When I was about 9 years old, another girl and I were discussing what our favorite color was. My little friend, in a burst of childish patriotism, dramatically declaimed that her favorite colors were red, white and blue. I replied unhesitatingly that my favorite color was green—and that it was “underneath” all the other colors. We wouldn’t even have red, white and blue, I declared, if we didn’t have green.
Recalling this conversation more than 60 years later, I’m amazed that my 9-year-old self knew this. Yet it’s something I’ve always believed: The color Green gives meaning, grounding and life to everything—from the sustaining, microscopic green of plants’ chlorophyll, which, directly or indirectly, feeds all planetary life; to Gaia’s vast, exuberant, ever-ramifying life-web that exists around and within us, and gifts our hearts, souls, and senses with endless beauty and vitality.
Some traditions of energy healing speak of chakras, which are nodes or loci for the non-material, vibrational energies that anchor and invigorate the physical body. In almost all of these systems, the heart chakra is green. When I first studied the chakras, back in the 1980s, I recognized the interwoven, organic truths that this shows: The Land is green. The Heart is green. The Heart is a mediator and generator of Love, which is green and exists in Nature and in all beings.
Our most inherent, reflexive, essential love—down to our very cells—is for the Green Land, for Mother Earth, for Gaia’s Green World, whose living constituents return our love by nourishing and informing the entire continuum of our being, from the physical to the spiritual. Our Green Heart is the link to all the mysteries of Nature, and to our own nature.
So our initiation into remembering ourselves as earth-connected people must take place in the Heart of each one of us, transforming it into a Green Vessel of Love for the natural world, and thus for our whole self and for all human and non-human beings. This Vessel gives, receives, and synergizes the universal flow of Green Love, of which we are inevitably a part.
It’s striking that virtually all religions and spiritual paths revere the heart as a spiritual organ of love, compassion, union and goodness. What most of them don’t seem to realize, however, is that love for the Sacred Land, for Nature in all her beauty and mystery, is the heart’s most primal, fundamental love. When this love is ignored or denied, our heart weakens and becomes less itself, and so do we.
Gaia holds, reflects and generates our Earth’s most fundamental transformative force: the force of Love. This force is Green, and it flows to and through humanity, pointing like an arrow to our true nature, held deep within our hearts. The truth is that we are inseparable from Gaia’s Green World. For us to become fully ourselves—and to have any chance of healing our sadly tattered biosphere—we need to awaken and remember this.
Only through the Green—which, in the confident words of a 9-year-old girl long ago, is underneath everything else—can we renew ourselves and become a positive, loving, heart-full force for the authentic, regenerative evolution of both humanity and the sacred lands of Gaia, our forever home.