Green is the Color of My Love for YOU

Spring is IT for me. The cactus tunas ripe with green buds that will burst soon into yellow flowers. The sky's gray flannel suit of rainclouds compliments the monochrome shades of kelly, jade, forest, lime, and grass. My critic looms large not wanting me to use flowery language, not wanting me to play and have fun with words and images, nor wanting me to alter my world into anthropomorphic hyperbole. I laugh in the face of my inner critic today. I am mentally tying her up with duct tape and feeding her all my green m&m's because deep down I love her -- I must. She's like a sister to me.

Green is the color of my love for You, the color of plants that turn sunlight into food. It is the color of the heart chakra, of the heart feeding off of the light that we give to one another in the form of love. Green- of money - our means of exchange with one another also feeds us when we exchange it for food. Envy is green - the converse of love - the other side of the coin. The green that is the greenest that is also the green of spring is newness, naivete, like that of a young child. It is fresh eyes seeing the world for the first time. It is having no preconceptions or judgements.

This morning I heard Rick James sing "Superfreak" on the radio. I hadn't heard it in a while, maybe in a few years and when that familiar intro played I time warped to the 6th grade. My family had recently moved from a small town of 1,000 people to a larger town of maybe 30,000. I was attending public school for the first time - one much larger than before. In this very coming of age moment I was invited to my first real party. My mom took me to the regional store that was a step above K-Mart. I bought my first plaid skirt -- it was the early 1980s when the preppy Scotish thing was really in vogue, at least I thought it was. I got to the party all dressed up in a kiltish skirt and white oxford shirt. All the other kids dressed in jeans and t-shirts. I felt so out of place I wanted to run and hide. That night I learned about the self-consciousness of consumerism. Gloria Vanderbilt, Jordache, and Calvin Klein jeans very hip. Plaid skirt and oxford shirt from Weiners -- very un-hip. It was also my first experience with that lovely pre-teen game "spin the bottle." It was a Coca-Cola bottle, but still, I was scared - realizing much later that I had nothing to be scared of - I was the nerd in the green plaid skirt, oxford shirt, and glasses.

La Virgen del Brazos de Dios

The wind whipped upriver all week. Chairs lost their footing, a screen door twisted off it's hinges, and the prayer hands of La Virgen broke off when she fell to the ground. I'm sensitive to the wind. In Ayurveda, those of us with a prana imbalance are labeled vata. People ask, "What dosha are you?" these days just like the old pick up line in the 1970's, "What's your sign?" But that's really not necessarily the best question to ask. You really don't want to be identified by your dosha because your dosha signifies your imbalance or what your physical body lacks, not what you ARE. Vata (air) doshas like myself have to work to be grounded - food is very grounding, as is rest. Think of marathon runners, of type - A personalities; people who are generally very thin because they go-go-go, forget to eat, and easily deplete themselves. Another way to say it is that I do not have a symbiotic relationship with wind, I do not naturally know how to regulate or nuture myself but have to have constant reminders all around me. I set the alarm on my phone to go off for my pre-lunch breathing time which segways nicely into lunch. I set my alarm for afternoon gardening and morning Kaya Sampat Kriya. Without this schedule my entire day would be a whirlwind of activity yet I would end overwhelmed and under nourished. In a sense I'd feel like La Virgen outside my mudroom looks -- knocked to the ground with a big hole where her hands once held the anjali mudra.