Hello from Maryland. Ophelia left us the cool weather of jackets and boots. The sky today is luminescent opal, which has me thinking about color. It’s one of the marvelous, hidden ways that our bodies consort with the world.
In my new monthly series “Talking Back to Walden,” I’m exploring the shift from an outsider’s intellectual gaze toward more ecstatic immersion in the world. You can read that post here. My next Walden installment will be cued up for Sunday, October 8, when we’ll be in New York seeing Lauren Groff on a panel with Jesmyn Ward—two of my all-time literary crushes. (I’m beyond excited!). Subscribe so you don’t miss it.
The vibration of energy, waves, color and sound is the secret signature of all things. Both science and spirituality tell us this. Artists, musicians and poets have understood it for millennia. A while back, I worked with a friend to produce a set of meditation cards based on the chakra system. It heightened my awareness of color in so many ways, from simple mood shifts to the resonance in my body of a particular color. How much do we really notice of the colors we encounter as we move through our day?
We all learned in high school physics that different colors and sounds vibrate at different wavelengths.1 Being a part of this system, our body acts as a prism, refracting the white light of all consciousness into the individual colors of the spectrum that we see with our eyes. When you are delighted by a rainbow or the dancing colors of a crystal hanging in a sunny window, your body is recognizing its kindred. When I pay close attention to the color red or violet or green, I feel the physical pull of recognition. For some reason, I feel green most strongly, right in my heart.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the gray window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colors,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
~ from “Beannacht” by John O’Donohue
To create blocks of colors for our meditation cards, I collaged pictures of natural places cut from magazines. Along the way, I contemplated the sources of the colors.
From the elusive, expansive whites of foam, feathers and clouds,
to the indigo of ocean depths and night skies, vast realms of mystery.
The blue of sky and water, clarity and truth.
The green of trees, grass, frogs, compassion and love.
Yellow sunrise, lemons and flowers, power and discernment.
Orange of rock, sand, sunsets and wood, emotion and creativity.
Red of flowers and fruit and fire, vitality and rootedness.
Every color we experience springs from the earth. The sun itself, though not of this world, has infinite ways of filtering through the atmosphere and appearing to us as reflected light. The depths of the cosmos are far beyond our planet, the “empty” space through which we travel. But in perception, that star-filled dome appears as the covering of our world.
Everything we see, touch, experience and know comes from this colorful earth. To hold a lemon in my hand, to contemplate its yellowness, is a staggering wonder—if I open my imagination and allow it. That color of the sun, that solar radiance, resonates in my own solar plexus, the seat of my will. I am tethered, through that point in my body, to all the yellow of this world. The feathers of a goldfinch, the petals of a daisy, the morning sun reflecting off tidal waters spread over a delta—all sing to the outward-directed center of my power and action.
I read somewhere that researchers found green and blue to be the most appealing, soothing and restful colors to most people. They speculate that it’s an ancient holdover from the first landscapes in which we evolved as upright primates. The safety of open savannas, greenyellow grasslands beneath the blue dome of sky, allowed clear sightlines to potential predators. That world contained us. We belonged.
Colors feature in mythic stories, which are, after all, about this world and our relationship to it on scales both intimate and vast. The sun travels by chariot through the underworld at night, to be reborn in the east each morning. The night sky is the protective body of the creator goddess or an eternal repository of divine entities and ancestors watching over us.
All our senses have their secret ways of working on both the physical and the metaphysical planes, the mundane and the subtle. We usually assume that color is in the realm of sight only. Yet it’s possible to take each color into the body through the breath. This literal in-breath of color is an ancient practice that acknowledges the vibrational, energetic aspect of color.
“A ‘chakra’ is just a meeting point for the energy system. It is a junction point, a traffic junction, and there are seven major junctions. This does not mean that a chakra by itself has its own quality, it is just that all roads which travel in a direction are doing certain things; they come together at a certain point, so it becomes a powerful place.”2
The Root Chakra vibrates with the color RED. It pulses with rootedness, the grounded I-AM-ness and vitality of the life force. It is the color of blood and fire and animal urges. We speak of “seeing red” when rage boils with surprise swiftness, a primitive emotion temporarily incapacitating our cultured reason.
The chakra system is not arbitrary or decorative. In the vibration of its wavelength, each color has its unique signature in the all of white light. The way our body is woven in, energetically, aesthetically and emotionally to the colors of this earth is nothing short of awe-inspiring.
Just think about it for a minute. Call up a color in your mind, breathe in that color, and let it sing its note to you. You may feel its vibration resonating in your body, in a particular region or center. Even if you can’t consciously name the effect, you can be sure it will have its way with you somehow.
To be honest, I didn’t learn anything in high school physics. Thanks to a terrible teacher, I decided that I hated physics, which now makes me sad.
“7 Notes, 7 Chakras: Music, Spirituality and the Body” from this website.
The colors and collages remind me of the joy of Eric Carle's books. My experience of colors (and prints and patterns) is that of neuronal pathways lighting up like lights on a runway.
I loved this post, and especially these lines:
"Being a part of this system, our body acts as a prism, refracting the white light of all consciousness into the individual colors of the spectrum that we see with our eyes. When you are delighted by a rainbow or the dancing colors of a crystal hanging in a sunny window, your body is recognizing its kindred. "
So interesting. I was at the bedside of a dying friend not long ago and she said that I was surrounded by a green light. I wasn't sure what that meant, but it sounds like from what you say being surrounded by green might be a good thing. I've always been deeply moved by the color blue in all its ranges, from turquoise to indigo, and especially blue in combination with gold or yellow. I'm always drawn to paintings with those combinations. I use them a lot in my own paintings.