attacked with such an atrocious persistence? Mud, so despised, I love you….’                        (Mud: The Unfinished Ode by Francis Ponge)”.                                   Tonya Alexandri-2017
 The Secret Lives of Colour, written by Kassia St. Clair, is a historical exploration of the world of colours. St. Clair illustrates how important colours have been in human history and what individual colors have meant throughout the centuries. She discusses how colours exist as much in the socio-cultural and political realm, as they do physically, and therefore, should also be understood as subjective cultural creations.

St. Clair initially introduces the basic science of colour and how we see colour. Around 4.5% of the world’s population are colour-blind or deficient because of faults in their cone cells.The phenomenon is usually genetic and is more prevalent in men: around 1 in 12 men are affected compared to 1 in 200 women. For people with ‘normal’ colour vision, when cone cells are activated by light, they relay the information through the nerve system to the brain, which in turn interprets this as colour; however, the interpretation stage is not that straightforward.

In a chapter with the title, Chromophilia, chromophobia: Politics of colour, she explains how a certain distaste for colour runs through Western culture, and that many classical writers were dismissive, believing that colour was a distraction from design / line and form. In art, she says, the tussle over the respective merits of drawing versus colour raged on through the Renaissance, and even today, though somewhat muted. Colour has even been viewed as sinful. The Protestants, for instance, writes St. Clair, expressed their intellectual simplicity, severity and humility in a palette dominated by black and white; bright colours like red, orange, yellow and blue were removed from the walls of their churches, houses and wardrobes, and pious Henry Ford refused for many years to produce cars in any colour other than black.

Also, during different historical periods there were laws that governed what class of people could wear certain colors. Difficult to create colors, like purple, “a greedy consumer of resources,” and red, and brighter colours, were reserved for kings and queens, cardinals, and the ruling class in general, while dull, earthy colours like grey and brown were confined to the poor, rural peasants and the working class. Tyrian purple dipped cloth, for instance, was worth its weight in gold, and by the 4th century AD in Rome only the emperor was allowed to wear Tyrian purple; anyone else caught wearing it could face death. St. Clair writes that as colours came to take on meanings and cultural significance within societies, attempts were made to restrict their use, through the sumptuary laws. Such laws were passed in ancient Greece, China and Japan, and they found their fullest expression in Europe from the mid-twelfth century. These laws could touch on anything: diet, dress and furnishings, and they sought to enforce social boundaries by encoding the social strata into a clear visual system. Colour became a signifier in this social language.

The book is full of fascinating facts, stories and insights into the use of pigments, dyes and colours. Just to mention a few, Kohl, the black colour used by the Egyptians as eyeliner to make the whites of the eyes stand out was believed to have magical properties, and the Pharaohs valued it so much they buried themselves with it so as to wear it in the afterlife. Naturally, the quality of Kohl depended on the wealth of the wearer. Indigo comes from the Greek word indikon, which means “from India” because it was thought that the seeds of the plant used to obtain indigo blue came from India, which is not actually true, and in the 1500s, in Rome, the indigo pigment was so expensive (one kilogram cost 15x the average salary per day) that some merchants tried to sell a fake product made out of pigeon poop. Absinthe isn’t actually poisonous, but this was a story told to convince people to drink less, and mauve was accidently discovered in the search for a cure for malaria. In 1979, a colour with the name BakerMiller Pink, first painted on the walls of a US Naval Correctional Centre, was praised for its calming effect on inmates reducing levels of violence within the centre significantly.This gave it something of a pop like status in the US, and as a result it was used for the seats of buses, houses, sports locker rooms, and so on. Subsequently, however, studies conducted by academia produced contradictory results.

Humans have been on an eternal quest to make pigments for artwork, dating back to prehistoric cave dwellers, who had figured out how to make long lasting pigments for their cave drawings. St. Clair writes that Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist writing in the first century AD, claimed that painters in classical Greece used only four colours: black, white, red and yellow; however, she notes the Egyptians had discovered a complex way of manufacturing a bright blue at least as early as 2500 BC., but still early artists were restricted.

