RED STATES, BLUE STATES, ME AND YOU STATES

art for red&blue blogI have written before about how, during psychic readings, the spirits of the dead show me things using visuals, more often than they tell me things using words.  I am a very visual person, so this suits me just fine.  A problem arises, tho, when a big concept is presented with a simple visual, and I am left struggling to translate it back into words, so I can convey its message and meaning to the person I am doing the reading for.

I get tongue-tied, and usually compensate by over-describing the scene or image I have been shown, but even then, I know that sometimes my descriptions fall short.  I remember one time in particular, when I was doing a reading for the mother of a young man who died tragically in a car accident.

The young man’s spirit wanted to describe the dynamic at work in his relationship with his mother, and showed me the image that appears with this column (It isn’t the real image, but a re-creation that I drew from memory. My apologies for the wrinkly paper….).  He put the image in motion, showing me the red area as fast and frenetic, indicating that it represented him, and then showing the blue area as placid and flowing like a refreshing stream, indicating that it represented his mother.

I understood the image at once: how his red area packed experiences and learning into a tight space and how his mother’s blue area spread them out; how his energy was like a comet and his mother’s like a gentle breeze; how his heat and vitality warmed her essence and how her calm coolness kept him from spontaneously combusting; how the content of his life equalled that of hers, but was manifest in a very different way.

I saw the image for maybe ten seconds, and then needed to convey the immenseness of its meaning to the young man’s mother.  I had a lot of trouble with this.  I believe I opened with, “He’s showing me himself as a paisley comet,” and it all went sort of downhill from there.  I began again, described it much better the second time around, and his mother said she understood what he meant, what I was describing, but I wished very much that I could take a picture of what he showed me to spare her the inexactness of my interpretation and translation.

I do not have the mother’s permission to tell her son’s whole story at this time, so I want to go back to that image.  What struck me most about it was the universality of it.  People live at different speeds and with different intensities; some people “run hot” and have lives that are all reds and oranges, while other people “run cool” and have lives that are all blues and greens.  Neither is better or worse than the other, just different.

I say this more for myself than for anyone else.  A quick self-assessment puts me firmly in the blue-green camp, but a part of me protests this, as I dislike the color blue, hate the connotation that I am cold and uncaring, and I would just rather be a red-orange.  My inner turmoil shouts: “I am fiery!”  “I am passionate!”  “I hate blue furniture!”  But the somewhat painful truth is that I am a blue-green person.  I am thoughtful and contemplative, I take the long view, and I like when ideas unfold.  When I get stuck on a project or I experience writer’s block, I say, “I need to remove these obstacles to get my flow back,” always imagining my energy as a river.  I never, ever say to myself, “I need to re-light my fire.”

By contrast, red-orange people are impulsive and impetuous.  They pack their schedules and are prone to change direction often.  They live in the moment, take the short view, and love to make things happen.

The young man’s image offers no judgement as to who is “better,” just a key into understanding what makes us and our relationships tick.  Through the lens of red vs. blue, it is easy to identify relationships as red-red, blue-blue, and red-blue.  And it is easy to see what you get with each of those — red-red gets you fireworks; blue-blue gets you the ocean; red-blue gets you both.

2 thoughts on “RED STATES, BLUE STATES, ME AND YOU STATES”

  1. Wonderful! Have you ever read the children’s book “I Love You The Purplest”. It’s about a mom and her two boys…one red and one blue. It goes beautifully with what you just said.

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