The Art Of Belonging

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

Nature comes in colors to teach us that the world we are born into is not only orderly and bountiful, but beautiful.

Color is how Mother Nature makes us fall in love with life. For a child, coloring is often their first experience of making something they feel proud of. It quietly builds 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, or deceive. They revealed truth. But what I didn’t understand for most of my life is that color reveals something else.

It reveals that we belong to this world, and that we are its hands.

Long before we know it ourselves.

I didn’t know the true power color played in my life until the summer of 2015. I had just been benched from making paint for the next five years. Being cut off from Devine Color—my dream, passion, purpose, and livelihood—prompted me to use color in my meditations, which sent my intuition into overdrive. Working with guided imagery, I was asked to imagine a beautiful place. I envisioned a deep blue, bowl-shaped lake. It made me think of Crater Lake—not knowing that Crater Lake, the deepest lake in America, famous for its surreal blue water, happened to be only hours from our home.

I told my husband, Scott, that I knew something was waiting for us there. This is the kind of knowing that does not require certainty. It is simply a strong urge, a wonder, a spark of baby-like curiosity that makes you beeline toward it.

And beeline we did.

We hopped into our midnight-blue BMW convertible and took off on a road trip we named In Search of Blue.

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. We circled the lake’s thirty-three-mile rim, contemplating its wonder and wondering how we hadn’t known it was in our backyard all those years.

Heading home, we were stopped by road construction. With the top down, we started talking to a road worker who happily answered my endless questions about the lake. He explained that Crater Lake is completely self-contained. The water comes directly from snow and rain. No rivers feed it. No rivers leave it. A planet within a planet. Manna from within.

It was a perfect metaphor for meditation.

I enthusiastically shared why we had come In Search of Blue and how meaningful his words 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 scared him off. Instead, he returned carrying a cooler filled with the most delicious bright orange smoked salmon I had ever seen. As we stood eating fish beside one of the bluest places on Earth, a stranger had gifted us not only a perfect metaphor, but 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 here 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 this coast alone with my daughters, searching for a better beach. I remember crying ugly tears, 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 with a big stick or a large finger: THINK GOD.

Who knows.

What I do know is that day changed my relationship with the Oregon Coast. It became clear that this coast is unapologetically raw, powerful, and untamable. It is not a crowd-pleaser. But it offers miles of pristine sand, tide pools, and rock monoliths to those seeking a reflection of nature that teaches you to reflect on your own.

I saw a reflection of myself on that coast.I was that coast.I beelined back to belonging.

Within a year of finding that beach, Scott and I met, bought a house, and married. For eighteen years, we drove up and down the coast trying to find that magical beach again, but we never did.

Until the drive back from Crater Lake. On our In Search of Blue road trip, I finally understood why I had needed to go. I had lost my sense of belonging when I lost Devine Color. I immediately recognized the parking lot. Our room overlooked my tropical beach, hidden in plain sight.

Three months later, I was back on the Oregon Coast for an inspiration retreat with a group of entrepreneurial women.

One of them brought mandalas for us to color as a meditation exercise. I had gone from In Search of Blue, to color meditations, to coloring mandalas in a matter of three months.

I drew a mandala called the Tree of Life.

We spread out across a long wooden dining table garlanded with wine, food, and flowers. A box of crayons sat in front of each chair. Remember the first time you smelled a crayon? The untouched order of the colors? Peeling the paper back in a perfect curlicue spiral? Breaking one in the middle of a passionate coloring session, promising to be careful, and then breaking another?

I was ready to roll.

I reached for an orange crayon. 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 to share. I laughed and admitted my color choices probably made no sense. Everyone 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 orange because there were mangoes, or if the mangoes appeared because I reached for the orange.

Who knows.

Either way, my mango-yellow-orange roots were showing.

The woman who pointed out my mangoes was having a revelation of her own. Her mandala was drenched in pink. Pink was the last color anyone expected from her—think black turtlenecks. She was wise, intellectual, and assertive. But the more she looked at her pink mandala, the more it became a womb.

Then a dam broke.

Tears poured out as 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.

I knew her coastline had changed.

In that moment, I realized the mandalas were not revealing our artistic preferences. They were asking us to beeline our way back to belonging. Crayon colors did what we 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 orange salmon, the rainbow starfish, the mangoes, the longing for Puerto Rico, and the colors I trusted before I understood why.

This is what I know.

Belonging is not something we find. It is something we remember. When we do, the same determination that drives a curious baby toward something familiar drives us to confirm what we know.

This is Mother Nature's call, from cradle to grave. Like a honeybee taking a perfectly straight path back to its hive after gathering nectar—to belong is to know, and to do amazing things with what we know. To care for one another like we care for ourselves. To fulfill the Golden Rule.

We long to belong.

No wonder the color of honey is gold.

Color is constantly trying to show us that we are one with her wondrous nature.

Coloring is an act of belonging.

You are the palette.

 Send this to someone you know. 

Gretchen.

Author Note

I came to this work not through therapy or a doctorate, but through a bucket of paint. I didn’t hear a calling, and I wasn’t particularly gifted at art. Color became my vehicle for self-actualization not because I loved decorating, but because using paint colors to make myself feel at home changed how I felt about the world.

This is my way of sharing what I know.