Series Six: 06. Red Purple

Integrating Body and Mind with one hell of a ritual

At the beginning of 2023, I set out to create a sixth series of Rainbow Squared. While the previous five can and are used as divination decks, I planned to create this sixth one that way from the beginning, each piece consisting of a card, (what was to be) a brief story, and a divinatory meaning. Even though I didn’t quite promise to share a piece a week, I thought I would at least make some sort of weekly progress.

That didn’t happen. I am not going to list the reasons why this one piece took as long as it did—there are so many. Nor will I make promises about any particular cadence going forward, or even whether I will ultimately complete this deck at all. If I continued at a rate of one card per year, this deck would be finished in 2067 just before I turn 81 (IY”H).

Whatever I make or don’t make next, I need to declare this piece finished, for now anyway. If you are new to this project, my apologies: the story is entirely too long, or perhaps not long enough to get much further than exposition. If you’ve been here for a while, you probably won’t be shocked at the word count, but it’s still pretty technical. Either way, thank you for caring. It is a wild gift that you do.

Story

I’ve known I was an artist since I was a kid. I was good enough at drawing that people around me reflected that identity back to me: “Oh, you must be an artist!” Though I now wholeheartedly disagree with that criteria, approval did help something I loved to do also become part of who I was.

So when I found out I was pregnant, I was terrified. I knew that I wanted to be a parent eventually. But “eventually” felt very far away, sort of like death. We all know we’re going to die, right? We just don’t think about it everyday or it would be a bummer. Motherhood was like that for me, an inevitability that might even be kind of pleasant but that I chose not to think about most of the time.

I found out I was pregnant precisely one week before my wedding. After seven days of secret panic, the wedding was glorious, heart-filled, and fun. I partied like I was going to die the next day because—as we already established—I basically thought I would. The morning after the last guests departed, I woke up and puked before even getting out of bed. Then I puked and puked for months. I was miserable. It would have been easier if I knew I didn’t want this. But I did want it, just not now. There was so much more I wanted to do before I became a mother, or that I wanted the freedom to do. I went into deep mourning for the person I thought I wanted to be. I felt trapped in my body, I felt trapped by my body. I felt tricked by my body. 

But somewhere in that prenatal depression, I realized that it wasn’t my body that was tricking me. It was my mind. I simply couldn’t reconcile my identity as artist with this newly forming identity of mother because I had internalized so much programming about what each of those identities meant. If motherhood represented the end of self, and being an artist required selfishness, then I couldn’t possibly be both at the same time. Right? Once I said it out loud to myself, I realized how silly it was.

So I began to just try it on, this idea of parenthood. It felt good, to surrender to what was already happening. But it still didn’t feel quite real. I decided the only way to prove to myself that I could still make art as a mother was, well, to make art as a mother. And not just a piece here or there, but by committing to a daily practice. Not every day forever, but for a period of time, which I determined would be seven cycles of seven days. A compact but significant unit of time. 

And so I made One Tiny Painting a Day, Seven Days a Week for Seven Weeks. 49 different watercolors on 3 inch by 3 inch paper, each a different color depending on the day of the week: red on Mondays, orange on Tuesdays, yellow on Wednesdays, green on Thursdays, blue on Fridays, purple on Saturdays, and black on Sundays. I used watercolors for ease of pulling out at a moment's notice, even filling a tiny pill organizer with water at the beginning of the week and using one slot per day to keep the colors separated. From Week 13 to 21 of my infant’s life, I painted everyday whenever I could: while she was napping, while she lay on the floor next to me, even once or twice while nursing.

I was surprised how much I liked it. I loved not only the time I spent painting but what that time did to the rest of my time. In the soup of postpartum life when time is endless and there also isn’t enough of it, this was my time. I might not be able to schedule that time, but I could find it and claim it, and the claiming itself was the art.

