Stirrings of Yellow

Yellow is a “color capable of charming God.” So wrote Vincent van Gogh from his yellow house in sun-drenched Arles, an experience embedded within his painting of Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers (1889).

Indeed, yellow sings. Yellow hums and smiles and surprises. It warms. It directs. It challenges. It floods dusky places.

Note its presence in the world of our senses: grosgrain bows in the brunette braids of a toddler, forsythias and daffodils and dandelions, mounds of scrambled eggs, lemons and bananas and squash and currents, a wool-pressed cardigan, accents used in decorating, caution lights in street signals, aging of paper, and so much more.

The world we cannot see also contains the color yellow: the third chakra, center of confidence, decision-making, and personal power; shimmering dreams; the halos of saints; lesser sunny spirits; the transitional stage (citrinitas) in the alchemical transformation from chaos to the philosopher’s stone.

However, there is a dawn-light that preempts all the above; it washed that empty rock-hewn tomb in first-century-Palestine and still compels spirits to a giddying hope.

Happy Easter!