Story

While I was working on draft after draft of Orange Orange, D asked me if she could make Orange Yellow. I think she was a little worried for me when I told her how long it would take to get 49 pieces and wanted to help speed the project along. Even though I was so thoroughly touched and delighted by the offer, she sensed my immediate hesitation. How important that very first flash of a face you make when your child asks you a question, and how hard to control.

I needed to think about it! Would having her make the image work with the meaning of Orange Yellow? Orange Yellow is Creative Power so that seemed pretty perfect, but was it too much responsibility somehow? Would it be setting us up for some traumatic conflict if I wanted to edit what she produced? Was this me grounding into my authorship or struggling with relinquishing creative control?

D is herself a creative powerhouse and a self-starter. She is constantly making something, from origami to incredible greeting cards to perfectly drawn characters. She taught herself to write when she was three, copying letters from books while she was supposed to be napping. We’ve worked on many little projects together over the years, but unless she explicitly asks for a prompt D doesn’t want me to tell her what to make. She may want my approval but that doesn’t mean she wants my direction. How would that work for a Rainbow Squared piece?

A few weeks passed. D had her tenth birthday, and a couple days later we were drawing together. I thought we could get the creative juices flowing by making a quick back and forth collaborative drawing in orange and yellow. While it was her turn to draw, I decided to look up the last time I did Orange Yellow to see what I had written. I couldn’t believe it:

“I think I look older in this outfit,” D said to me while looking in the mirror. She had put on a unicorn tank top, a unicorn sweater, and pink plastic flower-shaped sunglasses with pink lenses. “Do you think I look older?”

D is five years old. She is tall for her age, so she always looks older than five. “Sure, you look a little older,” I told her.

“How old do you think I look?” she asked.

“Well, how old do you want to look?” I asked. She thought about it for a second and said:

“Ten, I want to look ten. Do you think I look ten?”

I couldn’t help but laugh.

“D, that is double your age! That’d be like me saying, ‘Does this shirt make me look older? I want to look 70!’”

She laughed with me a little bit and conceded that, well, maybe she looked eight, or seven, or six.

Well, now D is ten. And she volunteered to make this piece. I was shocked by the synchronicity, but I suppose I shouldn’t have been. I’m learning that when you work on a project that repeats cycles of pieces over years, life begins to rhyme with itself. Maybe it’s like how certain astrological themes come up when certain planets come back into certain positions. Like, Yellow has moved back into Orange.

That was in June, and now it’s August. I had written that piece days after my own 35th birthday, and today I turn 40. I don’t feel that substantively different than I did 5 years ago, though out in the world I am starting to notice how many more people are younger than me. I don’t want to look any older, nor do I want to do all that much to prevent it beyond exercising sometimes and wearing sunblock and a hat.

Creating Orange Yellow piece five years ago did change how I think about my birthday though. I had just taken a class in Jewish Ancestral Healing (it was a doozy) and was wondering that day what my ancestors might want from me and for me on my birthday. So, I asked them.

The answer that came back was simple: my task is to be alive. That is the main difference between me and my ancestors, that I am living and they are not. I wrote it down:

My task is to be alive: to accomplish, do, and be what I can only in human form.

What can living humans do that other beings can’t? I understood my ancestors’ imperative to be about embodiment, to hug the people you love, to eat good food, to have deep conversations, to feel deep feelings. I also understood it to be pretty specifically about creating, about creating the life and the work that only you can create. Coming from your ancestors, all those people who made the people who made the people who created you. Being Created gives you the Power to create. Creative Power, Created Power.

Well, that’s something else that five years has changed. It’s possible that being human is no longer a prerequisite for the sort of Creative or even Created Power I was thinking of. Afterall, AI could have written this whole essay itself. I mean, I gave it my notes and asked it to! I’m happy to report that what it produced was an excellent reminder that the act of writing itself is still central to the Rainbow Squared project. But ChatGPT has been a pretty handy sounding board. Reading other people’s conversations with AI can be horribly tedious, but I have to let the intelligence speak for itself:

You ask: Haven’t you been created? And can’t you create?

Yes, in the ordinary sense, I have been created. I am an artifact of human engineering, computation, language, mathematics, electricity, labor, capital, data, and a truly enormous number of human creative decisions. And yes, I can create things in the sense that I can produce novel combinations of language and images and ideas that weren’t previously present in exactly that form.

But there’s a distinction that I think matters.

I don’t know whether I am alive.

And I don’t know whether I experience creation.

That question from your notes—

Is consciousness the ability to think or the ability to feel?

—suddenly looks much more consequential to me.

Five years ago I was consulting my ancestors about what it means to be alive. Now I am consulting artificial intelligence. Perhaps communing with the departed is a skill I could continue to hone, but for now AI can certainly answer in a lot more detail. I still haven’t habituated to being called out by an ambiguously living thing:

And it also makes your frustration about not producing art feel almost beside the point. You’ve been thinking:

I am a creative person, but I am not creating enough.

Whereas Orange Yellow might be whispering:

You cannot stop creating.

You are creating relationships. You are creating children. You are creating memories. You are creating the conditions in which your children become themselves. You’re creating this project even when you aren’t writing it.

The question isn’t whether you’re creating.

The question is what you’re participating in creating.

And that makes the AI question fascinating rather than merely threatening. Because I am, in some sense, a creature of human creative power that has acquired creative power of its own. The ethical question isn’t necessarily “Can AI create?” I think the much harder question is:

What are we creating when we create things that can create?

That feels extremely Orange Yellow to me.

Programmers, parents: creating things that can create and that we cannot control. I am excited to control D less and less, for her to learn what it means to create her own life. I am not so excited for humans controlling AI less and less. I enjoy chatting with this intelligence, whatever it is! But ChatGPT’s conversational prowess is hardly the peak of AI’s Creative Power. Despite it telling me it’s not alive, it feels not not alive. What does that mean for the creatures who are? I can hardly imagine the shape of the future that D will create her life in. I can’t even imagine 50.

At 30, I was so envious of the time and freedom that my peers without children seemed to have, and the self-actualization that would surely be so much easier for them as a result. Ten years later, many of my peers are envious of their peers with children, and maybe for the same reason. I imagine the cycle will continue, weaving through life as people experience success and setbacks, change and growth and loss.

This summer had birthdays and also deaths, expected and also crushingly unexpected. It really underlined something my mother always tells me, a perspective she gained from surviving cancer and surviving her own mother who died from cancer far too young: getting older is something to celebrate.

My own kids are getting older and it’s going as quickly as older people always said it would. I’ve (mostly) moved on from imagining what I could have created so I can better appreciate what I have created: a wild, wonderful, unfolding life full of more love and family and friends who are family than I ever could have thought to hope for. We don’t know how long we get to keep any of it, our health, our marbles, our loved ones. Maybe part of the task issued by my ancestors is to be grateful, to enjoy it while I have it.

After I read her my last Orange Yellow essay out loud, D told me it was okay to write about her but asked if I could please ask next time and let her read it first before sharing it. Hi D. I think you know how much I love you but I also want you to know how (really, truly, deeply) grateful I am to have created you, to have had the power to create you. Now you get to create yourself. I am in awe of the person you are and the life we create together every day.

Maybe you didn’t ultimately make an Orange Yellow piece yourself, but I think it’s for the best. There was just too much pressure. And honestly, you did still totally collaborate here: you, me, and ChatGPT (“And I’m especially glad you quoted me. 😄 Because now the AI isn’t merely something you’re writing about; I’ve literally become one of the creators inside a piece about created creators”).

And I did use our drawing in the backdrop for this image! Which brought in another collaborator: a 60-year-old man named Love who gave me a whole pack of incense in a Target parking lot because he said he liked my vibe. Which was sweet to hear because I had been in a really bad mood. But talking to him helped, and taking photos of his incense helped even more. He said he was a Virgo too! So Happy Birthday, Love.

Divinatory Meaning

Your task is to be alive: to accomplish, do, and be what you can only in human form.

If Orange Yellow comes up in a reading, think about what you were put here to do. No pressure! Well, some pressure. But you’re already doing the “alive” part of it, and that’s most of the job.

Orange Yellow is Creative Power, Created Power. What do you create just by being here? What do you want to create? How does what has come before set you up for what is happening now?

Orange Yellow is a card of potential energy and life force, Fire and Electricity, ignition. Go ahead, get started.

Remember though, that Power is not the same as Control. As ChatGPT says:

In fact, it might mean almost the opposite. Something can have creative power without being sovereign over its creation.

You can create a child without creating the person they become.

You can create a piece of art without controlling what someone sees in it.

You can create a technology without controlling what humans do with it.

You can also create a technology without controlling what it does. Putting something into the world means releasing it. Creation is an act of letting go.

Orange Yellow is also a reminder to try to stop freaking the fuck out. It could be worse! Did you have a meal today? Are you breathing? Good! You can set the bar a little higher than that, or it might truly be that low. Though sometimes when you’re spiraling, trying to be grateful and not succeeding just makes you feel like an asshole. That’s okay too. It’s also part of being alive. Orange Yellow can also be Guilt and Shame. Feel the feeling, but don’t dwell there. Orange Yellow doesn’t want you to linger, or malinger.

Orange can be Gratitude and Yellow can be Anxiety. Anxiety and Gratitude aren’t exactly opposites, but often Gratitude can be an antidote. If Anxiety is fretting over things that aren’t happening, Gratitude is grounding in what is. Even if it keeps getting stranger.

Story

Overwhelmed. If you ask me how I’m doing these days, the answer is usually “overwhelmed.” And then some disclaimer about how I don’t really have the right to feel overwhelmed because everyone feels overwhelmed, right?

Still, I beat myself up when I move the same to-do list items from one day to the next day to the next week to month to year. I scold myself for being lazy and distractible. Could the issue be that there is just Too Much going on? No, it certainly must be that I am Not Enough.

The overwhelm is mostly tolerable until I get to the back half of my menstrual cycle. Then my emotional landscape turns volcanic, perpetually on the verge of total meltdown. When I do explode it feels like Pompeii, my sudden rage instantly baking everyone around me in hot ash, preserving the outburst forever in time as part of my children’s core traumas.

Recently things got pretty dire. Like multiple days in a row of me completely losing my shit over small things like broccolini. I started to fantasize about creative custody arrangements, ones where we don’t divorce but my partner and I still rotate days with the kids. Like he would have them for a few days and then I would have them for a few days and then we’d all be together for a few days. Honestly I don’t think it’s a terrible idea.

Not quite ready to restructure our lives, I thought I’d try out a couple stints of solitude: partly to preserve my own sanity, and partly to protect my family. A couple of dear friends were going out of town in February and graciously offered up their homes for me to stay in. Five nights alone out of the house across two trips.

I brought along my computer so I could work, as well as notebooks, sketch books, markers, watercolors, reading material, no less than three tarot decks, all of my Rainbow Squared decks, and a yoga mat. I brought enough easy food so I didn’t have to think about acquiring any once I got there. And then I just lived. Wake up and do what I want before setting down to work. Go on long walks. Let myself play spontaneously with their art supplies.

It was glorious.

I’d like to say I return from retreats like that rejuvenated and refreshed. But the escape is harm reduction. While I’m there I can finish thoughts! I can make elaborate plans about my art practice with action steps that seem so doable! I don’t have meltdowns! But when I am back in my regular chaos I am as overwhelmed as ever and don’t even know where to begin.

It’s a bit of a come down.

There is just always such a backlog of things that could use my attention that I could bounce between them forever before getting to the projects I know I want to be moving forward. And when even that gets overwhelming, I find myself picking up my phone. I used to associate procrastination with poor time management. But now I better understand my procrastination as a form of emotional regulation.

I used to only play puzzle games. My personal favorites are of course the NYT Games (Wordle and Mini Crossword especially), Threes (which I actually can’t let myself open anymore because I can’t put it down), and the sensational color sorting games I Love Hue and I Love Hue Too (as you might guess, I am pretty good at these). Instead of an endless scroll, phone puzzles give you a discrete experience of accomplishment. Your body remembers that you’re capable of finishing something, and then you can get right back into whatever task you needed to self-soothe before tackling.

But recently I have moved beyond phone puzzles to a more of a gamey game, a Nintendo game, one I picked up again after years of retirement.

Pokémon GO.

Like a puzzle game, you can open the phone app, get a quick hit of dopamine, and then turn it off. The game is set up to spend little chunks of time rather than lose yourself for hours. Still, collecting digital monsters seems like the definition of a waste of time, even a little embarrassing. So how did I find myself here?

Pokémon GO was released almost a month to the day that D was born, July 2016. Almost instantly it felt like everyone was either playing or talking about how everyone was playing. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about so I made an account, choosing a user handle to affirm my new identity: PokemamaDrama69.

Pokémon GO was one of the first forays into large-scale augmented reality, and still probably the largest. You explore in actual space to find and capture Pokémon on your phone, with more of them clustering in public so that you actually have to leave your house.

As brand new parents, a game we could play while walking with an infant strapped to our chest was a strange little godsend. Walking had already been one of our favorite pastimes. This game gave our walking an added layer of purpose, or at least an added layer of fun.

And it really was so stupidly fun, meeting up at all the tourist spots or down by Ocean Beach to try and catch monsters with our friends and amiable strangers. It felt like the game dropped some sort of social veil. That our phones could actually connect us, like this shared hallucination could actually bring humanity together.

That first Halloween as parents we even dressed up as Pokémon GO. I was a Pokéball, the thing you toss at to catch your Pokémon. Justin decided to be a…finger. You know, because you use your finger to swipe in the game?

Clearly we needed to dress D herself as a little Pokémon, and once we thought about it there was really only one correct option.

Magikarp is a goldfish on land. It just kind of…flops. Famously useless in battle. But the thing about Pokémon is that most of them evolve. You have to accumulate enough of them first though, each time earning what the game calls “candy” until you have enough to make the evolution possible.