As part of this endeavor to produce more colours and find more sources for pigments, a huge number of plants, insects, crustaceans and humans have been sacrificed. The food industry, for instance, uses cochineal (officially named E120) in foods. It was only in 2012 that Starbucks was forced to drop E120 after a vehement protest from vegetarians and Muslims. Cochineal is obtained using a pigment from a tiny bug that lives on cacti, which was a sign of power for the Aztecs. Using a version of the forced-labour system the Inca had used to build temples and roads, the Spanish insisted locals over the age of 18 put in a year’s work for subsistence wages. Along with gold and silver, cochineal provided the financial sinew of the Spanish empire. One of the two most profitable mines in the Spanish empire was Cerro Rico, which was viewed by the locals as ‘the mountain that eats men.’  Accidents and mercury poisoning were common.

Metals like iron, copper, silver and gold have a structure that contains mobile electrons that strongly reflect light, and this is what gives these metals their distinctive sheen. St Clair tells us that gold’s glimmer, coupled with its resistance to tarnishing, made it an emblem for divinity; although, it is also associated with greed and avarice, evident in the myth of King Midas. She writes: “The medieval Christian Church binged on the metal.” And for hundreds of years artists liked to use it (e.g. Giotto’s figures are not depicted in a room or landscape but lie on a smooth golden ground; in The Birth of Venus Botticelli wove gold through Venus’s hair; Klimt’s ‘Golden Phase’).

People also became ill or died from dangerous substances like lead and arsenic as colorants in everything from make-up to clothing to wallpaper. Scheele’s Green, and its toxic cousins, St. Calir writes: “were responsible for many deaths, as unsuspecting consumers papered their homes, clothed their offspring and wrapped their baked goods in an exciting new shade that contained lethal doses of arsenic.” Like most colours over the centuries green has been associated with positive and negative qualities, and there have been many irrational taboos and prejudices against colours in different eras. In the West from the 12th century green started becoming associated with the devil and demonic creatures, maybe St. Clair notes, as a result of the increasing antagonism between Christians and Muslims, for whom the colour was sacred. Brown was also despised, and browns were used and valued mostly after the first period of the Renaissance, in Correggio, Caravaggio and Rembrandt’s great paintings. Anthony van Dyke, in the seventeenth century, became so skilled with one brown pigment that it later became known as ‘Van Dyke brown’.

Lead white was also deadly. In 1678, Sir Philiberto Vernatti described the fate of those involved in the production of white lead. But it wasn’t just the people grinding and producing the pigment that suffered from the effects of lead poisoning. White lead had long been used as a cosmetic to make skin look smooth and pale. St. Clair refers to Xenophon, who wrote disapprovingly of women wearing a ‘plaster of ceruse and minium ((white and red lead)’ in Greece during the 4th century BC. In China and Japan women were mixing a similar poisonous brew with rice powder to use as a foundation, and women in Queen Elizabeth’s court were painting blue veins over a similar very pale base layer. Similarly, two pigments used to produce yellow colours, orpiment and gamboge, were also highly poisonous. Orpiment, a naturally occurring mineral: a canary-yellow sulphide of arsenic (As2S3) is around 60% arsenic and it is deadly, and although it was occasionally taken in minute amounts as a purgative in Java, Bali and China, the risks of abusing it were well known.

Additionally, throughout the book there are references to the multiple associations we make between colours and other things. Let’s take white for instance. St. Clair writes white has an otherness to it, is considered positive or having a religious quality, and it is also connected to power and money. It is the Chinese colour of mourning, and in the West and Japan, brides wear it because it is a colour symbolic of purity. During the English Reformation, churches and parishioners used whitewash to obscure colourful murals and icons that depicted saints in ways they now deemed impious. But she mentions it can also be exclusive, autocratic and neurotic. White has long been connected with money and power, and in the past only the rich could afford to buy and maintain white fabrics because wool and cotton, had to be heavily processed in order to appear white, and then requied a lot of labour to be maintained in an era with no washing machines.

