Series Six: 04. Red Green

Not not doing what you love and not only doing what you love

Story

I signed up for a New Year Tarot Reading with artist Wren McMurdo Brignac, prolific creator of two different divination decks and currently working on a third.

Over video, I told Wren that I was working on my own divination system, but that I was hung up on how frivolous that sounded. That even after years of squeezing in this project alongside everything else, even after knowing fully that this is what lights me up, that I continually took on other work I didn’t strictly need to avoid the guilt of actually being in a financial position to do what I love. That even as I actively work toward wealth redistribution, choosing to spend a significant amount of my time on art would mean consciously choosing to benefit from an unjust system in more ways than I already do. 

After an illuminating reading, Wren sent me a spell in the mail, written in red ink. It was a Money Deserving Spell. She told me to decorate a stiff headband with real money and to meditate while wearing it for eight minutes a day for eight days. “Imagine the universe conspiring with your soul to set you free as an artist and healer through art.” She also told me to set up an automatic payment plan, preferably to a local indigenous organization.

I knew immediately where to find a headband: one was lying on the floor in the detritus of my kids’ toys. Even the money came without looking for it: at a store that week, my daughter begged me for a $7.99 cartoon cat coloring book, and after I bought it for her she paid me back in exactly eight one-dollar bills. I wove all 8 of them around the headband, securing them only with red thread. Once I put it on, the dollar bills formed something like an upside-down basket or a paper tiara. 

I started my eight days of meditation on February 24th, the day after I completed Red Yellow and also my half-birthday. I’ve been contributing to the Sogorea Te' Land Trust for years, but finally signed up to give Shuumi: a monthly 1% of my rent towards descendants of the Ohlone peoples displaced from the land I live on. 

And then?

And then I tried to write about Red Green.

Green isn’t always about money, but I knew this time it was. Would I really have to write about my relationship to money? And share it? Yes, that is the nature of this project and its magic. 

So I avoided writing. I threw myself into creating the image for the card instead, spending hours (and hours!) pushing tiny leaves around Photoshop. It was nearly a month before I had a written draft, and then I just let it sit (and sit). This year I had initially set out to create a piece a week, and I watched those weeks pass by. But now here I am, admitting publicly that I am a witchy weirdo born with access to some wealth I don’t feel I deserve but want to do something with and do something about. 

It’s not like my class privilege is a secret, and it’s not even the first time I’ve written about it. Still, talking about money always feels vulnerable, and by design. That’s how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer while being either lauded for their own ingenuity or blamed for their own poverty. When we don’t talk about money we don’t see how unequally and unfairly it’s distributed, and we certainly can’t band together across class lines to change that.

I don’t know if I feel that I “deserve” money anymore now than before performing this spell. I don’t know if I feel that anyone “deserves” money, really.  That wasn’t quite the point though. A ritual act is a gesture of commitment, not necessarily the thing itself. It’s choosing a new way of perceiving.

What I do know now is this: not doing what I love helps no one, but some important work lies in not only doing what I love, or at least not only doing what I think I’ll enjoy. 

Reckoning with what wealth truly means in an unjust society is embarrassing and painful. It would be easier in many ways to just try to personally enjoy its privileges and leave it at that. But that doesn’t feel good either. Hiding the truth doesn’t build the world I actually want to live in, nor does it generate good art. Changing my orientation to systems of oppression starts with being honest. It starts with telling actual stories from my own life. Even if it’s about that time I meditated with money on my head.

Divinatory Meaning

Have you ever looked at a dollar bill before? I mean really looked at it? Among the elaborate anti-counterfeit curlicues and repeating serial numbers, there is one design element that distinguishes the dollar bill from the rest of United States currency: leaves. Leaves framing the presidential portrait, leaves sprouting around the “1”s in the corners. 

In Spanish, a “sheet of paper” is an “hoja de papel,” and “hoja” means “leaf.” The leaves on the dollar bill symbolize the paper bills themselves: growing, spreading, circulating, piling. 

Money itself is a symbol, after all. Some of the first “greenbacks” were created to finance the Civil War, when the Union chose to print unbacked paper money rather than go into debt to foreign creditors. So this green money is itself a representation of a belief in money, a belief in symbolic energy exchange.

If Green shows up in a reading, it isn’t always about money. But paired with Red for Survival, Red Green can be about resources and livelihood: what you do for money, what you do to put bread on the table, what you do to earn the means to survive. 

Green is primarily about another kind of energy exchange: love. What if doing what you love put bread on the table? What if bread on the table was independent of what you did? If everyone had what they needed, might that create space for every act to be done in love? 

Dollar bills point to another kind of transaction: the hand-to-hand transactions that happen on the scale of everyday life, like a cookie from a kid at a bake sale or a placing a bill in someone’s empty cup. As money like so many things becomes increasingly digital, exchanging physical money is a direct connection. Who could benefit from direct attention and care in your own community right now? What can you choose to share rather than to hoard? Red Green is a reminder to slash through the abstractions and stories that distract us from tending to what’s actually happening right now.

Red and Green are complementary colors, one of the powerful pairs that between them contain all the primary colors: in this case, Red and Blue + Yellow. These are the colors needed to mix any other, the necessary ingredients to depict life on earth. All three mixed together make the color of earth, brown, the color to which everything returns and the rich soil from which everything grows. What soil are you growing in? What in it is composting and what is simply rotting?