The Art Of Belonging

There is a reason why coloring is one of the first creative acts we teach children to do.

Nature comes in colors for a reason: to teach us that the world we are born into is not only bountiful, but beautiful. Color is how Mother Nature makes us fall in love with life and why coloring is one of the first things we teach children to do. It is often a child's first experience of making something they feel proud of, quietly building confidence and ownership—a foreshadowing of what they will need to thrive and survive: the confidence to create beauty of their own.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung used mandalas as a coloring exercise to reveal hidden parts of ourselves so we could accept them and heal. He believed dreams did not disguise, distort, deceive, or lie. They revealed truth.

What I didn't understand for most of my life is that color reveals something else. It reveals who we are, long before we know it ourselves.

I didn't know the real power color played in my work until 2015. I had just been benched from making paint for the next five years. Being cut off from Devine Color as my dream, passion, purpose, and livelihood prompted me to use color in my meditations, causing my intuition to switch into overdrive.

At that time, I was working with guided imagery, visualizing the color blue. Instead of a blue beach or sky, I imagined a deep blue bowl-shaped lake. It made me think of Crater Lake, not knowing that Crater Lake, the deepest lake in America, known for its surreal blue color, happened to be only hours away from our home.

Scott, who Valspar also benched for five years, had never been to Crater Lake either.

When I told him I knew something was waiting for us to find there, we hopped into our midnight-blue BMW convertible and took off on a road trip we appropriately named In Search of Blue.

We circled the lake's thirty-three-mile rim road, stopping at multiple viewpoints, contemplating its wonder and wondering how we hadn't known it had been in our backyard for so many years.

Crater Lake blew our minds.

Its blue was more unreal than any blue I had ever seen. Even the shores seemed to burst with bright green foliage, as if the earth itself had risen to honor the incandescent water.

As we headed home, we were stopped by road construction. With the top down, we started talking with a road worker who happily answered my endless questions about this magnificent blue lake.

He explained that Crater Lake is self-contained. The water comes directly from snow and rain. No rivers feed it. No rivers leave it.

A self-contained planet within a self-contained planet. Manna from within. A perfect metaphor for meditation.

I enthusiastically shared why we had come in search of blue and how meaningful his answers felt. When I finally stopped talking, he abruptly said, "I'll be right back."

Scott and I looked at each other, convinced my monologue had been too long.

Instead, he returned carrying a cooler filled with the most delicious bright orange smoked salmon I had ever seen. While we stood there eating fish beside one of the bluest places on Earth, a stranger gifted us not only with a perfect metaphor for my meditation, but with manna itself—an unexpected offering that arrived exactly when it was needed.

I thought I had found what I came for.

I was wrong.

On the way home, Scott surprised me with an overnight stay on the Oregon Coast.

When I first moved to Oregon, the beaches made me sad, mad, or resentful, depending on the day. Puerto Rican beaches were easygoing and social. Oregon beaches were lonely, moody, broody, and uncooperative.

Years earlier, while struggling in my first marriage, I had driven the coast alone with my daughters, searching for a better beach. I remember crying ugly tears and begging God to help me find one.

Then a stranger pointed me toward a staircase.

Below was the most beautiful tropical beach I had ever seen in Oregon. Pools of warm blue water. Sea stars. Seaweed. Rock formations. A kind ocean keeping the mean one away.

And written across the sand in giant letters:

THINK GOD.

That day changed my relationship with the Oregon Coast. I realized it wasn't trying to be Puerto Rico. It was trying to be itself.

That day, I saw a reflection of myself on that coast.

I was that coast.

Years later, after Crater Lake and after Devine Color, I found myself at a women's retreat where someone brought mandalas and crayons for us to color.

We drew numbers from a bowl.

I drew the Tree of Life.

Perfect, I thought.

I can color a pretty tree.

I opened the box and reached for orange. Then another orange. Then another. Before I knew it, I had turned the entire mandala into a blazing ball of yellow, orange, and rainbow colors.

Once everyone finished, we gathered around a fireplace overlooking the Pacific Ocean and shared what our mandalas meant.

When it was my turn, I laughed and admitted that my color choices probably made no sense.

Everyone immediately disagreed. They said it looked colorful and bright like me. They said they could see my culture in it.

Then one woman spoke up.

"Gretchen, the whole thing looks like a juicy mango, ripe and abundant."

I looked closely. The tree was filled with fruit. Mangoes, to be exact. I wondered if I had subconsciously reached for the orange crayon because there were mangoes, or if the mangoes appeared because I had reached for the orange crayon.

Either way, the result was the same.

My roots were showing.

And I didn't know it.

The woman who pointed out the mangoes was having a revelation of her own. Her mandala was drenched in pink. Pink was the last color anyone expected her to choose. She was wise, intellectual, assertive, and anything but sentimental. As she tried to explain her choices, something shifted.

The more she looked at her mandala, the more it became a womb.

Then a dam broke.

She grieved the loss of the womb she came from when her mother died young. She grieved the daughter she would never have because she could not have children. She cried for a long time. The release was powerful.

I knew her coastline had changed.

In that moment, I realized the mandalas were not revealing our artistic preferences.

They were revealing us.

Color had reached places words could not. My mandala revealed where I came from. Hers revealed what she carried.

Both revealed belonging.

The more I looked back on my life, the more I realized color had been leaving clues all along: the blue lake, the tropical beach, the orange mangoes, the longing for Puerto Rico, and the colors I trusted before I understood why.

Belonging is not something we find.

It is something we remember.

Color had been trying to show us who we were all along.