Yellow is another colour group that has been associated with many different positive and negative qualities. In humans, St. CLair writes, the colour betokens illness, sallow skin, jaundice, and when associated to ‘journalism’it indicates rash sensationalism. Yellow has also been associated with sensationalist literature and the “sinful” yellow book covers from the mid-nineteenth century. For others, these sunny covers were symbols of modernity and yellow books show up in two of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings from the 1880s, for whom, among other artists and thinkers of the time, the colour came to stand as the symbol of the age and their rejection of repressed Victorian values. The final decade of the nineteenth century became known as the ‘Yellow Nineties.’

The flow of immigrants from the East [particularly China] to the West, in the early twentieth century, was dubbed the ‘yellow peril’. The most notorious example of yellow as a symbol of stigma is the star the Nazis forced Jews to wear, but other marginalised groups had been forced to wear yellow clothes or signs from the early Middle Ages, and during the Tang dynasty yellow shades and hues were forbidden to common people and officials. In India however, the colour symbolizes spirituality, peace and knowledge, and is associated with Krishna.

As for the orange group St. Clair mentions that the Russian abstract artist, Wassily Kandinsky, described orange as ‘red brought nearer to humanity by yellow,’and wrote that ‘Orange is like a man, convinced of his own powers.” It’s also a colour used to draw attention to potential danger in diverse contexts and cultures, a warning symbols on roads, “in part because it forms a high contrast against the blue-grey asphalt, even in low light.” It is the colour of the Dutch. It was used by the Impressionists and artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, Munch, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Crocuses are one source of saffron orange dye. Traces of natural saffron have been found in paintings in Iraq made 50,000 years ago, and the ancient Greeks used crocuses / κρόκος to dye their clothes. It has also been used to dye Buddhist robes, but its scarcity and high cost has resulted in it being replaced by turmeric, and currently synthetic dyes.

St. Clair’s chapter on language and colour is especially interesting. She points out that the study of old texts by ancient Greeks, especially Homer, the Bible in its original Hebrew, the Quran, Vedic chants from India, and ancient Chinese and Icelandic stories, seem to exhibit “the same muddled references to colour.” She refers to the relativists’s view that supports that language shapes perception and that without a word for a colour we don’t see it as distinct, and to the universalists’s view that suggests that basic colour categories are universal and rooted, somehow, in our biology. She concludes that what is certain is that the language of colour is complex.

There is a plethora of information in the book, as St. Clair discusses 75 different shades, dyes and hues. And I think her book would interest anyone who loves colours or / and is interested in art, history, politics and culture, chemistry and interesting trivia.

Images in ink, collage and colour……..

Over the years I have read a bit about the history and other sociocultural aspects of colours and pigments, and I might have posted something relevant in the past, although I’m not certain. Anyway, I will be writing more about colour and the book I am currently reading once I’ve finished it. In her book, The Secret Lives of Colour, St Clair affirms that colour is fundamental to our experience of the world we live in and begins by explaining that what we are really seeing when we look at an object is light being reflected off the surface of that object and into our eyes. She writes: “The visible spectrum only makes up a small proportion of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Different things are different colours because they absorb some wavelengths of the visible light spectrum, while others bounce off. So the tomato’s skin is soaking up most of the short and medium wavelengths – blues and violets, greens, yellows and oranges. The remainder, the reds, hit our eyes, and are processed by our brains. So, in a way, the colour we perceive an object to be is…. the segment of the spectrum that is being reflected away.” She mentions that about 4.5% of the world’s population is colour-blind or deficient in discerning colours because of faults in their cone cells. The phenomenon is usually genetic and is more prevalent in men: around 1 in 12 men are affected compared to 1 in 200 women. For people with ‘normal’ colour vision, when cone cells are activated by light, they relay the information through the nerve system to the brain, which in turn interprets this as colour, which she explains is not as straightforward as it sounds, because the interpretation stage is the most confounding.

There are a lot of interesting facts in the book about different aspects of colour, and the evolution or history of colour. One way of tracing humanity’s sensitivity to different colours, she writes, is through the evolution of peoples’ languages. It seems that everything started out with words for light and dark (or white and black); next came red, and then yellow, then green, then blue, and this suggests that two things: “the first was that colour categories were innate; the second was that if we didn’t possess a word for a colour, it affected our perception of it.”

Seasons and colour