Blood in the Leaves
Photo by David Clode on Unsplash
What does growth look like to you? For me, I often think of nature when I think of life. I think of lush green forests in the fullness of summer, or the baby green shoots of grass that start to push through the spring snowmelt. If life was a colour, it’d be green for me. At least, until I started to learn to appreciate the unseen life coursing through me.
To be fair, green isn’t a bad colour to think of when thinking of life. After all, nearly every plant is green. These plants are not only alive but they give us life. Without them, life on this planet would end. There would be no food or oxygen. The ability to grow is something remarkable. Seeing the visible signs of growth is exhilarating to me.
Likewise in our culture, we place great value on the outward things that represent growth to us — a job promotion, a clean house, a child successfully potty trained, or a mortgage paid off. We feel great satisfaction when we can see a visible difference. While this is definitely one type of growth, there is so much more to growth than just what can be immediately seen.
Blood in the Leaves by Christina Mayhew
In this piece that I did recently, the green immediately jumped out to me as a symbolism of growth. But as I reflected on it, I kept wondering about what the red meant. Red is often used to symbolize intense things like anger, hatred, or love. Those didn’t feel right to me though. The longer I looked at it the more I kept coming back to the idea of growth, which seemed odd to me at first. But the more I thought about it the more it felt right. Red is the colour of blood, of the very thing that brings us life. Not only do we need it in order to live but each of our lives began with the spilling of someone’s blood in order for us to have the chance to grow. We call it birth.
Just like plants are able to display visible signs of growth like new leaves, there is always so much more growth going on behind the scenes in a plant. It happens deep within, away from our view. Without it, the plant could never survive. I can tell you that a tree has roots — not because I can see them, but because I can see that the tree is able to hold itself up. I can tell you that the roots are absorbing nutrients and water by the state of the leaves. What is hidden away is absolutely integral for its growth and its life.
Photo by Eduardo Buscariolli on Unsplash
Just like plants have both areas of visible growth and of hidden growth, so do we. We have the things that we say, do, or achieve, which are easily visible for any of us to see. But we also have the areas that are completely invisible that can only be known to exist by observing how someone lives their life.
The green in this painting represents the outward things we do to make the world around us better, while the red represents what we do to improve our own selves as people. I believe we can’t do one without the other. If we want to make our world a better place we need to grow and develop the areas of our lives that bring life to us. We need to nourish ourselves. We need to make our development a priority. We need to engage in the things that bring struggle, healing, support, character, and self-love. These aren’t things that can easily be observed, but as time goes on the red growth will interweave with the green growth and enable us and our world to grow into something more.