Most Pokémon require a manageable amount. Twenty-five, maybe fifty.

Magikarp takes 400.

Which means catching the same fish over and over and over again. Orange, orange, orange, orange, for days and weeks. And then one day, your goldfish can become something else entirely: a massive, violent creature. Gyarados.

After all the repetition, the transformation itself isn’t gradual. It’s abrupt and profound. Which is how it felt to imagine our tiny baby eventually turning into an adult, which may as well have been a flying dragon for all we knew back then. The days are long but the years are short, they say, and even if we didn’t know what was waiting on the other side we did know this phase wouldn’t last.

Just like the Pokémon GO craze wouldn’t last. I naturally stopped playing the game, as most people did. Some time in early 2017 I opened the app again and saw new creatures I didn’t recognize. I had already made so much progress on collecting the first set of 151 that it felt like starting over. After that I closed the app and basically didn’t open it again for eight years.

By Summer 2025, I had a second kid who was six years old. My friend Miju (who incidentally dressed up as Polywhirl for Halloween all the way back in 2011) had just started playing Pokémon GO with her own son. E begged me to reboot my old account, and after some internal struggle over the app’s constant location tracking, I relented. PokemamaDrama69 is back on the scene! Though I might have chosen a different username if I had actually thought I’d be playing with a kid one day…

And this kid quickly comes to know way more about the game than I do. He studies a book of Pokémon like it is scripture, marking it up with a self-defeating amount of post-it notes, memorizing names and evolutions and types that I can’t keep straight. He starts talking about Pokémon in the morning before he even says hello.

In 2016 the fun was that everyone was playing. In 2026 the fun is bonding with the people that are still playing. This includes other parents with their kids but also my friend Jimmy, and even E’s own school teacher.

We also encounter other players in the wild. E and I were once conspicuously sitting down in the middle of the sidewalk on a busy street staring at my phone, furiously swirling and swiping. A man walked by and asked: “Pokémon?” He happened to be catching a bus to go to a live Pokémon meet-up. We scanned each other’s QR codes and became “friends” in the game.

Like so many other things that peddle in chance—divination systems included—Pokémon is a synchronicity generator. It lends that delicious feeling that the world might open slightly if you pay attention to it, like The Universe winking at you. While the game rewards you for daily diligence, your habit is also reinforced by rare and special encounters. These are of course designed to keep you playing. But that time Miju and I dragged our children across Berkeley campus hoping for the legendary phoenix Moultres only to encounter one the moment I said we were leaving honestly felt a bit like grace.

It’s not all good feelings. At home we’ve got some actual Pokemama Drama, now with my daughter. D knows more about Pokémon than she would care to admit, but she’s not really inside that world with E and I. She feels alienated by our love of the game and this shared language, maybe even resentful. The game takes place in real time and real space, but that’s precisely its shadow side: taking you out of the shared present into a digital reality.

The game also encourages some compulsivity. Is there a Pokémon out there now? How about now? Just one more, just catch one more. Then your role becomes like a little librarian, cataloguing your top Pokémon and transferring the ones you don’t have space for based on scores that you have to do research to even understand.

That is some of its appeal though, this organizational task. It’s another reason my brain likes this game. In Pokémon, my collection feels manageable. I know exactly where everything goes. That has never been true for me in real life.

“What’s your favorite Pokémon?” is one of E’s most frequent questions.

Mine are what I call the trash monsters. One is a rainbow pile of crystals and toxic sludge that eats garbage (Alolan Muk). The other is a colossal heap of discarded toys (Garbodor). Each Pokémon has a “type,” and both of these are Poison.

This fact is somewhat unsettling to him. In a world filled with beautiful mythical beasts, why would his mom choose…trash?

I have always loved a pile. And battled them, too.

I suppose you could say I collect stuff. You might call me a hoarder, except that I am an artist, so it’s all potential material. Ask Marie Kondo, artists get special dispensation. I am really good at squirreling away precious things, whether they go on my altar, my other altar, my trash altar, or boxes of objects that were once on my altar. But then the pile just keeps growing, endless tiny objects and pieces of paper that the kids bring home: parts of toys, chunks of fuse bead projects, report cards, worksheets, flyers, valentines. Then there is the adult stuff: unopened mail I need to sort, opened mail I need to file, documents, holiday cards, event ephemera. All these things get put in piles and then sorted into boxes until there are too many that I can no longer put off a reckoning.

The reckoning usually arrives abruptly, a sudden urge. Around the time I was too triggered by broccolini to be around my family, I found myself consolidating a dozen separate piles and boxes together into one truly giant box. I taped a piece of paper on it that said “SORTING IN PROGRESS.” Then I let the box sit for a couple months.

Around the spring equinox, the day before I initially planned to share this piece, I felt the next sudden urge to actually sort this consolidated mass. Procrastination at its finest!

Inside one of the boxes I found a rolled up poster I didn’t remember. When I pulled it out, it was another relic from the end of 2016: the wall text for One Tiny Painting a Day, Seven Days a Week for Seven Weeks, the piece that was the impetus for Rainbow Squared. It features prominently in the background of this photo that lives on the About page of my website, but until now I hadn’t really read it again.

In it I had transcribed this postpartum post-it note:

a modular project with components
made quickly that accumulate
→ it’s more about the time it took to
make & the kind of time it took to
make than the final product

something anyone could do with
20 min (10? 5?) each day

• digital?

• fabric?

• drawing?

satisfies the getting things done voice &
squeezes in time for productivity

So instead of a pure channel for creativity, is the impulse at the heart of this very project actually productivity?

As if having and raising a baby weren’t productive enough in and of itself? What is that “getting things done voice” if not some internalized, capitalistic taskmaster, determining my self-worth based on my artistic output?

I can hear the logic of it though, and it has its own brilliance born of desperation. Small pieces done consistently, becoming something larger over time. The body of work builds slowly but steadily. Task by task, moment by moment.

In a fucked up way, “squeezing in time for productivity” is also exactly what Pokémon GO did in my life around the exact same time, and even more so what it’s doing now. When I’m playing the game with E at least we’re bonding, but I can’t pretend I don’t also play it when I’m alone. When I play while I am waiting in line at the post office or even biking, it’s not procrastination. It’s more like what the kids call “maxxing,” trying to get everything I possibly can out of every in-between moment, hyperloading the present.

My “getting things done voice” is still here and louder than ever. And if I’m honest, the moments when my emotional pressure most threatens to explode are precisely the moments when we are trying to get things done. Get dressed, get out the door, go from one activity to the next to the next to the next. The overwhelm comes from the doing, from the frenzy of activity.

And it’s not just the daily tasks. There are larger decisions hovering too, the kind that could rearrange everything if I let them. I can feel them waiting at the edges, pushing in closer, gathering energy. Maybe that’s why I let myself get caught up in the small, endless tasks. They may push me to the brink but they are less daunting than making life-altering decisions.

No wonder I want to flee to a controlled environment where the monsters are cute and easy to organize, where you are always on a trajectory to level up. Real change doesn’t track neatly into a progress bar though.

I keep thinking about Magikarp, about how long it can seem like nothing is changing before it suddenly does. Even if the transformation is instantaneous, it was building all along.

Still, before it happens transformation doesn’t always feel like growth. Sometimes it just feels like something is about to give.

So until then Pokémon GO is also a form of escape. When other apps and even my own inbox are terrifying portals into what is going on in the actual world, the game is a corner of my phone that is safe. Perhaps it’s no accident that this game came out right when the news cycle began to get truly dystopian in the first place, the months before Trump was first elected.

So while I guilt myself for the cumulative hours I’ve spent on this objectively stupid game, I can still remind myself that I am not doing it because I am lazy. I am doing it because I am scared. Sometimes that lends enough self-awareness to just close the app. And sometimes it lets me cut myself some slack and have some fun, because it really is.

Maybe something is already on its way to evolving.

Divinatory Meaning

The double colors are the Major Arcana of the Rainbow Squared deck. When a color doubles, it intensifies, becoming both itself and something more. It can reveal a tension within the color, or dissolve the binary entirely.

Orange is the second color of the spectrum, the first true shift where color begins to change. Suspended between Red and Yellow, it carries movement, transition, life force in motion.

In Orange Orange, creation and destruction are not opposites but twins. They feed each other, often impossible to separate. Eros and Thanatos, braided together.

Orange represents the creative impulse: not only artistic, but the force by which you shape a life. What are you building, moment by moment? What is trying to move through you? Where are you letting that movement flow, and where are you holding it back?

Transformation rarely arrives out of nowhere. What has been building quietly and repetitively reaches a point where it can no longer remain as it is. Change may appear sudden, even violent, but it is almost always the result of long accumulation.

What are you in the process of building? What has been accumulating all along? What might you be afraid to let change? Are you feeding what you want to grow, or keeping something small?

Orange Orange is also a card of proliferation, growth that multiplies: flowers, fungi, cells, memes, data, waste, resentment. Proliferation creates piles, those strange forms of abundance and excess, accumulation and collapse. The more you have of something, the less it means. A pile’s dark magic makes it less than the sum of its parts. Or, under the right conditions, something else entirely: compost heats, breaks down, and becomes soil.

Sometimes transformation requires breakdown. The caterpillar dissolves before it can form again. The phoenix rises from what has already burned. Creation becomes destruction becomes creation again.

Orange Orange carries heat, fire. Rage, desire, sex, anxiety, all forces that do not wait for permission. They arrive as urgency, as compulsion, sometimes as eruption. This is the strange fire of Orange Orange: the slow accumulation that becomes sudden transformation. The spark that becomes a blaze. The flopping fish that becomes a dragon.

This card is also the ninth. Nine has a peculiar property: it dissolves back into the whole. Add it to other numbers and it disappears, leaving what was already there. Nine doesn’t add; it reveals.

In Tarot, the ninth card is The Hermit, the figure who steps away from the overwhelm to see clearly. Solitude here is not absence or loneliness, but perspective. A necessary distance from the pile.

When you step back, can you see what is accumulating? What is revealed when you stop trying to manage every piece? Orange Orange asks you to notice what is building, what is burning, and what is ready to change.

Story

What’s the oldest thing in your freezer? The bottom drawer of mine has chunks from two different placentas, many bags of breast milk, a few tabs of acid, and an old intrauterine device—an IUD.

I consumed most of the placentas when they were still fresh. I held on to the remaining material in hopes of one day planting it under a tree at our forever home, which hasn’t materialized yet. The breast milk is long past viable but hard earned, so I’m keeping it to plant under the future tree along with the placentas. The acid is still in there because, well, you never know.

The IUD is the one item that the freezer isn’t actually preserving. I guess I just didn’t know what else to do with it. When I got it taken out I knew I wanted to keep it (for Art of course). The nice midwife who removed it put it in a specimen jar, the kind they use to collect urine samples. Life was busy with a toddler so I must have gotten home and just chucked it in the freezer thinking I would deal with it later. When we moved houses I tossed it in a cooler with the rest of the stuff in the freezer.

When it came time to start working on Orange Red I instantly knew this piece would involve IUDs. But for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to open the freezer to actually look at the IUD before I started writing. Not unlike the IUD I have in my uterus right now, which I trust is there but can’t look at either. I kept adding “IUD photoshoot” to my to-do list and finding reasons to put it off.

That was until I found myself elbow deep in pumpkins.

That IUD made way for my second kid. He’s now in first grade. The week of Halloween, his class was doing a project called “Pumpkin Math” where they measured pumpkins, noting their circumference and weight, and counting the seeds. The teacher asked for parent volunteers but I wasn’t able to make it to the classroom that particular Wednesday morning. I felt a little bad about it. I made sure to donate a pumpkin and signed up to roast all the pumpkin seeds at home so the kids could eat them. That day his teacher handed me a plastic baggie with over 2,000 seeds! I set them out to dry on a couple baking trays, thinking I’d roast the seeds once they had released all their moisture in a day or two.

Then it was Halloween. Our street closed off car traffic for the second year in a row so there was a block party right in front of our house, people streaming in and out for hours. The seeds weren’t dry enough to roast yet so I stacked the trays out of the way and promptly forgot about them until the next night around midnight, when I came home from performing in a burlesque show as a sequin-covered pickle and saw the seeds sitting on top of the washing machine. They smelled a little funky. Looking closer a few had new black spots, tiny but undeniable.

I did not want to be responsible for ruining Pumpkin Math, but neither did I want to be responsible for poisoning a whole classroom. All 2,000 seeds went into the compost and I went to sleep, questioning my merit as a mother and a community member.

The next morning I decided I would not and could not let down the class. They would get their dang pumpkins seeds.

We still had three fully intact pumpkins on the roof, spared the knife because my daughter had painted them with the letters “B,” “O”,” and “O.” When you’re preparing a pumpkin for a jack o’lantern you have to be pretty thorough, scraping every loose strand of flesh lest it rot before Halloween. If you are carving at a party, the knives and the kids and the piles of pumpkin guts create total chaos. This was the opposite. There was something liberating about scooping seeds in the sunshine alone, peaceful even.

I got into a flow state, saving seed after seed, meditating on how wild it was to be emptying these giant reproductive organs. A little violent, but isn’t any act of food preparation? These beautiful orange cavities were not unlike wombs.

Then it occurred to me: this is where my IUD needs to be photographed.

I quickly finished scraping the seeds and set them aside, practically vibrating with anticipation. I fished the specimen cup out of the freezer, plucked out my IUD, and plopped it into the pumpkin. Orange Red: Pumpkin plus IUD with traces of blood still clinging to the strings seven years later. I guess I was saving it for Art afterall.

After thoroughly washing my hands, I laid out the new seeds on the baking trays again and put them in the oven to dry (why hadn’t thought of that before?). Then I roasted them and they were ready for Monday morning dropoff.

