The Color of Together: Mixed Metaphors of Connectedness

"We lose our vocabulary for gratitude when fear becomes our common vernacular. We lose the words that matter most, and, as a result, we lose part of our humanity." -From The Color of Together

Milton Brasher-Cunningham has written a book that speaks to one of the greatest challenges facing us today: How do we live together when so much seems bent on driving us apart?

"The chance we have to find strains of grace and hope and love—even gratitude," Milton writes, "comes in solidarity and the sharing of our stories, not in the measuring of them one against the other."

When his father died, Milton learned that grief was a primary color of life. That truth is as old as the human story but was new to him.

The Color of Together explores the metaphor more fully, looking at the primary colors of life, which he names as grief, grace, and gratitude, and then expanding the palette to describe some of the other hues that make us human.

"Where grace matters most is in the daily details, the quotidian encounters where we have a chance to step into the contagion that ripples through the grief of our lives, where we pass grace hand to hand to make meaning together," Milton writes.

The book is a conversation between Milton’s personal stories, authors who have been mentors from the page, biblical accounts, and a variety of metaphors that allow us to see the colors of life in different lights and contexts.

This is a story that started in grief and continues in hope.

Milton Brasher-Cunningham was born in Texas, grew up in Africa, and has spent the last thirty years in New England and North Carolina. He is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, and has worked as a high school English teacher, a professional chef, a trainer for Apple, and is now an editor. He is the author of three books, Keeping the Feast: Metaphors for the Meal, This Must Be the Place: Reflections on Home, and his latest, The Color of Together. He loves the Boston Red Sox, his mini schnauzers, handmade music, and feeding people. He lives in Guilford, Connecticut with Ginger, his wife, and their three Schnauzers. He writes regularly at donteatalone.com.