Year 5, Piece One: 24. Green Yellow

Bodily Wisdom, Creative Expression, and the Power of Love. Or Love Power.

Every other year I’ve begun the Rainbow Squared cycle with Red Red. Red the color of blood, perhaps the most appropriate color to begin any cycle with. This year I am following the 49 in an emergent order, determined by drawing cards. The first card I drew was Green Yellow. The middle of the grid, though satisfyingly not in the exact middle, composition-wise. Like we are going up the traffic light, from red to yellow to green: let’s go.

Drawing Green Yellow compels me to share something. During 18. Yellow Green last year, I came up with a meditation and a symbol that have been an entirely personal part of my practice until now. Or perhaps they emerged. I didn’t share it at the time because I didn’t really know how, or maybe I didn’t even want to. But Green Yellow popping up first feels like a nudge.

I pictured Yellow and Green as the center of the rainbow, the most visible points in the visible spectrum, with the other colors swirling around them. I pictured the colors in a circle, a sort of pie chart color wheel with Yellow and Green taking two opposite quarters, and with Purple and Blue and then Red and Orange sharing the other opposite quarters so that the rainbow is split and flipped, with complementary colors either touching or facing each other. Or maybe that symbol came from my attempted drawings of the meditation, a sort of uneven asterisk made from three lines split into two colors at the apex, a pole with a squat X through it. 

Maybe the visual will also help. It’s my first time digitally drawing images for an animation.

I’ll try to describe the meditation: a series of four full breaths, with each out-breath imagining a ray of light going through you up and down, then left and right, then front to back, and finally a sphere of light surrounding you. These rays of light each have colors, two actually. Maybe numbered steps would help:

1. First, ground. However you choose to do so. Visualizing an anchor into the earth, taking a series of deep breaths, or doing whatever you need to do to get ready to be present.

2. Breathe in, then breathe out while imagining a single shaft of light split into two colors going through you up and down, with purple emanating from your chest up and red emanating from your chest down. 

3. Breathe in, then breathe out while imagining a single shaft of light split into two colors going through you left and right, with orange emanating from your chest to your right side and blue emanating from your chest to your left side. 

4. Breathe in, then breathe out while imagining a single shaft of light split into two colors going through you front and back, with yellow emanating from your chest behind you and green emanating out from your chest in front of you. 

5. Breathe in, then breathe out while imagining a sphere of light emanating from your chest and spreading all around you. 

6. Repeat.

Red Purple, Orange Blue, Yellow Green, BlackWhite. 

Bodily Wisdom. Creative Expression. The Power of Love. Interconnectedness. 

Though this meditation emerged initially during Yellow Green, it feels important to root here in Green Yellow. Why? Because the Green and Yellow pole was placed front and back as a conscious choice. Purple above and Red below followed the chakras, Orange as left and Blue as right are honestly somewhat arbitrary (or perhaps I don’t totally understand it yet). But I very deliberately placed Yellow going backwards and Green shooting forwards. If you are shooting anything at anyone, it should be love, it should be Green. Yellow is power, in some ways a thing to leave behind, or to approach with care. So though I have dubbed it Yellow Green, the Power of Love, perhaps it was Green Yellow all along. Not just the Power of Love, but Loving as Power. Love Power. 

I am writing this today on January 28th of the Gregorian calendar, and the 15th of Shevat on the Hebrew calendar, or Tu B’Shvat. It is the full moon of the waning winter that is celebrated as the new year of the Trees. Green Yellow is also leaves and sun, or photosynthesis. Drawing power and sustenance from a star. Trees are star-powered beings trees, even if we think of them as perhaps the most earthly of all creatures, rooted in the beautiful brown dirt. 

Where do you draw your power from? How do you gather nourishment, and how do you share it?

Here’s a timelapse of the live process of drawing in the Procreate app.