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Leaves of green, cities of emerald, cleanness, freshness, newness, health, sustainability. Green holds so much meaning for me, and I didn't know it until I started counting the ways...
For as long as I can remember, I have said that green is my favorite color. I didn't know why, but I had an idea it might have something to do with being a redhead and having been told that green is a great color for redheads to wear. Also, I'd heard that green eyes were genetically related to red hair. Wait - is that true? Let me ask my friend Gloria.
It seems that this is not actually true! Red hair and green eyes may look great together, but they don't necessarily go together genetically. Instead, the greenness we see in green eyes is due to a combination of factors. Here's one factor: brown eyes contain relatively large amounts of melanin in the front layers of the iris. Melanin absorbs a lot of incoming light, so relatively little gets scattered back toward the observer. What comes back looks brown. Blue eyes contain much less melanin in those front layers. With less pigment to absorb the light, shorter wavelengths are scattered more strongly by the microscopic structures in the iris. That's why the iris appears blue. It's somewhat analogous to the physics that makes the sky appear blue—although the exact scattering mechanism in an iris isn't identical to atmospheric scattering.
Green eyes - here's the interesting part - green eyes occupy an intermediate territory. They generally have more melanin than blue eyes but considerably less than brown eyes. So you get two things happening at once:
some yellowish/brownish coloration from the melanin and other pigmentation in the iris;
bluish light produced by structural scattering.
Our visual system perceives the resulting combination as green. The graphic below (courtesy Gloria, my name for my ChatGPT subscription) depicts this beautifully.
By the way, those of you who don't know me well might not realize that I was born a red-head. That's partly why I had an interest in green eyes. My mom often said to me and my brother that she wanted to have twins - twins with green eyes to be exact. Apparently both twins and green eyes are traits her forebears, and my dad's, had, which she had hoped to passs on. We both got red hair (me and my brother) but our eyes are brown. My brother has lots of freckles as well.
Curiously, because red hair is the rarest hair color in the world and blue/green eyes are also quite rare, people sometimes assume they always go together. In reality, a person with red hair is actually most likely to have brown, hazel, or blue eyes.
I began to see green in a new light when I read a book about the Apocalypse. In this book, the author gives an interpretation of certain passages in the Book of the Revelation of St. John. The author claimed that the meaning behind the emerald foundation is UNITY.
"The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass. The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, the fifth onyx, the sixth ruby, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth turquoise, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst. The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass." --Revelation 21:18-21
The reasoning behind this association between green and unity is both simple and memorable. The color green is ubiquitous in nature and blends well with every other color. If you studied science in school, you will know that the green of leaves and other growing things in the Kingdom of Plants is due to a miraculous molecule known as chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is a large green pigment molecule that helps plants catch light energy from the sun to make food.
Imagine a garden full of flowering plants, each bearing flowers of a different shade of red, blue, yellow, orange, purple, or pink. The varying shades of green surrounding and connecting the flowers serve as a unifying element. It is hard for me to even imagine any other color producing the same effect.
Diagram of part of a chlorophyll molecule. The green colored ball in the center of this image represents a Magnesium atom, which is surrounded by blue Nitrogen atoms. Grey balls are Carbon atoms, white is Hydrogen and red is Oxygen.
Perhaps this is what green can teach us about unity:
In a garden, each flower retains its own color, its own shape, its own particular beauty. Yet somehow they all belong together. The green that surrounds them does not compete with their differences; it helps those differences become part of a harmonious whole.
Maybe getting along with one another is something like that. Unity does not require us to become alike, to agree about everything, or to surrender the qualities that make each of us distinctive. It asks us to learn how to live alongside difference—to find what connects us, and perhaps even to discover that our differences can make the whole more beautiful.
We don't have to blend in. We have to learn how to blend together.
My hair is no longer red! It darkened quite a bit by the time I got to voting age. But I still love green, and I couldn't resist this pattern when I was picking a dress for my birthday present last month. If you're a woman who likes this type of design, and shops on a budget, check out Afropenda (afropenda.com/) and let me know what you think. Afropenda describes itself as a Black woman-owned clothing brand founded by Lena. I have found Lena's customer service team to be very helpful and responsive. It's nice to feel like real people are behind the brand.
The name Lena means torch, bright, or shining light from its Greek roots (Helene, like Helen of Troy), and also translates to tender, delicate, or a young palm tree in Arabic.
Virtues and qualities I associate with green: Generosity, Service, Unity
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