💡The Shadow Between the Colors
An Epiphany from the watercolor wheel
On what happens when we meet our opposite.
Today I was learning to watercolor.
The teacher was talking about the color wheel
and explaining that when we want to deepen a color,
we do not always reach for black.
Sometimes we reach across the wheel.
We introduce the color’s complement.
A little green changes red.
A little orange changes blue.
A little violet changes yellow.
The original color is still there.
But something happens when it meets its opposite.
It becomes quieter.
Deeper.
More complex.
And suddenly I thought about astrology.
The Other Side of the Wheel
Astrology is a wheel too.
Every sign has another sign sitting directly across from it.
I am a Scorpio.
Across the wheel from Scorpio sits Taurus.
These signs are often described through opposition.
One reaches beneath the surface;
the other attends to what is tangible.
One transforms;
the other preserves.
One asks us to release;
the other asks us to hold.
It would be easy to decide that one must therefore be the shadow of the other.
But watercolor made me wonder if that is quite right.
Perhaps the opposite does not bring the shadow.
Perhaps the shadow is created somewhere in the meeting.
🎨 Where the Colors Meet
When complementary colors meet on the palette,
neither color is necessarily wrong.
Neither needs to defeat the other.
They affect one another.
Add too much of the complement and
the original color may become heavily neutralized.
Add only a little,
and something much more interesting can happen.
The color remains recognizable as itself.
But it has acquired depth.
Perhaps we do something similar?
Maybe Scorpio does not need to become Taurus.
Maybe Scorpio needs enough Taurus to give transformation somewhere to stand.
And perhaps Taurus does not need to become Scorpio.
Maybe Taurus needs enough Scorpio to know when holding has become holding on.
Between them lives a question:
What is worth keeping,
and what is ready to change?
That is neither Taurus nor Scorpio alone.
It belongs to the axis between them.
The Center of the Pole
We spend a great deal of time trying to decide which end of a polarity is right.
Light or dark.
Holding or releasing.
Stillness or movement.
Self or other.
But perhaps wisdom isn’t waiting obediently at either end.
Perhaps some of it is created in the center
where one truth finally encounters the truth standing opposite it.
Not to erase itself.
Not to surrender.
But to become more complete.
A watercolorist can make a shadow without reaching for black.
She introduces another color.
And suddenly the shadow is not an absence of color at all.
It is a relationship between colors.
Perhaps some of our own shadows are like that.
Not darkness waiting to be eliminated.
But places where something in us has not yet learned how to meet its opposite.
And perhaps integration does not make us less ourselves.
Perhaps,
like pigment meeting its complement,
we become deeper because we have met what we are not.
From the Keeper
Perhaps our opposite does not bring us our shadow.
Perhaps the shadow lives in the space between the poles
where one truth meets the truth that completes it.
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