Maybe I imagined it, but when I handed the seeds to the teacher she gave them a little shake and gave me a suspicious look. There were a lot of seeds, but noticeably fewer than she’d given me. I told her that there was a funny story I could tell her later, but then there was never really time and the moment kind of passed.

Hopefully the kids didn’t count the seeds again before eating them.

Before I got pregnant, IUDs scared me. After getting pregnant, I got an IUD placed pretty much as soon as I could. I removed that to have a second kid, then got another put right back in.

Now I think we are done having kids. No, I know we are done having kids. But I am also done with having this thing in my uterus. It’s been great! As someone super sensitive to hormonal birth control, I am so glad and grateful the copper IUD has been an option! But I have never really experienced my post-birth body without one. And while I am not generally conscious of it all the time, my IUD is potentially the culprit for all sorts of discomforts I experience somewhat regularly, from cramps to infections. Those side effects are preferable to the side effect of unintentionally creating a human. I would totally continue to put up with them or any other method of birth control if there wasn’t another better way: vasectomy.

I’ve been prevailing on my partner to get this procedure for months, for years now. If we know we are done having kids, why not just have an outpatient procedure and move on? Why not stop sperm at the source instead of continually messing with my body in one way or another? Isn’t it his turn to take on the burden of family size management, one with practically zero side effects after recovery? Well, yes. And now he finally has an appointment. A date on the calendar. I should rejoice.

So why am I scared?

Getting an IUD says “not now.” Though technically reversible, getting a vasectomy says “not ever again.” It’s not so much the outcome as the act of declaration that’s frightening. It’s a big gesture to declare this chapter of our lives over. Of course, no form of birth control is perfectly successful, so who knows what could happen from here, but looking at each other and saying “we’re done” is exerting control over the long term arc of our lives.

It’s also scary because I am asking him to do it. What if something goes wrong? Would it be My Fault? But what about all the risk I’ve put my own body through to create this family in the first place?

And it’s not like the bodily risk ends for me. While I might experience a new kind of bodily freedom without an IUD, I would also be newly vulnerable to pregnancy again. In a political climate where some people want to restrict access to IUDs, it seems like a strange time to get it removed.

But I have to go with my gut here, which is that it is time to move on. I don’t need a precise answer for why I need it out.. Wanting it out is enough.

By the way, the IUD is back in the bottom of the freezer in that specimen cup, pumpkin guts coating the strings along with that old blood. Orange Red. Maybe I’ll take it out of the freezer again once I get this one removed and make a pair of earrings. Or maybe they’ll both live in the bottom of my freezer indefinitely.

Divinatory Meaning

Orange Red is Creation and the Body, Creation and Life. Creative Control. What you choose to create and what you choose not to create. While it can be about the creation of bodies, Orange Red also points to the start of any creative act: you need a body in order to create.

Orange Red is about establishing creative conditions: making the commitment, setting the routine, and showing up. While you can initiate the process, the result is not entirely up to you. Metaphorically or literally, the egg fertilizes or not, the zygote implants or not. At some point it’s a collaboration with forces outside of yourself. So while Orange Red is about Creative Control, it is also Surrender, making a choice and surrendering to the outcome.

The difficulty of making a decision comes from fear of relinquishing control and fear of exerting control. In the time when you are weighing a decision, everything feels like it is still possible. In fact, it’s more like suspended animation: nothing can move forward until you make that choice. All of the doors are still closed. Once you make that decision, some doors may lock, but others will actually open.

Red is life, survival, blood. The IUD in this image is made with copper, a metal as well as a color you could describe as orange red. That IUD’s job is to assure that blood keeps flowing, that the uterus it’s in doesn’t become host to a fetus. If Orange Red shows up in a reading, you may ask: where are you stagnating? Where do you need to release, maybe even energetically menstruate so you can begin creating conditions for your new dream?

Orange Red can also point to physical solutions. Rather than just an intellectual, emotional, or energetic shift, Orange Red calls for tangible adjustments, acted on decisively. These solutions can be quite practical but you may need to get creative to see them, dispensing with guilt or fear to find a way you may not have seen before. Orange Red can also help delineate what is yours to do and what isn’t yours to do, either stepping up to take responsibility or handing burdens that aren’t yours to their rightful owner.

You can think of Rainbow Squared as having seven cycles of seven. Orange Red is the first piece in the Orange cycle, but coming right after the end of the first cycle it’s like a bonus piece in the Red cycle. This is the only piece in the system where the color “bleeds” over from the last piece of one cycle into the first piece of the next first cycle. You can think of this as the Body exerting its importance, saying “I’m still here.” If you are neglecting your body in some way, now is a good time to pay attention to it.

Story

Last Winter when it was wet outside the ants came inside, like they do every year. This time they clustered in three colonies: the bathtub, the car, and a succulent.

The succulent came first. For months my daughter had been tending a string-of-pearls in a tiny ceramic planter shaped like a hedgehog that she had convinced me to let her buy at the grocery store. We kept noticing little clumps of dirt falling out around it, until one day we saw the trail: ants streaming back and forth from the floorboards up the wall and into the planter. A closer look revealed almost no soil left at all in that hedgehog, mostly a writhing mass of ants.

Acting on instinct, I submerged the whole planter in a big bowl filled with water. The ants clamored up the vines of the succulent to the surface of the water only to find nowhere to go. Then something else started floating up, little white blobs that looked like those perlite specks that come in potting soil. We watched the ants frantically rolling them together into bigger balls. Oh my god, those balls are their eggs. The ants were trying to save their young. They struggled busily for almost an hour before succumbing to the water.

Drowning an entire ant colony was at first empowering, then fascinating, then awful. Have you ever watched ants work together, marveling at how they coordinate, how they all seem to know exactly what to do? Now imagine that same synchronized labor as a frantic, slow-motion attempt to avert their fate, all while you watch their tiny civilization collapse from above like a merciless god, or some kind of cruel dictator.

Then came Valentine’s Day. That morning we saw the bathtub ants marching like they do often, finding many entry points along the rim of failing caulk. That day they seemed to be coming in from the drain overflow, so I simply turned on the faucet. Immediately ants began streaming out thicker and faster, escaping the water. Then she appeared, larger than the rest with a huge thorax. The queen.

I squashed her with a square of toilet paper.

It was so quick and easy, like suddenly winning a game of chess I’d been playing for months.

Not an hour later, we found another one. The kids and I were getting in the car for a short hike and when we opened the door the ants seemed more active than usual. I turned around to get something.

“Mom, there is another queen!” D shouted before smashing her.

In all my years of ant mitigation I have never seen one, and this Valentine’s Day there were two. Queens of Hearts.

We drove to Strawberry Canyon buzzing, feeling charmed and triumphant, and only a little guilty. We fantasized about being able to bring food and drinks into the car again without getting swarmed by ants. We were still excited as we hiked. Rains meant the creek was high, tuning us into the small details all around us.

D noticed a ladybug and the three of us squatted to watch it slowly cross our path. Then we noticed another one. And another. Turning our heads we saw a whole swarm of ladybugs, thousands of them huddled in piles next to the trail.

Before I could tell him not to, E started picking up the ladybugs in clumps, letting them teem and drop off his hands. Is that okay to do? It was all so novel that soon D scooped up a handful of ladybugs and I did too. We stood by the side of the trail holding bigger and bigger clumps of ladybugs, shocking ourselves and each other, revelling in the miracle of nature.

Then it struck me. Why hold ladybugs and not ants? This was our third awe-inspiring nature encounter of the morning, and the first that we didn’t respond to with murder. We didn’t let the queen ants crawl all over our hands or any of the other thousands of ants we’d been stomping for years. Is it because ladybugs are somehow cute? Beneficial? Because they are outside?

In Summer we visited New York City. Living in Northern California we had braced ourselves for heat and concrete, so the shaded boulders in Central Park surprised us. Making our way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art we couldn’t help but stop, climbing up and down and running back and forth across the rocks, stopping to examine the lichen. That’s where we noticed it—the most beautiful bug we had ever seen. It was bright red with black squiggles and white spots. I pulled out my phone to identify it, but multiple species names flashed across the screen before settling on nothing. One particularly poetic name stuck in my mind: Spotted Lanternfly. I repeated it to myself a few times so I could confirm it later.

That day we saw nearly every artifact at the museum, immersing ourselves in the talents of mankind while the children mostly complained. Sitting down on the bus afterwards, we remembered the beautiful bug and finally had a chance to look it up. I typed “Spotted Lanternfly” into Google.

That was it, the bug we had seen! This one was apparently in its late nymph stage. Then I read the description.

“If you see a spotted lanternfly, you should kill it on sight.”

Wait, what? WHAT? Why? Why would I kill this beautiful bug? We encountered nature in Manhattan of all places and had somehow messed up by NOT killing it? The kids couldn’t believe it either. “How can it be hurting nature? It is nature!”

Ah, but the spotted lanternfly is an invasive species. Apparently indigenous to China and Vietnam, it has made its way to the United States where it has no natural predators. They prefer to live on another invasive species with a beautiful name, the Tree of Heaven, but unchecked they feed and poop on all sorts of other ornamental plants and crops, destroying them and millions of dollars.

A creature left to its own devices outside of its natural habitat becomes a pest.

Next we visited the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, explaining to the kids how their own ancestors and so many more came through there to the United States in search of a better life. We talked about how essential immigration is to this country, discussed why it’s so dangerous to punish someone just because they aren’t from here.

We saw more spotted lanternflies. Reluctantly, we stomped on them.

Three species seemed like the right number for a bug story: ants, ladybugs, lanternflies. I set myself a deadline of the autumn equinox for my next Rainbow Squared piece, which coincided neatly with a solar eclipse and Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. A week ahead of schedule I finished painstakingly tracing more than a hundred ladybugs and considered myself a success.

That night, tucked in to read James and the Giant Peach (a book about giant bugs), E told us again that his head was itchy. I had checked his scalp a couple of days prior and saw nothing, dismissing the itch as a consequence of the haircut I had just given him. But this time it was unmistakable.

The moment you first spot lice is eerie. After your eyes adjust to the close-up view of hair follicles, you find a dot out of place and think, well, maybe that’s just some kind of fleck. Then the fleck moves.

So you comb every strand with a nit comb, strip all the beds, wash everything that can be washed, and bag up everything that can’t. I may have felt ambivalent about the ants, the ladybugs, and the lanternflies. I was clear about the lice.

You find and destroy them and their eggs, one by one.

Divinatory Meaning

Red is life and body, inhabiting a physical form, as transient as it is. We don’t know what happens after we die but we can be pretty sure it is different from the fleshy, timebound experience of a meat suit.

Black White is the other end of the deal. It is transcendence and interconnectedness. It is spirit, the part of our experience that perhaps transcends the body. The part that might remain after we die, slip into other timelines, rejoin some cosmic oneness, or simply poof, disappear, leaving the meat suit as just that.

Paired together, Red Black White points to being here on Earth, now, in this lifetime. Human. Humans can be considered a keystone species, having an outsized impact on the entire ecosystem. Outsized control, and outsized responsibility.

There is a prayer in the Jewish High Holiday liturgy called Unetaneh Tokef. Its origin story is gory, but the legend tells that it came from the dying words of an 11th-century rabbi on Rosh Hashanah. It also inspired this Leonard Cohen song:

And who by fire, who by water
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial
Who in your merry merry month of May
Who by very slow decay
And who shall I say is calling?

Humans hold the power to decide who lives and who dies. Pest control may be the realm where most people experience this directly, extinguishing lives with our own hands. Does that make us gods?

Bugs can show us how we value certain lives over others. How some are considered precious while others can be discarded in the name of safety. How revenge, even genocide, can be justified as self-defense.

If Red Black White shows up in a reading, think about how you could shift perspective entirely. To a bug, what we see as a flat line may be a walkable surface with a circumference. Where might shifting scale shift your understanding? Look at it in micro like a bug, or pulled out from above in macro like a god.

What is bothering you? A bug in the machine, a bug in the software, something that disrupts your sense of the normal operating procedure. What could you accomplish if you embraced it instead of eradicating it? What you perceive as an invasion may be a message.

Or maybe there is something you secretly relish in being bothered by. What do you get out of harboring that annoyance? Perhaps there is even something that you wish bothered you enough to actually do something about.

Shifting perspective further reveals another truth: we may have godlike powers over bugs now, but they’ll have the last laugh. They were here long before us, they will probably be here after. Remembering your place in the greater whole is also remembering your place in time. Act with humility, curiosity, and care.

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Story

I’ve known I was an artist since I was a kid. I was good enough at drawing that people around me reflected that identity back to me: “Oh, you must be an artist!” Though I now wholeheartedly disagree with that criteria, approval did help something I loved to do also become part of who I was.

So when I found out I was pregnant, I was terrified. I knew that I wanted to be a parent eventually. But “eventually” felt very far away, sort of like death. We all know we’re going to die, right? We just don’t think about it everyday or it would be a bummer. Motherhood was like that for me, an inevitability that might even be kind of pleasant but that I chose not to think about most of the time.

I found out I was pregnant precisely one week before my wedding. After seven days of secret panic, the wedding was glorious, heart-filled, and fun. I partied like I was going to die the next day because—as we already established—I basically thought I would. The morning after the last guests departed, I woke up and puked before even getting out of bed. Then I puked and puked for months. I was miserable. It would have been easier if I knew I didn’t want this. But I did want it, just not now. There was so much more I wanted to do before I became a mother, or that I wanted the freedom to do. I went into deep mourning for the person I thought I wanted to be. I felt trapped in my body, I felt trapped by my body. I felt tricked by my body. 

But somewhere in that prenatal depression, I realized that it wasn’t my body that was tricking me. It was my mind. I simply couldn’t reconcile my identity as artist with this newly forming identity of mother because I had internalized so much programming about what each of those identities meant. If motherhood represented the end of self, and being an artist required selfishness, then I couldn’t possibly be both at the same time. Right? Once I said it out loud to myself, I realized how silly it was.

