Books on the Boat: The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair
Winter reading in Burlington, Vermont, and the quiet power of naming
A snow-piled Lake Champlain birthday weekend pairs well with Kassia St. Clair’s bite-sized color histories that deepen noticing and language.
Winter is a special season in our family: three of our six adult children celebrate birthdays within the space of a month. Having began the trifecta of revelry with our digital nomad daughter in Maine, and feted our Valentine Day’s child in Savannah, we are rounding out this year’s festivities with our son in Vermont.
This weekend we are staying at a place near Lake Champlain, close enough to run the shoreline and see the ice stacked and splintered at the edge. The lake feels familiar and unfamiliar at once. It carries more depth and less motion than the water near our island in Maine. The wind arrives colder, sweeping in long bands that sting the face and wake the body.
I return to an important part of my history every time I come back here.
I am the only child of my large family of origin born in Burlington, where my parents lived while my father attended medical school at the University of Vermont. Years later, I returned to attend the same medical school, and gave birth to my son in the midst of my own studies. He was the only one of his siblings born here. That symmetry delights me every time we come back.
Places become significant in our lives, receding and reappearing when we least expect them.
Following medical school, I experienced another Burlington chapter when I completed a leadership-focused online MBA through Champlain College, after years away from the classroom. Great teachers anchored that experience. Younger classmates challenged my assumptions and widened my view. Learning keeps its door open when we keep showing up.
“Debate over whether colors really, physically exist or are only internal manifestations has raged since the seventeenth century.”
— Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color
Why This Book, Right Now
The Secret Lives of Color is like our other February picks, Kitchen Table Wisdom, The Serviceberry, and The Greatest Sentence Ever Written— each books that offer insight in small bites, honoring the brevity yet importance of this month.
St. Clair structures the book as a reference. Each color gets a short entry, often just a few pages. We can read one color at a time at the kitchen counter, or beside a winter window. We can dip in for five minutes and still leave with something worth holding.
My husband and I first learned about The Secret Lives of Color while visiting Portland Art Gallery artist Greg Day in his studio. We noticed stacks of reference books everywhere, and that detail fit him. Greg brings deep study into his work. He learns across modalities, including his earlier life in architecture.
The Secret Lives of Color belongs not only in a studio, but also on the nightstand or in the boat bag of anyone who has ever wondered about our visual understanding of the world.
Amaranth and the Pleasure of Precision
St. Clair writes about pigments and materials that came from minerals, plants, metals, and insects. Some sources, like those based in lead and mercury, carried toxicity. As a physician, I read those pages with extra attention. Beauty often exacts a price.
St. Clair traces the cultural life of color as well. People elevate and restrict colors. People assign meaning, then revise it. People fight over who gets to wear what.
“Colors, therefore, should be understood as subjective cultural creations: you could no more meaningfully secure a precise universal definition for all the known shades than you could plot the coordinates of a dream.”
— Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color
St. Clair also gives us the part I love most. She gives us names, and she shows us the hue. Viridian. Cobalt. Amaranth. Dutch orange. The specificity feels like returning to a childhood crayon box, except now the words come with history.
Naming matters in writing. Descriptive naming pulls us closer to the real thing. A precise word helps us see more clearly. Labels can flatten. Description can open.
The color amaranth offers one example. I first met amaranth as an integrative physician focused on healthy foods. I was intrigued by this protein-rich grain once cultivated by the Aztecs. Later, I came to know amaranth as a feathery flower, plush and vivid. It is not surprising that artists would admire the color.
“Some amaranth was grown on special floating gardens, boats filled with soil and set adrift on lakes; the water helped regulate the temperature of the soil and stopped animals from getting at the crop.”
— Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color
We live by what we notice. We live by what we name. We also live by what we miss.
“So, in a way, the color we perceive an object to be is precisely the color it isn’t: that is, the segment of the spectrum that is being reflected away.”
— Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color
Why This May Matter for You
The Secret Lives of Color offers a small, practical reset. It trains attention.
If winter has narrowed your world to errands and screens, read one color entry and look up. If you write, teach, lead, or parent, you already work with perception all day long. St. Clair strengthens the muscle of specificity. She reminds us that “blue” never means only blue, and “orange” never means only orange. That mindset supports better language, better listening, and more humane leadership.
This also connects to narrative medicine. Stories change when we name accurately. Healing often begins when someone finds the right words.
Boat Book as Invitation
The Secret Lives of Color welcomes the life we actually live. A few pages at a time. Multiple settings. Small openings of wisdom, like our other brief February reads, just delivered through color.
📚Your Turn
What are you reading as February closes? Any books that help you notice more clearly, or name more precisely?
This weekend holds so many returns: to Burlington, to family milestones, to the lake that shaped my earliest chapters. St. Clair’s pages offer another kind of return, back to names and the precision that helps a writer stay honest. When I call a color by its true name, I feel my mind slow down and my heart settle into the moment.
You may notice our next piece in your mailbox or feed on a new schedule, and sooner than usual. We are building something new for you, and look forward to sharing it soon.
Until then…
May the place you came from offer you something simple and sustaining.
May the words you choose bring you closer to what you mean,
and may your noticing guide you gently home.
🌟Thank you for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me,
Lisa
The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.
