The colour green is the easiest for us humans to recognize. We see so many shades of this beautiful colour, more so than any other.
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It calms us and revives us and draws us into the womb like security of its verdant mantle.
Its name in old English means to burgeon and in the Romance languages the root of vert is growth and Spring.
It is the colour of life and abundance.
In pre-Christian times, witches, dragons, fairies, spirits, and leprechauns were all green. That great soul of the Celtic renewal was the Green Man and in Egypt Osiris the God of the underworld and rebirth was also green.
This was the colour of the natural and the feral, the colour of hope and the cycles of life.
All too soon, those who worshipped the great monotheistic Gods turned this around.
Green was the serpent in Eden and it became associated with sickness, envy and the monsters of our imagination.
The old pagan ways began to fade and slowly we moved away from the green of the natural world.
Perhaps it is time to go and reclaim what is in fact the primary colour of humanity and rejoice in the sheer abundance and multitude shades of green in places such as this.
Photo: Riverbank at Los Tornos. Courtesy of the author.