So I began to just try it on, this idea of parenthood. It felt good, to surrender to what was already happening. But it still didn’t feel quite real. I decided the only way to prove to myself that I could still make art as a mother was, well, to make art as a mother. And not just a piece here or there, but by committing to a daily practice. Not every day forever, but for a period of time, which I determined would be seven cycles of seven days. A compact but significant unit of time. 

And so I made One Tiny Painting a Day, Seven Days a Week for Seven Weeks. 49 different watercolors on 3 inch by 3 inch paper, each a different color depending on the day of the week: red on Mondays, orange on Tuesdays, yellow on Wednesdays, green on Thursdays, blue on Fridays, purple on Saturdays, and black on Sundays. I used watercolors for ease of pulling out at a moment's notice, even filling a tiny pill organizer with water at the beginning of the week and using one slot per day to keep the colors separated. From Week 13 to 21 of my infant’s life, I painted everyday whenever I could: while she was napping, while she lay on the floor next to me, even once or twice while nursing.

I was surprised how much I liked it. I loved not only the time I spent painting but what that time did to the rest of my time. In the soup of postpartum life when time is endless and there also isn’t enough of it, this was my time. I might not be able to schedule that time, but I could find it and claim it, and the claiming itself was the art.

After the 49-day sprint was over, I knew I couldn’t sustain a daily practice once I was back at work. But I also didn’t want to stop. The number 49 roughly lined up to the number of weeks in a year, with a little wiggle room. What if instead of a painting a day, I made a painting a week? And what if instead of using one color, each piece used two colors, one as the foreground and one as the background, each pair determined by a rainbow grid so that no two pieces are the same? And what if I also associated meanings with those colors, much like I had done for the seven blessings at my aforementioned wedding ceremony? And that’s how I came to create and follow the formula you see here: Rainbow Squared. 

Once that year of weekly paintings was over, I realized that I still didn’t want to stop following the Rainbow Squared formula. I started another cycle, switching from painting to stop-motion animation. Then another cycle, and then another, and then another, adding in full essays and incorporating guest artists to boot. This postpartum exercise was now morphing into something else entirely: a spiritual practice, a divination system.

But something else was happening in the background.

Eventually I realized that while this 7x7 formula had emerged for me so naturally, I was not the first to discover it. In fact, following a sequence of 49 pairs in a 7x7 grid was almost exactly the same formula as a Kabbalistic approach to counting the Omer, the 49 days between the Jewish holidays of Passover and Shavuot.

There is more context at that link, but I’ll sum it up here: for Jews, the holiday of Passover commemorates being freed from slavery while the holiday of Shavuot commemorates receiving the Torah after that. The 49-day period between those holidays can be considered the time it took for a people freed in body to become freed enough in spirit to possibly accept divine revelation.

Counting the Omer can be a way to reenact this process of spiritual liberation and healing every year. And that’s where the 7x7 formula comes in. Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) identifies ten sephirot or divine emanations/attributes that make up existence, so to speak. Of those ten, only seven are said to be even somewhat comprehensible to most humans. Noting that the 49 days of counting the Omer line up pretty neatly with seven weeks of seven days each, the Kabbalists took those seven lower sephirot and assigned each one to a week as well as to a day. That way during the Omer, each week has an overarching attribute to consider while each individual day of the week also has its own attribute, cycling in a 7x7 grid to create 49 pairs of spiritual themes. Each day of the Omer is then an opportunity to reflect on how those emanations of divine energy interact in your own life and the world.

If you are still following: my initial 49-day postpartum sprint was precisely the same length of time as the yearly counting of the Omer. My 49-week Rainbow Squared formula enacted the very same process of pairing seven attributes that the Kabbalists used to count the Omer. I had unwittingly intuited a mystical ritual technology and mapped it onto my own life.

Now, I’ve actually at least known about counting the Omer most of my life. I attended a religious elementary/middle school, so between Passover and Shavuot we always recited the number of that day’s Omer count as part of our daily prayer services. However, we never used or even acknowledged the sephirot in our counting, or even talked about sephirot at all. Jewish mysticism was still a subject only to be studied by devout married men over 40, and I pretty much only knew the word “Kabbalah” from people around me being irritated that Madonna was culturally appropriating it (though they didn’t use the term at the time). 

As Kabbalah has found its way back into mainstream Jewish life (thanks Madonna), counting the Omer has also become more popular, even among people who aren’t otherwise religiously observant. So in the hippie Jewish spaces I hang out in, it was really only a matter of time before I heard about this practice and that people began pointing out the similarities to what I was doing.

At first I was actually kind of spooked. What did it MEAN? I honestly ignored this cosmic coincidence as long as I could. Then the opportunity arose to join a cohort of other queer creatives who would each do a project around counting the Omer: A New Gift.

I knew that whatever project I created around counting the Omer, it would need to incorporate color. Though each of my colors had become imbued with so much personal meaning for me over the years of this project, I wanted to approach the sephirot with new curiosity and reverence, separate from “my” colors.

It turns out there is no consensus about which colors to associate with which sephirot. In fact, there isn’t even consensus about the meaning of each of the sephirot. These attributes are hard to translate, and like any Jewish concept, there are many approaches:

1. Chesed - Lovingkindness, Unconditional Love, Grace, Mercy

2. Gevurah - Strength, Judgment, Boundaries

3. Tiferet - Harmony, Balance, Beauty

4. Netzach - Eternity, Endurance, Dedication, Ambition

5. Hod - Splendor, Awe, Humility, Acceptance, Order

6. Yesod - Foundation, Creativity, Bonding, Sexuality

7. Malchut (Shekhinah) - Divine Presence, Physical Reality, Manifestation, Leadership

You can see how associating colors with these concepts could be a pretty subjective process. Rather than try to find individual colors that matched each sephira, I wanted to find a way to think about their colors as a whole system. My strongest criteria was that the colors be in sequential order, like counting the Omer would be. And that’s how I found my way to Reb Zalman.

Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (Z"L) was the founder of the Jewish Renewal movement that began in the 1960s and continues to this day, blending Hasidic teachings, mystical tradition, and contemporary spirituality. Generally, Jewish Renewal promotes a more experiential, inclusive, and creative approach to Judaism. I had always heard great things about Reb Zalman, but when I learned that he was the person behind the rainbow tallit (prayer shawl) that I had seen so many times in my childhood, I finally started to pay attention. He is perhaps the first person to conceive of praying in a tallit that was not simply white with black or blue stripes. Reb Zalman’s rainbow stripes opened the door for people to pray in any color of cloth. Those rainbow stripes also happen to represent the seven days of creation and the seven lower sephirot.

Reb Zalman’s colors go in descending order, starting with Purple and proceeding to Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, Red, and ending with Brown. Brown! Brown is the color I miss most in my own Rainbow Squared system, the one I so often want to swap out for Black White.

For that first year I counted the Omer, I incorporated each week’s color into that week’s Rainbow Squared piece. To make things even more chaotic, this was during Year Five, when I was moving through the color pairs at random. So each piece had three colors: its emergent Rainbow Squared color pair and a third color associated with the sephira for that week. To make things even crazier, every seventh piece was by a collaborator, so one of the color pairs even spanned two weeks and two sephirot. I called that mini-series Rainbow Cubed. It was a lot.

From there, I decided to separate my Omer practice and my Rainbow Squared practice. Or rather, I practice them separately but think of them as unified, each different aspects of my growing spiritual practice. It’s not the specific colors that matter, rather the 7x7 pairing up of colors so that by the end every color has danced and merged with every other color.

After two years of counting the Omer as a largely solitary activity, I then decided to count with my daughter, significantly during her seventh year of life. We made a drawing a day together, using the technique of folding a single sheet of paper so that you get an eight-page booklet. We each created seven of our own tiny zines, or a zine a week, coloring one page a day using Reb Zalman’s colors.

D and I counted and colored together nearly everyday. A couple days when I wasn’t home, she even colored by herself. It felt important for us to each work on our own drawings. They certainly influenced each other, and I would sometimes try to wait to start drawing until after she started so that she wouldn’t copy me. And sometimes I would copy her!

D loved this process of daily ritual drawing so much that she wanted to make a presentation about it at school to her first grade class. At first I actually tried to discourage her. It’s hard enough for me to explain our made-up Jewish art ritual project in writing. How would she explain it out loud to first graders, giving them a cogent summary of the Omer, or Passover, or Shavuot? But despite my gentle suggestions to the contrary, still-six-year-old D insisted on making that presentation. She stood up in front of her class and spoke for twenty whole minutes. I don’t know how much her classmates understood, but I also don’t know how much she cared.

Just like my own Rainbow Squared project affirmed for me that I was my own person, separate from her, this Omer Project affirmed that she is her own person, separate from me. And we are unified in this, defined by our relationship to each other. 

The magic doesn’t stop there though.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but D was actually born during the Omer. She was born on a new moon, at the very end of the Hebrew month of Iyar, not long before Shavuot. The Hebrew Calendar is a lunisolar calendar, meaning that each month begins with the crescent new moon and then every few years there is a leap month to be sure that the seasons of the holidays stay roughly the same, particularly so that Passover always falls during the Spring. This means that while the dates of Jewish holidays fluctuate on the Gregorian calendar, they always have the same dates on the Hebrew calendar, and so the forty-nine days between Passover and Shavuot also always have the same Hebrew dates. If you were born between Passover and Shavuot, your Hebrew birthday is always on the same day of the Omer.  

As we filled our Omer books last year, D and I started to anticipate what day of the Omer and what color combination her Hebrew birthday might fall on. Maybe something she thought was pretty like Green Blue?

As we got closer to the actual date, we figured out that her birthday would be on the 42nd day of the Omer. This is the seventh day of the fifth week: Red Brown. Oof. She was crushed to learn this. 

But then something nagged me about the 42nd day of the Omer. I thought I had learned something special about it, what was it? Then I finally remembered.

In the story of Noah and the Flood, the Torah says that the Earth was finally completely dry “in the second month, on the 27th day of the month.” That day God cast a rainbow into the sky as a covenant never to destroy all life on earth by flood ever again. You may know that the Jewish New Year is celebrated in the fall at Rosh Hashanah, but you may not know that that is actually in the ninth month (yes, that is confusing) (what here isn’t confusing?). The first month of the Biblical Hebrew calendar is in the Spring with Passover, which means the second month falls during the Omer. My daughter, the being whose becoming inspired this very project, was born on something called Rainbow Day.

I’m not sure if anyone else can follow this esoteric color calendar math, but that feels pretty cosmic to me.

This story has been so hard to wrap up in a single card. Somehow Red Purple came to contain the whole of this project as it continues to unfold. Like Red to Purple, the two ends of the spectrum. And something else magical happens with Red and Purple between my system and Reb Zalman’s system.

See, my system (R2) and his system (RZ) both start with the six main colors of the rainbow (sorry, Indigo) and end with a seventh, non-rainbow color: Black/White for me, or Brown for him. So that means that the R2 colors pair up with the RZ colors so that Red = Purple, Orange = Blue, and Yellow = Green. The sixth piece in a Rainbow Squared series using my color formula is Red Purple, and Day Six of the Omer using Reb Zalman’s colors is Red within Purple, or what I call Purple Red. That day is today: Piece Six of Series Six on Day Six.

I am coloring Omer books with my kids for the second year now, a creative ritual that feels like our own yet connected to so much history. It is both a very simple act and suffused with so many more layers of meaning than they know, be it my own personal history or the atrocities unfolding in the part of the world where all of this originated.

When we color these books at the end of the day, it’s about uniting our bodies and minds in an activity together. Being as weird as we want to be, as we are blessed to be, and as full. We are integrating body and mind through ritual practice, iteration after iteration, generation to generation.

Divinatory Meaning

Red is the first color in the visible spectrum, while Purple is the last. Taken together they signify a kind of totality, an Alpha and Omega, an Everythingness. A microcosm of a whole system. 

At first glance Rainbow Squared seems to be a system of binaries. In actuality, methodically pairing these seven elements so that each dances with the other is quite maximalist. Taken together, the 49 pairs constitute a whole, a multiplicity, a way to describe a profound oneness. The technology of the 7x7 grid breaks down a larger complex whole into every permutation of relationship, a cosmic queerness. A process like Rainbow Squared or even counting the Omer is about integration, helping you to feel like every part of you belongs, every part of existence belongs. Even the parts you don’t like, the parts you don’t want to deal with, the parts you’d rather forget or have made yourself forget.

At its simplest but certainly not its easiest, Red Purple is the connection and integration between the body and the mind: the self.

Red is a primary color. Purple is a secondary color, made of Red and Blue. This means that mixing the Red of the body and Blue of communication gets you the Purple of mind, of self. Learning how to communicate as your body and with your body is essential to your selfhood.

On a personal level, if you are feeling scared or stuck or like something just isn’t working, is there any sort of practice or ritual that could help you recalibrate and even get free? It can be as rigorous as committing to a 49-day sprint or as simple as remembering to breathe.

On a collective level, well, we need spiritual liberation now more than ever. Red Purple is also about our bodies and our identities, stories passed down through generations. Traumatized people traumatize people, and cycles of violence are just that: cycles.

It is a gift to be part of such a beautiful and long tradition of maintaining annual cycles. May the wisdom of our and your ancestors guide us in upholding the cycles that make us who we are, to break the cycles that no longer serve us or that never did. True liberation never comes at the expense of anyone else’s.

Story

In the middle of the night I heard a loud thud and then crying. I got up and made it as far as the bathroom where I found my three-year-old, E, coming to get me. 

“I fell out of the bed and I hurt myself and a dog was eating Mickey Cat,” he sobbed.