After the 49-day sprint was over, I knew I couldn’t sustain a daily practice once I was back at work. But I also didn’t want to stop. The number 49 roughly lined up to the number of weeks in a year, with a little wiggle room. What if instead of a painting a day I made a painting a week? And what if instead of using one color each piece used two colors, one as the foreground and one as the background, each pair determined by a rainbow grid so that no two pieces are the same? And what if I also associated meanings with those colors, much like I had done for the seven blessings of my aforementioned wedding ceremony? And that’s how I came to create and follow the formula you see here: Rainbow Squared. 

Once this year of weekly paintings was over, I realized that I still didn’t want to stop following the Rainbow Squared formula. I started another cycle, switching from painting to stop-motion animation. Then another cycle, and then another, and then another, adding in full essays and incorporating guest artists to boot. This postpartum exercise was now morphing into something else entirely: a spiritual practice, a divination system.

But something else was happening in the background.

Eventually I realized that while this 7x7 formula had emerged for me so naturally, I was not the first to discover it. In fact, following a sequence of 49 pairs in a 7x7 grid was almost exactly the same formula as a Kabbalistic approach to counting the Omer, the 49 days between the Jewish holidays of Passover and Shavuot.

There is more context at that link, but I’ll sum it up here: for Jews, the holiday of Passover commemorates being freed from slavery while the holiday of Shavuot commemorates receiving the Torah after that. The 49-day period between those holidays can be considered the time it took for a people freed in body to become freed enough in spirit to possibly accept divine revelation.

Counting the Omer can be a way to reenact this process of spiritual liberation and healing every year. And that’s where the 7x7 formula comes in. Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) identifies ten sephirot or divine emanations/attributes that make up existence, so to speak. Of those ten, only seven are said to be even somewhat comprehensible to most humans. Noting that the 49 days of counting the Omer line up pretty neatly with seven weeks of seven days each, the Kabbalists took those seven lower sephirot and assigned each one to a week as well as to a day. That way during the Omer, each week has an overarching attribute to consider while each individual day of the week also has its own attribute, cycling in a 7x7 grid to create 49 pairs of spiritual themes. Each day of the Omer is then an opportunity to reflect on how those emanations of divine energy interact in your own life and the world.

If you are still following: my initial 49-day postpartum sprint was precisely the same length of time as the yearly counting of the Omer. My 49-week Rainbow Squared formula enacted the very same process of pairing seven attributes that the Kabbalists used to count the Omer. I had unwittingly intuited a mystical ritual technology and mapped it onto my own life.

Now, I’ve actually at least known about counting the Omer most of my life. I attended a religious elementary/middle school, so between Passover and Shavuot we always recited the number of that day’s Omer count as part of our daily prayer services. However, we never used or even acknowledged the sephirot in our counting, or even talked about sephirot at all. Jewish mysticism was still a subject only to be studied by devout married men over 40, and I pretty much only knew the word “Kabbalah” from people around me being irritated that Madonna was culturally appropriating it (though they didn’t use the term at the time). 

As Kabbalah has found its way back into mainstream Jewish life (thanks Madonna), counting the Omer has also become more popular, even among people who aren’t otherwise religiously observant. So in the hippie Jewish spaces I hang out in, it was really only a matter of time before I heard about this practice and that people began pointing out the similarities to what I was doing.

At first I was actually kind of spooked. What did it MEAN? I honestly ignored this cosmic coincidence as long as I could. Then the opportunity arose to join a cohort of other queer creatives who would each do a project around counting the Omer: A New Gift.

I knew that whatever project I created around counting the Omer, it would need to incorporate color. Though each of my colors had become imbued with so much personal meaning for me over the years of this project, I wanted to approach the sephirot with new curiosity and reverence, separate from “my” colors.

It turns out there is no consensus about which colors to associate with which sephirot. In fact, there isn’t even consensus about the meaning of each of the sephirot. These attributes are hard to translate, and like any Jewish concept, there are many approaches:

1. Chesed - Lovingkindness, Unconditional Love, Grace, Mercy

2. Gevurah - Strength, Judgment, Boundaries

3. Tiferet - Harmony, Balance, Beauty

4. Netzach - Eternity, Endurance, Dedication, Ambition

5. Hod - Splendor, Awe, Humility, Acceptance, Order

6. Yesod - Foundation, Creativity, Bonding, Sexuality

7. Malchut (Shekhinah) - Divine Presence, Physical Reality, Manifestation, Leadership

You can see how associating colors with these concepts could be a pretty subjective process. Rather than try to find individual colors that matched each sephira, I wanted to find a way to think about their colors as a whole system. My strongest criteria was that the colors be in sequential order, like counting the Omer would be. And that’s how I found my way to Reb Zalman.

Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (Z"L) was the founder of the Jewish Renewal movement that began in the 1960s and continues to this day, blending Hasidic teachings, mystical tradition, and contemporary spirituality. Generally, Jewish Renewal promotes a more experiential, inclusive, and creative approach to Judaism. I had always heard great things about Reb Zalman, but when I learned that he was the person behind the rainbow tallit (prayer shawl) that I had seen in my childhood, I finally started to pay attention. He is perhaps the first person to conceive of praying in a tallit that was not simply white with black or blue stripes. Reb Zalman’s rainbow stripes opened the door for people to pray in any color of cloth. Those rainbow stripes also happen to represent the seven days of creation and the seven lower sephirot.

Reb Zalman’s colors go in descending order, starting with Purple and proceeding to Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red, and ending with Brown. Brown! Brown is the color I miss most in my own Rainbow Squared system, the one I so often want to swap out for Black White.

For that first year I counted the Omer, I incorporated each week’s color into that week’s Rainbow Squared piece. To make things even more chaotic, this was during Year Five, when I was moving through the color pairs at random. So each piece had three colors: its emergent Rainbow Squared color pair and a third color associated with the sephira for that week. To make things even crazier, every seventh piece was by a collaborator, so one of the color pairs even spanned two weeks and two sephirot. I called that mini-series Rainbow Cubed. It was a lot.

From there, I decided to separate my Omer practice and my Rainbow Squared practice. Or rather, I practice them separately but think of them as unified, each different aspects of my growing spiritual practice. It’s not the specific colors that matter, rather the 7x7 pairing up of colors so that by the end every color has danced and merged with every other color.

After two years of counting the Omer as a largely solitary activity, last year I decided to count with my daughter, significantly during her seventh year of life. We made a drawing a day together, using the technique of folding a single sheet of paper so that you get an eight-page booklet. We each created seven of our own tiny zines, or a zine a week, coloring one page a day using Reb Zalman’s colors.

D and I counted and colored together nearly everyday. A couple days when I wasn’t home, she even colored by herself. It felt important for us to each work on our own drawings. They certainly influenced each other, and I would sometimes try to wait to start drawing until after she started so that she wouldn’t copy me. And sometimes I would copy her!

D loved this process of daily ritual drawing so much that she wanted to make a presentation about it at school to her first grade class. At first I actually tried to discourage her. It’s hard enough for me to explain our made-up Jewish art ritual project in writing. How would she explain it out loud to first graders, giving them a cogent summary of the Omer, or Passover, or Shavuot? But despite my gentle suggestions to the contrary, still-six-year-old D insisted on making that presentation. She stood up in front of her class and spoke for twenty whole minutes. I don’t know how much her classmates understood, but I also don’t know how much she cared.

Just like my own Rainbow Squared project affirmed for me that I was my own person, separate from her, this Omer Project affirmed that she is her own person, separate from me. And we are unified in this, defined by our relationship to each other. 

The magic doesn’t stop there though.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but D was actually born during the Omer. She was born on a new moon, at the very end of the Hebrew month of Iyar, not long before Shavuot. The Hebrew Calendar is a lunisolar calendar, meaning that each month begins with the crescent new moon and then every few years there is a leap month to be sure that the seasons of the holidays stay roughly the same, particularly so that Passover always falls during the Spring. This means that while the dates of Jewish holidays fluctuate on the Gregorian calendar, they always have the same dates on the Hebrew calendar, and so the forty-nine days between Passover and Shavuot also always have the same Hebrew dates. If you were born between Passover and Shavuot, your Hebrew birthday is always on the same day of the Omer.  

