Year 5, Piece Thirteen: 18. Yellow Green

Love within Power. Surrender. Hod.

I’ve always thought of Yellow Green as the Power of Love. This time around I am wondering about the ways that it is Power and Love. If changing that preposition to a conjunction doesn’t seem like enough of a difference, we can also call it Love within Power.

Power reveals the ways that even Love can be a privilege. Sure: “can’t buy me love!” or “money can’t buy happiness.” But in reality—or in 2021 anyway—happiness is quite correlated with money. I would guess that access to giving and receiving love is supported by a certain baseline of financial security. Or maybe the Green we are talking about here isn’t just Love, it is also Money. So we can talk about Power and Love, and we can also talk about the Power of Money. 

Love and loving have always come easily to me. I have many other hang-ups to be sure, but for the most part, I have always been surrounded by people who love me and who I love readily in return. We can chalk this up to many factors. One may be the relative ease and security of most of the adults around me as a child, that no one was truly struggling to stay afloat financially or even in their mental health. For all of their own hang-ups, I still had adults in my life that were able to give me attention, affirmation, and affection. As I moved into young adult life, this also meant I had a financial safety net to go along with that emotional support. Does this mean that these things are necessary or even guaranteed to produce a loving, happy adult? Of course not. But it certainly fucking helps.

I hurt someone recently. Or someone felt hurt by their interpretation of my cumulative actions and after a while the whole relationship just imploded. It’s super complicated, and not something I am going to unpack here. While there are many misperceptions that lead us to this moment, there are also some real dynamics that likely extend beyond the relationship in question. Including the ways I can take love and even financial support for granted because I have always had them. So I am chewing on that.

Another quality of love’s power is how fiercely it can spin out into hate. Just like there are many kinds of love, there are many kinds of hate. The kind of hate that is spawned by love stings like hell. But if you are able to somehow grip that hate from just the right angle, you can get outside of it enough to regard it. And maybe stare down the sting of that hate until it turns to grief. Then mourning, then maybe release, and then maybe peace.

Whether you are the one feeling or receiving that hate-love, the only way to move through it is to surrender. Feel what you are feeling. Accept what you have done, what they have done, what you can’t change. Be present. Be grateful. Be. 

Which brings us to counting the Omer. This is Week Four: the sephirah of Hod. Hod is interpreted many ways, including surrender, acceptance, presence, submission. And also splendor, radiance. Hod is the counterpart to last week’s sephirah, Netzach. If Netzach is about endurance, Hod balances that with surrender. If Netzach is about eternity, then Hod is about revelation, fleeting as it may be. 

Hod is also about humility and gratitude. Accepting your smallness, and also accepting the ways you have missed the mark. Not needing to be right or even righteous, just accepting your role and showing up to it. This paves the way for gratitude, for your place in the universe.

Hod is Orange. Orange is also about many things, including gratitude and compassion. If I were doing Rainbow Squared in order, each color would show up somewhere in the combination at least once every seven pieces. This time, following an emergent order, Orange has shown up only once in soon-to-be fourteen pieces, and it was the one I didn’t make.

So I welcome Hod this week, the warm glowing presence of Orange. The full moon was a chance to light stuff on fire and cry, to talk to the moon like it was a portal to a once-loved one’s ear, mind, heart. To share gratitude that they will perhaps refuse to hear but might feel. And surrender to the fact that it is time to let go.