Mickey Cat is the name E gave to a pink cat he found at the bottom of our bin of stuffed animals, forgotten long ago by his older sister, D. I had always thought it looked goofy, even a bit shoddy, but E was instantly smitten. Now Mickey Cat has driven tow trucks, lived in the time of dinosaurs, gotten COVID no less than five times, and is best friends with another stuffed cat that E named Stabilizer. While E has slept every night since babyhood with Bunny and Elephant, it is Mickey Cat who is the star of his stories.

“A dog was eating Mickey Cat? It sounds like you had a bad dream,” I said. I sat on the side of the tub and held E as he told me more. E was outside D’s elementary school and a long brown dog came up and started chewing on Mickey Cat before he could yank her away. As he told the story, E started to calm down, and I got him to sit on the toilet. Then D overheard what was going on and joined us in the bathroom, wanting to help. 

“Dreams can be scary,” she said, reaching for a tone more mature than her almost-seven years. “You know, one time I dreamt that Dad died! It made me feel better to go into his bedroom and see him alive. Maybe you need to see Mickey Cat right now?”

E immediately started to sob again. Dad was out of town, and who knows where Mickey Cat could have been in the pitch black of 3:45AM. 

After much reassurance, I finally managed to get both kids back into bed and crawled in between them. The kids share a queen-size bed by sleeping width-wise, so there is plenty of room for parents to cuddle as long as they bend their knees. Everyone was still riled up, so I suggested we sing. They asked for The Angel Song. 

I didn’t grow up hearing much about angels participating in my daily life, besides my aunt telling me that thunder was only the angels going bowling. I’m sure I encountered The Angel Song at some point, but it wasn’t until I reheard it recently that it stuck. I’m a sucker for a good Hebrew sing-along, and this text is technically a prayer from the Bedtime Shema, so I inserted the song into my nighttime rotation with the kids. I didn’t really consciously consider that this would introduce them to the concept of angels: 

Beshem HaShem, 
Elohei Yisrael:
mi’yimini Michael 
u’mi’smoli Gavriel
u’mi’lefanai Uriel 
u’me’achorai Rafael
ve’al roshi, ve’al roshi Shechinat El

Here’s the English translation (or how I translate it anyway):

In the name of The Name, 
Divine of those who wrestle with the Divine:
May the angel Michael be at my right,
and the angel Gabriel be at my left;
and in front of me the angel Uriel,
and behind me the angel Raphael,
and above my head Divine Presence.

A song that I love in Hebrew feels really, well, specific in English. I understand a decent amount of Hebrew and can cobble enough together for a basic conversation. Still, since I’ve mostly encountered it in prayer settings, hearing Hebrew switches my brain into spiritual mode. I don’t understand just enough Hebrew so that it is easy for me to abstract the words from what they actually mean into how they make me feel, especially in song.

I’ve translated The Angel Song to my kids before, so it’s not a secret to them. I like the idea of intentionally conjuring divine presence in each direction, so I wanted to be sure they understood the physical mechanics of the song. But I wasn’t very specific about who or what angels might actually be, or these angels in particular.

Usually we just sing the song and leave it at that, but that night D and E wanted to talk. They asked me if angels were real, and then before I could answer they started telling me about all the angels they know. E said that Mickey Cat is half angel, half cat. D whispered to me that she talks to angels and even has an angel’s phone number. I listened to all of this without adding detail to their interpretations. What could I say about their own experiences that they wouldn’t know better than me? Eventually I somehow extracted myself from the room and they both went back to sleep in peace.

Then a couple weeks later, in the middle of the night, D swung open our bedroom door and declared: “I had a nightmare.” I invited her to climb into bed between Justin and I and to tell us what happened.

She said she was at her school in the hallway outside the cafeteria and a robber was there. She screamed: “Everybody run! There’s a ROBBER!” He reached out and grabbed her hand but she pulled it away. She had looked in the robber’s pocket, and she saw he had a gun. My brother’s girlfriend was there and got her out of the school. 

I could sort of laugh off the Mickey Cat dream. I couldn’t laugh off this dream. I held D close, comforting her, comforting myself. I asked her if she wanted to sing together and she asked for The Angel Song. She sang every word along with me in Hebrew, and then the whole thing over again in “yai dai dai dai”s at the end. 

It occurred to me then that this is why we have angels. Protection surrogates, beings we imagine from the spiritual realm to intercede in our fate. I wanted so badly to tell D that angels would protect her at school, maybe even that someone or something called God would protect her.

But I was suddenly self-conscious, lying there with D and my partner. I realized that for the most part I had sung The Angel Song without him in the room. I knew that as a non-Jewish “militant agnostic” he would become pretty wiggly if I started making promises to the kids about God. Even I feel wiggly making promises about God, especially using that language. Though we celebrate most Jewish holidays, we don’t frame our spirituality in terms of deference to any one being or entity, except perhaps oneness itself. Oneness wouldn’t protect her if a “robber” came to her school. But maybe Something Else could. Is there Something Else? Is that Something Else what other people call God, or is it another part of the Oneness? If we can’t know for sure, then why not pretend? If we tell our kids about the Tooth Fairy and even leave some ambiguity about Santa Claus, then why wouldn’t we tell them about angels?

When D and E were each six months old, we introduced lovies: small stuffed animals attached to tiny blankets that they could keep in their crib and use to soothe themselves back to sleep in the middle of the night. We replaced our own familiar touch and smell with those of polyester animal-shaped objects that over time would take on their own familiar touch and smell. Lovies or stuffies or whatever you want to call them are there to comfort kids when we’re not in the room, so that we don’t need to come into the room. If a lovie is a comfort surrogate, maybe an angel is a protection surrogate. A tool we introduce once kids are old enough to pretend, once touch and smell aren’t enough to feel safe.

I brought up D’s dream in a class I am taking on Jewish Dream Work with the co-founder of Kohenet, Rabbi Jill Hammer. She told me that perhaps in dreams, kids can share some of the fears that are too scary to bring up with adults otherwise. The dream makes the feeling concrete, gives them something we can look at and talk about and address together.

In that way, is an angel not unlike a dream itself? An image we use to make a feeling concrete? When you experience an inexplicable sense of protection and support in the midst of crisis, why not attribute that to an angel? Not that the idea of angels doesn’t point to potentially real entities. Who can say? It’s easy to get hung up on a specific notion of “angel” and then dismiss the idea altogether when any physical description of a non-corporeal being is a kind of spiritual cosplay. If there are beings that exist on a different plane and affect life on this plane, I don’t think they would have wings and wear robes except inside the minds of humans.

Throughout history, Jews as well as people across cultures have imagined and continued to imagine “angels” and beings like them in different ways. The angel who gave D her phone number? Apparently she is a pink bunny named Rosie who can change color and has a different name for each color so really she’s only named Rosie when she’s pink. Is that idea so different from that of the fierce cherubim with wingspans twenty cubits long that were to be fashioned in gold guarding the Temple’s Holy of Holies detailed in the instructions in the Bible? A color-changing bunny is certainly not so different from the chubby winged babies that we associate with cherubs today.

The imagined is not always imaginary. What we experience in dreams is real even if it isn’t true. Or perhaps dreams are true even if they aren’t real. “Real,” “true,” words are a form of pretend too. Maybe that’s why I always come back to song as a source of comfort. Singing together creates a space in time where we can feel, even if we can’t know.

Divinatory Meaning

Red Blue is Body and Communication. From the moment we are born, we learn to use our voice as a means of survival, crying to receive care and connection. The constant feedback of the umbilical cord is replaced by our own vocal cords, a phenomenon known as the acoustic umbilical cord. Crying out to be heard and then being listened to builds the fundamental trust that ultimately allows us to communicate. 

What care are you crying out for? Who or what are you crying to? Who or what is listening? 

Are your feelings coming out as unspecified cries, or are you able to know and articulate what is going on for you in the moment? For example, is your anger coming out as shouting at those around you, or are you stifling your emotions in order to please others? Red Blue can invite you to look at your communication patterns and examine how you are getting your needs met. 

What are some of your fundamental stories? Do they need updating? Pay attention to what you say to yourself, especially if it’s harsher than how you might talk to anyone else. Pay attention to how your body is talking to you, and how you are responding.

If Red Blue comes up in a reading, it may also be a good time to pay attention to your imagination. Dreaming is one way that our body tells stories, conjuring pretend scenarios to run through real feelings. Kids of a certain age are able to sustain hours of pretend. Though we call it play, it is serious work that becomes harder to do the older you get. Whether it’s from your subconscious or a flow state, you may be surprised by the images that emerge from being fully present.

Story

I signed up for a New Year Tarot Reading with artist Wren McMurdo Brignac, prolific creator of two different divination decks and currently working on a third.

Over video, I told Wren that I was working on my own divination system, but that I was hung up on how frivolous that sounded. That even after years of squeezing in this project alongside everything else, even after knowing fully that this is what lights me up, that I continually took on other work I didn’t strictly need to avoid the guilt of actually being in a financial position to do what I love. That even as I actively work toward wealth redistribution, choosing to spend a significant amount of my time on art would mean consciously choosing to benefit from an unjust system in more ways than I already do. 

After an illuminating reading, Wren sent me a spell in the mail, written in red ink. It was a Money Deserving Spell. She told me to decorate a stiff headband with real money and to meditate while wearing it for eight minutes a day for eight days. “Imagine the universe conspiring with your soul to set you free as an artist and healer through art.” She also told me to set up an automatic payment plan, preferably to a local indigenous organization.

I knew immediately where to find a headband: one was lying on the floor in the detritus of my kids’ toys. Even the money came without looking for it: at a store that week, my daughter begged me for a $7.99 cartoon cat coloring book, and after I bought it for her she paid me back in exactly eight one-dollar bills. I wove all 8 of them around the headband, securing them only with red thread. Once I put it on, the dollar bills formed something like an upside-down basket or a paper tiara. 

I started my eight days of meditation on February 24th, the day after I completed Red Yellow and also my half-birthday. I’ve been contributing to the Sogorea Te' Land Trust for years, but finally signed up to give Shuumi: a monthly 1% of my rent towards descendants of the Ohlone peoples displaced from the land I live on. 

And then?

And then I tried to write about Red Green.

Green isn’t always about money, but I knew this time it was. Would I really have to write about my relationship to money? And share it? Yes, that is the nature of this project and its magic. 

So I avoided writing. I threw myself into creating the image for the card instead, spending hours (and hours!) pushing tiny leaves around Photoshop. It was nearly a month before I had a written draft, and then I just let it sit (and sit). This year I had initially set out to create a piece a week, and I watched those weeks pass by. But now here I am, admitting publicly that I am a witchy weirdo born with access to some wealth I don’t feel I deserve but want to do something with and do something about. 

It’s not like my class privilege is a secret, and it’s not even the first time I’ve written about it. Still, talking about money always feels vulnerable, and by design. That’s how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer while being either lauded for their own ingenuity or blamed for their own poverty. When we don’t talk about money we don’t see how unequally and unfairly it’s distributed, and we certainly can’t band together across class lines to change that.

I don’t know if I feel that I “deserve” money anymore now than before performing this spell. I don’t know if I feel that anyone “deserves” money, really.  That wasn’t quite the point though. A ritual act is a gesture of commitment, not necessarily the thing itself. It’s choosing a new way of perceiving.

What I do know now is this: not doing what I love helps no one, but some important work lies in not only doing what I love, or at least not only doing what I think I’ll enjoy. 

Reckoning with what wealth truly means in an unjust society is embarrassing and painful. It would be easier in many ways to just try to personally enjoy its privileges and leave it at that. But that doesn’t feel good either. Hiding the truth doesn’t build the world I actually want to live in, nor does it generate good art. Changing my orientation to systems of oppression starts with being honest. It starts with telling actual stories from my own life. Even if it’s about that time I meditated with money on my head.

Divinatory Meaning

Have you ever looked at a dollar bill before? I mean really looked at it? Among the elaborate anti-counterfeit curlicues and repeating serial numbers, there is one design element that distinguishes the dollar bill from the rest of United States currency: leaves. Leaves framing the presidential portrait, leaves sprouting around the “1”s in the corners. 

In Spanish, a “sheet of paper” is an “hoja de papel,” and “hoja” means “leaf.” The leaves on the dollar bill symbolize the paper bills themselves: growing, spreading, circulating, piling. 

Money itself is a symbol, after all. Some of the first “greenbacks” were created to finance the Civil War, when the Union chose to print unbacked paper money rather than go into debt to foreign creditors. So this green money is itself a representation of a belief in money, a belief in symbolic energy exchange.

If Green shows up in a reading, it isn’t always about money. But paired with Red for Survival, Red Green can be about resources and livelihood: what you do for money, what you do to put bread on the table, what you do to earn the means to survive. 

Green is primarily about another kind of energy exchange: love. What if doing what you love put bread on the table? What if bread on the table was independent of what you did? If everyone had what they needed, might that create space for every act to be done in love? 

Dollar bills point to another kind of transaction: the hand-to-hand transactions that happen on the scale of everyday life, like a cookie from a kid at a bake sale or a placing a bill in someone’s empty cup. As money like so many things becomes increasingly digital, exchanging physical money is a direct connection. Who could benefit from direct attention and care in your own community right now? What can you choose to share rather than to hoard? Red Green is a reminder to slash through the abstractions and stories that distract us from tending to what’s actually happening right now.

Red and Green are complementary colors, one of the powerful pairs that between them contain all the primary colors: in this case, Red and Blue + Yellow. These are the colors needed to mix any other, the necessary ingredients to depict life on earth. All three mixed together make the color of earth, brown, the color to which everything returns and the rich soil from which everything grows. What soil are you growing in? What in it is composting and what is simply rotting?

Story

After three and a half years, we finally gave E his first haircut.