As we filled our Omer books last year, D and I started to anticipate what day of the Omer and what color combination her Hebrew birthday might fall on. Maybe something she thought was pretty like Green Blue?

As we got closer to the actual date, we figured out that her birthday would be on the 42nd day of the Omer. This is the seventh day of the fifth week: Red Brown. Oof. She was crushed to learn this. 

But then something nagged me about the 42nd day of the Omer. I thought I had learned something special about it, what was it? Then I finally remembered.

In the story of Noah and the Flood, the Torah says that the Earth was finally completely dry “in the second month, on the 27th day of the month.” That day God cast a rainbow into the sky as a covenant never to destroy all life on earth by flood ever again. You may know that the Jewish New Year is celebrated in the fall at Rosh Hashanah, but you may not know that that is actually in the ninth month (yes, that is confusing) (what here isn’t confusing?). The first month of the Biblical Hebrew calendar is in the Spring with Passover, which means the second month falls during the Omer. My daughter, the being whose becoming inspired this very project, was born on something called Rainbow Day.

I’m not sure if anyone else can follow this esoteric color calendar math, but that feels pretty cosmic to me.

This story has been so hard to wrap up in a single card. Somehow Red Purple came to contain the whole of this project as it continues to unfold. Like Red to Purple, the two ends of the spectrum. And something else magical happens with Red and Purple between my system and Reb Zalman’s system.

See, my system (R2) and his system (RZ) both start with the six main colors of the rainbow (sorry, Indigo) and end with a seventh, non-rainbow color: Black/White for me, or Brown for him. So that means that the R2 colors pair up with the RZ colors so that Red = Purple, Orange = Blue, and Yellow = Green. The sixth piece in a Rainbow Squared series using my color formula is Red Purple, and Day Six of the Omer using Reb Zalman’s colors is Red within Purple, or what I call Purple Red. That day is today: Piece Six of Series Six on Day Six.

I am coloring Omer books with my kids for the second year now, a creative ritual that feels like our own yet connected to so much history. It is both a very simple act and suffused with so many more layers of meaning than they know, be it my own personal history or the atrocities unfolding in the part of the world where all of this originated.

When we color these books at the end of the day, it’s about uniting our bodies and minds in an activity together. Being as weird as we want to be, as we are blessed to be, and as full. We are integrating body and mind through ritual practice, iteration after iteration, generation to generation.

Divinatory Meaning

Red is the first color in the visible spectrum, while Purple is the last. Taken together they signify a kind of totality, an Alpha and Omega, an Everythingness. A microcosm of a whole system. 

At first glance Rainbow Squared seems to be a system of binaries. In actuality, methodically pairing these seven elements so that each dances with the other is quite maximalist. Taken together, the 49 pairs constitute a whole, a multiplicity, a way to describe a profound oneness. The technology of the 7x7 grid breaks down a larger complex whole into every permutation of relationship, a cosmic queerness. A process like Rainbow Squared or even counting the Omer is about integration, helping you to feel like every part of you belongs, every part of existence belongs. Even the parts you don’t like, the parts you don’t want to deal with, the parts you’d rather forget or have made yourself forget.

At its simplest but certainly not its easiest, Red Purple is the connection and integration between the body and the mind: the self.

Red is a primary color. Purple is a secondary color, made of Red and Blue. This means that mixing the Red of the body and Blue of communication gets you the Purple of mind, of self. Learning how to communicate as your body and with your body is essential to your selfhood.

On a personal level, if you are feeling scared or stuck or like something just isn’t working, is there any sort of practice or ritual that could help you recalibrate and even get free? It can be as rigorous as committing to a 49-day sprint or as simple as remembering to breathe.

On a collective level, well, we need spiritual liberation now more than ever. Red Purple is also about our bodies and our identities, stories passed down through generations. Traumatized people traumatize people, and cycles of violence are just that: cycles.

It is a gift to be part of such a beautiful and long tradition of maintaining annual cycles. May the wisdom of our and your ancestors guide us in upholding the cycles that make us who we are, to break the cycles that no longer serve us or that never did. True liberation never comes at the expense of anyone else’s.