> CD #71: Green
I came late to the colour green, typically favouring its cousin, blue, or its complement, pink, well into my 20s. I don’t think I truly began to appreciate green until I started gardening, a hobby that changes your perspective on many things. For a gardener, green is the colour of fresh hope, from the seeds that sprout like tiny miracles out of decay to the bright and tender tree leaves reminding us that things are mostly cyclical—and what looks dead might be very much alive.
I don’t wear much green, except for this jacket I got from a clothing swap I helped organize at work a few years back. It belonged to my friend Mel, who is always urging me to add more colour to my wardrobe.
Sometimes I wonder if wearing more green would give me more hope—if there is anything I could possibly do to gird myself against the heartbreak of living in this broken world. My Chinese ancestors might’ve thought so, donning lucky colours to attract good fortune and repel evil. I wasn’t really raised in that tradition, though.
So I’ll have to settle for adorning my spirit with green thoughts, like this spring poem by Ada Limón. I’ve shared it with you once before, but its sentiment is evergreen.
Instructions on Not Giving Up
by Ada Limón
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
💚
:) Teresa
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