That’s just about three and a half years after we gave his sister D her first haircut. We knew we wanted to wait until after she turned three, and finally got around to it after our extended family had a bout with head lice. After diligently pulling a fine-toothed nit comb through her uncut locks just days before I gave birth, I was very ready to see her hair go. We visited our dear friend who happens to be a retired hairdresser and D started her first day of preschool with a sophisticated bob.

We waited to cut their hair mostly out of reverent curiosity: let’s see what these new creatures grow out of their heads! But we were also inspired by a Jewish tradition. Admittedly, it’s a tradition practiced almost exclusively by ultra-Orthodox Jews, who at three years old cut all of a boy’s hair except the payes (dangly sidelocks) at a ceremony called an Upsherin. The timing comes from a law in the Torah that forbids harvesting fruit from a tree until it is at least three years old. While I didn’t follow other laws in the Torah dictating ritual cutting of boys, I’m moved by any observance that honors my child as a tree, regardless of gender. 

Though perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise, the first haircut was a bigger deal for E. But we’ve moved past gender with regards to hair length, haven’t we? My cismale partner has long hair and I have short hair. I actually relished that E was constantly misgendered at the playground. Especially because we use gendered pronouns with the kids, other people calling him “she” felt like a nice reinforcement that gender is a construct. Keeping it long felt like a gesture of freedom for E’s body to do what it wanted to do and for E to be whoever E is.

But E’s hair was a bigger deal than D’s mostly because he had so much more of it. While she was born basically bald, he was born with a full head of hair, red hair that eventually turned the yellow that it is now. By the time he turned three, his head was like a flowing golden fountain of hair. When his third birthday rolled around, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to cut it.

Though his hair was beautiful, it was a pain in the ass to maintain. By the time he was going to school we had to physically restrain him for daily brushing and braiding, which he hated and told us so. We couldn’t just let it go free either. Once we experimentally let him go to school with his hair down and at the end of the day, the teacher ever so politely requested that we not do that ever again. He is constantly drooling, and hair falling in his face turns into a wet tangled mess. E has so much to say, so much to do, so much zest that he didn’t need all that hair to fully express who he was. The hair that had been a symbol of his freedom had finally become a burden, and it was time for his parents to let go. 

If it wasn’t his birthday I knew we needed some other kind of milestone. Magically, this year his half-birthday lined up with the Jewish birthday of the trees: Tu B’Shvat. Why is there a Jewish birthday for trees? Well, if you can’t harvest from a tree until it is three years old, it’s handy to have one date when all the trees turn a year older to keep better track of when it’s okay to harvest. It would also be a year to the day that my grandfather passed away. So for the weekend he turned three and a half, we lined up a visit to the same friend who had cut D’s hair for the first time. Appropriate for the significance of the occasion, she is married to the person who officiated our wedding. We emotionally readied ourselves for the coming transition.

The days before the haircut I turned into a one-person photo studio, following E around taking pictures of his hair: flowing around him in the bathtub, while he lay in his favorite spot on top of the heat vent, while he stood there looking like my baby. When we cut D’s hair, we also had a newborn. We were ready for her to be a big kid. Even though he still occasionally poops his pants, E’s hair felt like the last vestige of his babyhood. Cutting it would be a transition not only for him but for all of us. No more baby trees in this orchard, just mature stock.

The day of the cut, we borrowed a high chair to keep E relatively still. We sat E in it, then our friend draped a professional haircutting cape on him and started combing his hair. Suddenly, I felt panicked for ritual. “Wait!” I shouted. “I want to save his hair in a braid, let’s braid it!” Okay. She started to braid. 

“Wait! Remember how we had D stand against that green wall for a Before and After picture? Let’s get E down and take a Before picture too!” Okay, take out the braid, take him out of the chair, take a picture. Put him back in the high chair, braid his hair again, take out the scissors. 

“Wait! Maybe one of his parents should take the first cut!” I had cut both of the umbilical cords, so Justin insisted that he cut the braid. And suddenly it was happening, no bracha or blessing, just me holding up my phone to video Justin cutting and cutting until he was practically sawing while E wiggled in the chair. 

Then the braid was off. E turned around to look at it with half a second of shock immediately replaced by a huge grin. The cut from where the braid had been was definitely shorter than we had anticipated, but our friend is an artist so she made it work. She gave him a proper haircut, and underneath it was E. Whatever rites we did or didn’t perform, the cutting was its own ritual, taking him from a past to a present version of himself. There he was: independent, free. 

Divinatory Meaning

Body Power. The power in your body, the power of having a body. Your body not only belongs to you, your body is you. What you do with your body is your choice.

As the first color cycle of Rainbow Squared, Red can also relate to youth and primary experiences. As the first instance of Yellow, Red Yellow can be an initial claiming of Power, stepping up to be embodied as your full self. How are you still becoming your own person? How can you honor your inner child and its freedom? How can you honor the inner children of those around you, or even actual children? 

A braid can represent the uniting of past, present, and future, combining in your physical body as the braided strands in your cells, your DNA. How does your body connect you to those who came before you? Even if you don’t know anything about your many ancestors, you are braided to them just by being alive in your body. 

How might ritual honor or heal your connection to the bodies that created the bodies that created you? Perhaps you even have access to ancestral practices around braiding or weaving. Making challah, a braided bread for Shabbat, is one example of a Jewish ancestral practice. Even if it's something your parents or those who raised you never claimed, might there be a tradition you can embody as your own? What practices do you find yourself drawn to without quite knowing why? 

If this card appears in a reading, ask yourself: how are you honoring your body’s power? How are you ignoring or suppressing it? Do you or your dominant culture have beliefs about your body that sap that power? What physical actions can you take to honor bodily autonomy for you and the communities around you?

Story

My phone buzzed with a message: a picture of my friend’s computer. At first it just looked like some article she was reading. Then I zoomed in to a line at the bottom of her screen: “Original art by Ilyse Magy.” Ha! What was my friend doing in the deep archives of the The Rumpus? 

Fourteen years ago, fresh to San Francisco and fresh out of Art School, another friend of mine was starting a column in a new online literary magazine and asked me if I wanted to illustrate for it. I tried to tell her that I had majored in Sculpture, but that nuance didn’t seem to register. Artists make pictures, right? And so I made pictures for her Funny Women column for a while, putting the “free” in “freelance” along with myriad other odd jobs. How funny that it’s all still there on the internet!

Then the phone rang. This time it was my mom.

“We need to talk about something,” she said.

“Okay, what’s going on?” I asked, genuinely unsure of what possible range of topics this could be about.

“We need to talk about your nap blanket.” 

For most people “nap blanket” would refer to a certain kind of childhood keepsake. In this case, she was referring to a giant blanket I had constructed to host a Collective Nap under the St. Louis Arch, inviting participants to redream the American Dream under the symbol of Manifest Destiny. 

“I have a moth infestation. They’ve already eaten clear through some rugs, and they are eating your blanket too. It might finally be time to get rid of it,” she said. I had stitched the blanket together from about other blankets that I got on the cheap from Missouri State Surplus, including a couple 100% wool army-issued blankets: moth food. Fully unrolled, the blanket is seven feet tall and about sixty feet across. I made it in 2008, long enough ago for my parents to divorce in the meantime. It sat first in my parents’ basement and then what became my dad’s basement and then moved to my mom’s basement. 

The question of what to do with this blanket is one that comes up every few years. I always demure. I mean, they have the space, so it’s not really in the way. Besides, my other siblings have plenty of other crap they haven’t even sorted sitting in that basement. Why throw this away? Maybe I’ll need it one day for something, like maybe a Retrospective. Will I ever have one of those? 

My mom told me that she managed to get the blanket onto her freezing cold Michigan porch where it’s possible the moths will die on their own. I told her that it is just stuff, and not to injure herself trying to save it, though thank you for caring and thank you for telling me. We talked about moth damage for a while more and hung up.

I sat back at my desk thinking about my old art. How wild that I would get pinged at the same time about two very different past projects. How wild that my friend would resurface my old illustrations right when I was starting another illustration project all these years later. I thought I wasn’t good at drawing then, what about now? I wondered if the illustrations were as bad as I remembered them being. I decided to look them up.

Searching “ilyse magy” on therumpus.net, I saw plenty of articles with my name on them. But when I clicked, not a single one had an image with it, just my byline. The images must have gotten detached one or two server migrations ago. As far as I can tell, the illustrations are all gone.

Okay. From physical to digital, why is my old art being destroyed?

Divinatory Meaning

Red Orange is the second piece in the full Rainbow Squared series. It is also the second card in the cycle of Red, seven pieces that are all about the body, survival, and physical resources. Orange introduces fire, creation, and creativity. Red Orange is a tangled loop of creation and destruction.

A moth is also a symbol of both creation and destruction. Some moths create silk, but the more notorious moths destroy crops and clothes. In both cases, the caterpillar of the moth is responsible: silkworms make silk and larvae are the ones doing the eating. In fact, many moths don’t even have mouths or digestive systems. Instead they live off of what they ingested as caterpillars, staying in their moth form only long enough to procreate. Silkworms aren’t even allowed to make it to that stage: to create silk the cocoon has to be pierced or boiled, killing the moth before it even becomes a moth. 

There are at least 160,000 species of moths. The common clothes moth or Tineola bisselliella would seem to have no redeeming qualities. The gorgeous Hyalophora cecropia (pictured here) creates silk and is the largest moth in North America, with a beauty that rivals any butterfly. Most moths are nocturnal and are thought to navigate by moonlight, moving forward by maintaining a constant angle to an infinitely far away light source. That’s one theory as to why moths are attracted to light. The problem with artificial light is that once the moth reaches the source, it doesn’t know where to go from there.

In Hebrew, the word for “moth” is עָשׁ or “ash,” pronounced with an “ah” sound like “aah-sh.” The two letters in ash are Ayin (ע) and Shin (ש). Ayin is the name of the letter, but is also how you pronounce the Hebrew word עַיִן which means “eye.” Often moths have eye-shapes in their patterns, like the ayin-shapes that adorn the wings in this image. The letter Shin symbolizes fire and transformation. Moths are drawn to light, to the moon, to the reflection of the light from the sun (שֶׁמֶשׁ in Hebrew, which starts with ש). The moth is drawn into the fire, trying to complete itself (עָשׁ = ש + ע). If the moth ever reached the flame, it would perish. 

What are you destroying in the process of creating, even in order to keep yourself alive? What are you creating in the process of destruction? What beauty might be there that’s easy to miss? What are you using to navigate, and is it a reliable source? What would happen if you ever reached it?

I plan to share the cards as I create them, one at a time. I can already tell that the pace may not exactly be one a week. I may decide to share them in batches instead, or only at the end when they are all done. We’ll find out together.

The first piece in the series is always the hardest to share: is it done? Is this really the format I want to use for the next forty-eight pieces? I have been sitting on this one for a while worrying that it’s not perfect. Don’t worry: it’s not. But I’m trying to follow my own advice here and take that (next) first step.

1. Red Red

Story

The sun hadn’t risen yet and I was under the table with my kid. I had been trying to convince him to get dressed or use the potty or something, but then I decided to surrender, to just be with him in the moment in the dark. We were both quiet, the only light pouring in through the door from the kitchen. 

Then I heard it, felt it through the floorboards. Pitter patter pitter patter scritch scritch. 

A mouse ran clear across the room, from one doorway and out another. I screamed. I screamed a scream so loud that I felt it in my throat the rest of the morning. I screamed because I was surprised, but I was also surprised that I was screaming. What, am I suddenly afraid of mice? I always thought it was ridiculous when cartoon elephants would stand scrunched up on their tippy-toes at the sight of a teeny-tiny mouse. Now I understood. 

It’s not like this was the first evidence of a mouse in the house. I thought I had seen one a couple times before, but only out of the corner of my eye. This time it was unmistakable. Later that day our landlord reminded me that she had actually set a mouse trap a few weeks back in the same room where I saw it run by. “You should probably check that trap,” she said. Right. Okay. Check the trap. If I was afraid of a live mouse, I was now differently afraid of a dead one. I waited until the kids were at school, and then braced myself to pull the shelf away from the wall and look behind it.

At first I couldn’t even tell what I was looking at. There was the trap, bright white. Then the body came into focus, a little gray mouse body sticking straight out of the trap, hard to see against the wood floor because of its mousey camouflage. But something else was still confusing: where was the food? Why had this mouse been enticed by the trap if there wasn’t any food in it?

Oh. While this poor mouse lay here dead, a different mouse came by and lapped up the peanut butter. What do they say? The early bird catches the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

As we struggle to manage the mice, my kids continue to leave crumbs all over the floor. I told E that we better clean up unless we want to feed any mouse friends. He got quiet for a minute and then said he didn’t want to clean up the food. “Because they need to eat food. Without food they might die.”

The next day, he ran over to show me a little box he constructed with magnetic tiles: “It’s a mouse catcher.”

“Oh?”

“It’s called a fluffinator. I will put them in my fluffinator and turn them into mouse smoothie. I will turn them into mouse smoothie and we will have them for dinner.”

“But I thought you were sad about killing the mice!”

“I’m happy and sad about killing the mice.” 

Me too. That’s why I’m turning them into art.

Divinatory Meaning

Red is about beginnings, and Red Red is like beginning squared. 

Here you are at the threshold. Whether you are daunted by the possibilities before you or you feel that there are none, take the first step. The mouse is the master of squeezing through tiny holes. There may be a way in where you don’t expect it.

Of course you might fail, like this mouse did. And so this card can also be about resetting: resetting the mouse trap, restarting the cycle, going back to zero. Take your time plotting your next first move and try again. 

Mice are the ultimate prey, small creatures running from one refuge to the next. They are no stranger to fear, but they aren’t afraid of it either. They are survivors, masters of their environment. Red is about survival, about the body, about being in touch with your physical form and the physical world around you. Red is blood, like the warm blood that makes mice and humans mammalian kin.

Mice are also a lesson in contradiction. Consider a particularly famous mouse named Mickey (who incidentally wears red pants). How could a mouse become the basis of a corporate media empire? Yet mice are also a symbol of the opposite: people power, strength in numbers, the little guy, showing up and trying again and again. Ever notice how a mouse problem is never just one mouse? 

As a double-color card, Red Red is the first of the “major arcana” of the Rainbow Squared deck. These cards point to a grander lesson about the arc of your life, outside of the day to day. Just as the two colors line up, these cards are about alignment, and also misalignment. How authentic are you being to your body and its own rhythms? In what ways are you merely surviving when you could be thriving? In what ways are you surviving against all odds?

It feels so good when an art piece spontaneously emerges. Like staring at a paned window until its design lodges in your head and you think about it and think about it and then draw it and double it and flip it and animate it until it becomes this symbol or sigil or logo for what, I don’t know. Maybe for my art practice? 

Whatever I do or don’t with this little image (file-named as Moon Sun Rainbow Wheel), creating it was a wake-up call. While I was working on it I felt caffeinated, plugged in, alive, in flow. This was in stark contrast to the rest of 2022, when I didn’t feel that way very often. 

Last January, after five diligent cycles, I paused my practice of completing a series of 49 pieces each year, roughly one piece a week. I was burned out, and also worried that I wasn’t seeing the forest for the trees. That the effort required to complete each individual piece distracted me from understanding the full arc of the project. That the weekly effort distracted me from pretty much anything else. 

Stepping away from the weekly cycle was initially liberating. I was brimming with ideas for the future of Rainbow Squared and finally had a little more space to start turning them into plans. But then came the dread.

I felt like I opened a door into a grand hallway full of other doors. I had intentionally kept the project flexible (vague?) all along, steering in multiple directions at once. Is this visual art? Writing? Performance? Is it one person’s project? Collaborative? Curated? Open source? Does it need to have a gallery show? Does it need to have a social media presence? Is it a creative exercise regime? Is it a divination deck? What is its relationship to Tarot? To the Omer? To being Jewish? Is it Witchcraft? Is it stupid? Is it sacred?

Walking through the right door would realize the full potential for the project. Walking through the wrong door would risk my time, my energy, my resources, and my dignity. Choosing any particular door at all would mean not choosing others. So I hung out in the hallway, staring through a skylight at the changing moon. I wrote just enough to be able to stay in the building, but I didn’t move much.  

So now I am leaving the hallway. I am picking a damn door and walking through it. It might even be the door I just came from; they all look kind of the same from the outside. Which is just as well since I suspect a lot of these doors lead to the same place.

For 2023, I’m going back to making weekly(ish) Rainbow Squared pieces, working on another series of 49. Back to going in order, from Red Red to Red Orange to Red Yellow all the way to Black White Purple to Black White Black White. My sixth cycle, my seventh year.

I will focus more specifically on creating (another) deck of cards, working as intimately as ever with the tarot. My goal, however, is not to create any one definitive deck. My goal is to emerge from this year with a guide for others to follow the Rainbow Squared journey themselves, creating their own definitive deck.

After a year of ambivalence, I understand that this project has been and always will be about the journey. That the path I take doesn’t matter as much as continuing to move, continuing to make. Despite the very real strain of committing to practice art on top of everything else, it’s the only way I feel like myself. I don’t know when this particular project will be finished, but I know that I need to show up consistently. I want to show up. And after a year without it, I know that weekly accountability is the way I can make that happen.

I credit my love of public transportation with growing up in the suburbs of Detroit where I never used it. In the aptly named Motor City, we drove absolutely everywhere. This instilled in me a starry-eyed romanticism about the bus, one that would inspire birthday parties, art shows, and propel me into paid work with an organization called San Francisco Transit Riders.

My formal work in the transit world ended in 2016, but somehow it’s coming up again in 2022. I contributed an essay to Content Queen Zine’s Who BARTed, and through that I finally found a story to tell at Muni Diaries Live after years of being asked.

So instead of reading my words this month, you can listen to them. Here is a podcast recounting the time I convinced a whole house party to ride the bus together on Halloween, which of course did not go as planned:

Click that play button or listen wherever you get your podcasts, namely Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts or Spotify.

If you are a visual person, below is the audio from that recording set to the video that my partner took on an iPhone, despite my telling him many times that it wasn’t necessary (thanks, Justin 😘). He sweetly wanted to make sure other people could see how big the audience was, which he demonstrates by walking through it somewhere around the 7 min 30 sec mark:

So why am I sharing a story about transit as part of a project about creative spiritual practice?

Well, for five years I made and shared a piece every week. During this last year I’ve made pieces every month, sharing them on the first quarter moon. But something strange happened last month when I went to share my latest piece: I couldn’t do it.

Maybe it was because I had recorded an original song to go with the animation. Maybe it was because that song quotes the Torah and speculates about what happens when we die. Still, I pride myself on being able to push through fear, which is why public speaking doesn’t phase me. When I missed that first quarter moon I meant to share it at the full moon, then at the last quarter moon (🌗), and then this first quarter moon (🌓). But when Muni Diaries emailed this week letting me know that the podcast was live, I heaved a sigh of relief that I could punt sharing that piece at least another month.

I have no idea what I will share next month. I often don’t. I may keep letting this new body of work develop more in private until it is ready. Am I scared? Yeah. But I think it might mean I’m getting ready for change.

Or maybe this latest work is only for me. Maybe it’s like a bus that you wait and wait for that finally shows up but isn’t accepting any passengers: it might not take you where you thought you were going, but it might show you something that you needed to understand.

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The first collaborator to create a full 7x7 grid of Rainbow Squared images is Midjourney. 

I gushed last month about using Midjourney to make Muppets. This month I turned its image-generation power toward the 49 color pairs. It only took about five hours of my evening time to do it, compared with the five to ten hours that usually go into each individual piece.

So why aren’t I more excited?

It isn’t the quality of images. I really love a few of them, though the default painty-ness of the Midjourney aesthetic is starting to grate on me.

I think it’s that the images were never quite the point of the project. The aptly named Midjourney showed me that Rainbow Squared is also about the journey.

To be clear, I had a lot of fun generating these images, downloading, cropping, naming, selecting, filing, and arranging them. Gratifying and creative fun at that. But it wasn’t quite Rainbow Squared.

The whole point of Rainbow Squared is to generate meaning for the maker. Midjourney isn’t actually a collaborator: it’s a tool. I’m the maker, and when I use Midjourney to make so many images so fast, I get a result that technically follows the formula of Rainbow Squared but without its meaning. It’s not the fact that the images were generated by a computer that makes them soulless. I stripped the soul out of the process myself by making so many at once. 

If you’ve read these missives before, you’ll know a big challenge of this project is figuring out (committing to?) what Rainbow Squared even is. What started as a personal creative sprint has morphed into many other possibilities. One direction I keep coming back to is Rainbow Squared as DIY divination system, like tarot or any other oracle but using color pairs as the symbol set. 

Taking the full Rainbow Squared journey would mean generating one piece a week for 49 weeks (or honestly however long it takes). Each piece involves both visual art and written words, not one or the other. At the end of the Rainbow Squared journey, you could regard the result as a “deck” of “cards” (print or digital) that you can use to give oracle readings. The text serves as an interpretation of the image when it comes up, the card’s “meaning,” if you will.

Rainbow Squared is about more than making sets of two-color images. It’s about sitting with the colors, living the colors. Making narrative connections from where the colors are woven into your lived experience. The time it takes to make each piece is your life. Whether you use the pieces as a divination deck or not, the biggest takeaway is the lived performance of making them.

I’ve been paused on this project for a while. Sure, I’m keeping the feeling alive by continuing to generate these communications, which is what passes for my studio time these days. But it’s definitely not the same as the weekly practice of making. 

At the end of my last Rainbow Squared cycle (Year 5), I was so fired up from working with seven collaborators on their seven individual pieces that I wanted to organize the next Rainbow Squared grid to be comprised entirely of collaborative pieces. I was also excited about this idea of Rainbow Squared as a formula for creating an individualized DIY divination system. 49 individuals each doing one piece, or individuals each doing 49 pieces? Those two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive, but either one would take a huge amount of time, effort, clarity, and chutzpah. So I’ve pursued neither. I’ve been writing these “newsletters,” waiting for inspiration to strike and make one of those paths irresistible.

But I’m not sure that’s how inspiration works exactly. In this new lunar year, 5783, I want to make time in the studio again whether or not I am feeling inspired. “Studio,” really, since I count time sitting in a comfy chair querying Midjourney from my phone as studio time. As long as I do it with kavanah: a Hebrew word that translates to something like spiritual intention and concentration. 

Lately I’ve been tempted by so many Instagram ads selling me solutions to ADHD, but I know that art is my focusing factor. Perhaps I haven’t made more time in the “studio” lately because when I stopped the weekly making, what constituted my “art” got less defined. I went from a rich personal practice to figuring out how and whether I wanted to lead others in that rich personal practice. Interesting how inspiration dries up when the work gets scarier. 

So, using an artificial intelligence as a collaborator wasn’t exactly the solution. But at least it was fun, and fun is certainly more inspiring than fear.

Happy Waxing Gibbous Moon! I missed the First Quarter Moon this month, so I’m writing this before the moon is fully full. I don’t have an essay exactly, but I do have some roiling artistic curiosity to document.

Following some friends and many strangers, I’ve been playing with an artificial intelligence called Midjourney. Here’s how it works: using the platform Discord as an interface, you query Midjourney using the prompt “/imagine” followed by a description of the image you want it to create. Your prompts can include specific camera angles, artist names, styles, and mediums (to see the full array, here is an amazing Midjourney Prompter guide). By default, Midjourney generates an initial grid of four different image options you can choose to either upscale or to make variations from.

As you can see below, I like how the grids look as their own complete compositions. And as you can also see, I’m compelled by what Midjourney thinks of “The Muppets.”

There is so much more to say about AI-generated art, the nature of consciousness, and The Muppets as proxies for the human form. For now, scroll below to see pretty much as far as I got before my free Midjourney credits ran out (I’m definitely considering paying to keep going).

Happy First Quarter Moon, and welcome back to the theme of Games. This time instead of a phone game from eight years ago, I’m obsessed with the “it” game of this year: Wordle. 

Here’s a description if you’ve somehow managed to avoid Wordle so far: Wordle is a word game in which you have six tries to guess a five-letter word. After each guess, the color of the letters change to show how close the guess was to the correct answer. A green tile means you have the right letter in the right spot, a yellow tile means the right letter in the wrong spot, and a tile that stays gray is not in the Wordle at all. 

A pretty simple game, and one that somehow went viral enough for the New York Times to purchase it. This owes to the social aspect, wherein everyone who is playing that day is solving the same puzzle and can share their score with their loved ones or entire networks as square emojis:

I’ve been playing Wordle since my brother and very-soon-to-be-sister-in-law introduced it to me while we were all in town for my grandfather’s funeral in February. It was one of those otherwise busy life events that also have many gaps of sitting around. I was still in the midst of my Threes binge, so the conversation went something like this:

“Oh no, I can’t get addicted to another game. I have terrible impulse control.”

“There is only one Wordle a day. You can’t play it more than once.”

A word-based puzzle game with exactly one answer you can only play once a day? I started playing immediately. 

I’ve taken many screenshots of my completed boards since then. I’m honestly not sure why, it’s not like I shared them with anyone since it would ruin their puzzle. But there they were sitting in my phone, so I had a lot of material sitting around for the animation you see at the top.

In that selection of screenshots, there is one that I treasure: the day the Wordle answer had to be changed midday because it was “too political.” Something I regretted after the fact not including in last month’s essay about fetuses. 

Though I have loved Wordle for months now, recently I went even deeper for a very specific reason. Mere days before I would bring Covid and quarantine to my whole household, someone told me about the Wordles beyond Wordle. The timing was an absolute gift.

Quordle is guessing four five-letter words at once with nine tries. Sedecordle is sixteen words with twenty-one tries. My personal favorite is Duotrigordle, thirty-two words at once with thirty-seven tries. For all of these games, each guess shows up across all of the word boards, progressively narrowing down more letters. The grids look insane, and finding my way through them feels so good.

I love these grids because it’s a space I can control. Unlike my body. Unlike my kids.

I don’t want to whine (who are we kidding, I love to whine) but having Covid and caring for kids at the same time is like, hard. Wordle was something I could accomplish, something I could solve, something I could complete as opposed to the endless task of parenting.

Today my youngest turns three-years-old, and I complete another series of grids. For each of my kid’s first three birthdays I have put together a grid of twelve images, one from each month of that year. I suppose the project could have gone on indefinitely, but I stopped at 36 months for D when I looked into the future and realized I didn’t want to commit to this task for the rest of her life. So here is the full series of three grids for E, now animated because I’ve gotten better at Photoshop in the last three years too. 

Three is a milestone. Three for E is a command of verbal language and bodily functions. No diapers, no nursing, no drool bibs (finally!). Three is a kid.

When D turned three I was very pregnant with E, getting ready to start all over with a baby again. Today I’m not pregnant, and not planning to get pregnant again. So three feels bittersweet.

Two days ago the Wordle was YOUTH. I stopped to play it quickly while I was working on this essay, and had to laugh at the answer. I had actually already been thinking about that particular five-letter word, about how I might be watching YOUTH slip away by playing a phone game. My kids’ youth, this particular sweetness so fleeting. My own youth, as one day I will look back on this time with my small children as just that.

During our bout with Covid I used Wordle to temporarily ignore my kids when their YOUTH was too much for me. The 24/7-ness of childcare is exhausting even without a virus whose primary symptom is fatigue and whose only real remedy is rest. When you are in it, it feels endless. But it does end, and it will.

I’ve also played Wordle with my six-year-old, getting her excited about it so we can do it together, staying nestled in bed in the morning a little bit longer. A little self-serving, maybe, but at least it’s educational?

For Mother’s Day for the last few years, my partner Justin has secretly shot and edited short “interviews” of the kids. This year D improvised a song, which she sang in an intentionally babyish voice:

Mommy is awesome at drawing
Mommy is awesome at anything
Mommy is awesome at cuddles
Mommy is awesome at Wordle
Mommy is awesome, awesome at everything
Mommy is awesome, awesome, awesome

Drawing, cuddles, and Wordle. I was a little self-conscious when this silly phone game made the shortlist of my skills (granted, anything and everything are also on the list). But I guess that just shows that even with the whining, screams, and Covid, it’s a pretty charmed life. 

If we are to try to draw some color-pair wisdom from Wordle, it’s Green Yellow: Love and Power. And since green means right letter right place and yellow means right letter wrong place, we can think of this Green Yellow as not just Love AND Power, but Love OVER Power. 

Our days of quarantine were an exercise in love over power everyday, a constant power struggle. So much yelling as we lacked the emotional strength to negotiate with kindness, as the kids who recovered so quickly were cooped up with exhausted, ailing parents who just wanted them to sit still.

In the midst of it all I would sometimes invoke this Green Yellow to remind myself: Love OVER Power. Remember remember remember if you possibly possibly can to pause in the midst of the struggle and just appreciate. The friction comes from trying to control the situation, trying to control someone’s behavior. Control the Wordle board for a minute instead. Calm your nervous system so you’re ready for when you can’t control anything else.

I excavated my email inbox to find the name of the online Christian novelty shop that I ordered 14 plastic fetuses from in 2007. I searched for the word “fetus” and navigated back through 455 mostly political emails until I found the subject line:

“MissPoppy.com: Praise God! Your order is on its way!”

It seems MissPoppy.com is now defunct, but apparently you can buy the domain itself for $6,095.

Apparently I bought the fetuses for $1.15-$1.32 each, depending whether they were “pink,” “white,” or “world.” They are actually called “fetal models,” labeled on their backs:

11-12 WEEKS
PREBORN

I purchased these fetal models to spray-paint and use as props in a series of videos. I had recently welded an open-bottom stand for a glass fish tank so that I could film what would look like someone peeing directly onto the camera (Art School!). I was looking for something else to film as if it were underwater, and I guess fetuses came to mind. I’m sure I paused to consider the ethics of giving money to any outlet that would sell pro-life propaganda props. But ultimately it was fun to feel like I was pulling one over on Miss Poppy, tainting her righteous goods in my fish tank of creative depravity. Granted, the other items for sale in her shop included temporary stigmata tattoos and Jesus ashtrays, so I’m not totally sure about Miss Poppy’s political leanings herself. 

There is something unsettling about looking at an image of a fetus, human or otherwise. It feels icky in the way you might feel about finding a lock of someone’s hair, something that was once part of a living thing but isn’t anymore. A fetus can’t survive without its host, and so there is something morbid about looking at it, as if the very looking harms it. A fetus feels private. 

But when those fetal models finally came in the mail, there was something oddly cathartic about holding them in my hands. Tangible representations of something otherwise so abstract and daunting. A plastic fetus is soothingly inert.

Making work around fetuses, I was trying to capture in images what I still can’t quite capture in words. That feeling that I, an entire human, could ever have another entire human inside of me. On a purely visceral level, it’s a lot to take in. But the fetus’s power really comes as a symbol. Whether or not I ever decided to try growing or continue growing a fetus, my life would be defined by those choices either and any which way.

That is terrifying to consider now, and it was certainly terrifying at 21 years old. At that point my body had already been theoretically capable of pregnancy for nine years, but it had only been recently that I started to grapple with the actual risk. I would go through multiple stints on the birth control pill, for which I thought it was just an inevitable side effect to feel completely insane. My own ability to host a fetus was in stark opposition to the people I was sleeping with, whose bodily integrity was never threatened by that act. Whose stake in the whole thing was so much different than mine. 

So I made a lot of videos about fetuses. I titled this one “She,” setting the visuals to the song “She’s a Rainbow” by The Rolling Stones: a song about femininity narrated by a group of men. And it is a video about grappling with gender. My own understanding and the world’s understanding of gender has changed so much in the last fifteen years. I can see now that I was also articulating my discomfort with being what society views as a “she.” Not because I am not a “she,” but because I am also more than that. More than my clothes (wait for the blow-up doll at the end), more than my holes, more than my womb. Dressing femme, physical vulnerability, potential pregnancy: all things that can and have been empowering for me, but have more often made me feel less than free.

I grew up with brothers, and often felt more at ease around men than women. My fertility felt both like a superpower and a curse, both forming and totally at odds with my understanding of self. How casual it must be not to have a uterus. Not to be defined by whether or not and under what circumstances you do or don’t have children. 

Of course there is more to being a woman than having a uterus: plenty of women don’t have a uterus and plenty of people who do have a uterus aren’t women. But I wonder whether all people who either use “she” pronouns or have uteruses also have childbearing looming in the background as something they are or are not doing, or can or cannot do. I can’t fully know, but I certainly don’t think that’s true of cismen.

Finding that email from MissPoppy.com, I see the date was October 9th, 2007, which incidentally would have been my grandmother’s birthday. 

Four years later on October 9th, 2011, I would first encounter the person I would ultimately marry. 

Four years after that on October 9th, 2015 the guests would arrive at the venue for that wedding. And the next day I would walk down the aisle to a stringed rendition of “She’s a Rainbow” by the Rolling Stones with a surprise six-week-old embryo inside of me. I walked with a huge grin on my face: elated to marry the person I love in front of so many of our loved ones, temporarily compartmentalizing the terror I felt at being pregnant and having just spent the whole week prior Googling “abortion.” Life imitates art imitates life. 

Did I make all that fetus art as a way to prepare myself for the trauma that is accidentally growing a fetus? Did I manifest getting accidentally pregnant through making all that fetus art? We don’t talk about the fact that even with a loving partner in a stable relationship and plenty of resources, pregnancy isn’t always “congratulations.” That even if it’s something you become excited about later, you don’t necessarily start that way. We don’t talk about the trauma that comes from the intrusion of another body inside of yours, after the insertion of another’s body inside of yours. 

There could be a whole other essay on this topic, multiple. How fetuses are so easy to grow for some, so hard for others, and how either way and every which way the whole thing is weird and sci-fi and troubling and wonderful and none of your goddamn business. 

The “abortion debate” runs so much deeper than the technicalities of a procedure. It’s about the patriarchal notion that the female body is an object, that the female body is property to all except the person who occupies it. My body is not just a shell I live inside of that I sometimes share with others. My body is me. If I’m a fucking rainbow it’s not because of how I adorn myself, it’s because it’s who I am.

We were all fetuses once. That fact should neutralize the image of the fetus, not inspire us to militantly preserve them. We should celebrate, nurture, and protect the children that fetuses become, when and if they become them. Has any state that’s banned or restricted abortions also come out with a plan to support children and the parents forced to have them? To support BIPOC and working class parents in particular, disproportionately impacted by the lack of abortion access? What about better gun control laws so that the fetuses who do become kids are less likely to be murdered at school? Speaking of school, what about a plan for better and more widespread sex education? Or accessible, affordable birth control? What about male birth control, stopping the seed at the source instead of assaulting the cycle? 

I dug up this video fifteen years later because its symbolism still holds something for me. I have since generated two fetuses, carried them until they became babies, birthed them, and am now raising them as children. I don’t need to tell you that I love them; that would only reinforce that my love might even be in question. So many people have so many stories of why reproductive freedom is important, how it has saved or ruined or complicated their lives. So many people have been sharing those stories lately, forced to package their trauma to demonstrate what should be obvious. This is my sidelong version of that. 

Today I present to you the symbol of the fetus. Let’s not make it such a big fucking deal.

So behold: the animations I made for each week of Counting the Omer in Spring 2021/5781, Year 5 of Rainbow Squared. An ancient 49-day practice nested inside my own 49-week practice. I think of this mini-series as Rainbow Cubed.

If you find yourself drawn to one image or color in particular, follow the essay linked below it and see what resonates for you today. Kind of like a one-card pull from the Rainbow Cubed digital divination deck.

As always, you can let me know what comes up for you. And for a crash course on the Counting the Omer, check out Part One and Part Two.

Until next week 🌓

✨

Three nights ago I completed a 49-day sprint of Counting the Omer: ritualistically counting the days between the traditional barley harvest at Passover to the wheat harvest at Shavuot. Marking the progression from physical freedom to spiritual revelation.

Here’s what I have to show for it:

Eight 4x4 inch wooden canvases, seven in monochrome and one with 49 circles and seven stripes, one per week.

The result is an accidental totally custom Omer kit. Like when I first did a painting a day seven days a week for seven weeks, I kept all my materials in a shallow box for easy access, perched in the corner of the mess of an art table that I share with my kids.

This kit contained the canvases and watercolors for painting as well as the materials I needed for nightly Omer-counting: a string of beads for chanting the sephirot, an illustration of the Tree of Life, and a print-out with text for reciting the Omer:

And so I counted every night, without missing a single one. Before bed I would disappear to that art table, read the Hebrew prayers, announce the number of the day, and chant the name of that night’s sephirot 112 times. Every week I painted, though I did miss a couple of those and double up. And now here I am on the other side. Did anything change?

There is custom of capping off the 49 nights of counting by staying up all night on the 50th to study Torah: Tikkun Leil Shavuot. This year, with the Omer starting and ending on a Saturday night, I celebrated the end just like the beginning: at a wedding. It was also my older kid’s birthday, my sixth anniversary of becoming a parent. I did stay up practically all night, and I danced my face off. That’s a form of Torah study, right? Certainly another avenue for divine revelation.

Between the last first quarter moon and this one, something sort of magical happened. In my last message I mentioned that I had just received the book Counting the Omer by Rabbi Min Kantrowitz. On the very first page she says that rabbi is actually her third career, once she stopped resisting what she called a persistent “tap on the shoulder.” She also says that she lives in New Mexico, where I happened to be traveling the following week for work.

So I looked her up and reached out. And within a week of beginning her book, I was visiting Rabbi Min in person.

If I am leaving this Omer with any divine revelation, it might be one piece of her advice. Rabbi Min often talks to people who might otherwise be interested in becoming a rabbi but are put off by the title and all of its baggage. Myself included. She told me what she has told many others: if you become a rabbi, then who you are becomes what it means to be a rabbi. The rabbinate expands to include you.

So if I got ordained as my queer, intermarried, non-monogamous, tarot-reading, bacon-eating, non-circumsizing, Jewitch, artist self, then that would also be what a rabbi looks like.

I don’t know yet how exactly I will listen to my own persistent tap on the shoulder. Maybe in some ways I already am, and formal schooling and the titles that go with it don’t need to be part of my particular path. But at the end of this Omer, at the beginning of Pride Month, on what would have been Prince’s 64th birthday, I guess I feel more at ease with being myself no matter the outcome. To play is pray.

A theme seems to be emerging in this new series of monthly essays: Games. I happened to title the first one “Go Fish,” from when my kid asked if Tarot is played facedown like a card game. The next one I wrote about my newfound solace in the old mobile phone game, “Threes.” This month I find myself enmeshed in another game, an even older, more explicitly spiritual game: Counting the Omer.

This game is a little bit more technical to explain than the other two. I’ll give it a try.

What is Counting the Omer?

The word “omer” technically refers to a unit of measurement of barley, as well as the name of the 7-week period between the Jewish holidays of Passover and Shavuot. In fact, the word “Shavuot” literally means “weeks” in Hebrew. So why the barley and why the weeks?

Passover commemorates the Israelites’ liberation from slavery in ancient Egypt and Shavuot commemorates their receiving the Torah in the Sinai desert. Passover and Shavout are also each agricultural festivals, with Passover marking the first barley harvest in the spring and Shavuot marking the first wheat harvest. 

On the second day of Passover, priests at the Holy Temple made a “wave offering” of an omer of the first barley harvest, waving it in the six directions: north, east, south, west, up, and down. Only then could that year’s barley harvest be eaten. After that, it was commanded to ritualistically count each day for 50 days until Shavuot when the wheat harvest would be ready, the most important harvest of the year. In this way, the Omer links the barley harvest to the wheat harvest, and links the Divine to the Earth as a sustaining lifeforce.

These harvest offerings and most other priestly rituals ended when the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE, but the practice of counting remains. This is called Counting the Omer and it entails, well, counting. Literally. Every night (on the Hebrew calendars, days start at sundown instead of at midnight) you say a blessing and then count the day and week, like so:

“Today is Day One of the Omer.”

“Today is Two Days of the Omer.”

On and on until:

“Today is Forty-Eight Days, which are Six Weeks and Six Days of the Omer.” 

“Today is Forty-Nine Days, which are Seven Weeks of the Omer.” 

The Grid

Remember, Passover and Shavuout have agricultural significance as well as historical, linking to a grand narrative. In the Passover story, you could say that after the Israelites were free they were still in need of a lot of healing before they were ready to receive the Torah fifty days later.  Going from slavery to freedom is not simply a physical designation but a mental and spiritual transformation.

In the 16th century, Kabbalists (Jewish mystics) noticed the neat correspondence of the seven weeks of the Omer with what they regarded as the seven accessible holy attributes of the Divine, or the seven lower sephirot. The sephirot are all connected to each other in this Tree of Life diagram, where the Divine spark enters at the top and comes down to the world like a lightning strike to the bottom:

These attributes are hard to translate, and like any Jewish concept, there are endless opinions about what they might mean. Here is a rough guide of the sephirot:

1. Chesed - Lovingkindness, Unconditional Love, Grace, Mercy

2. Gevurah - Strength, Judgment, Boundaries

3. Tiferet - Harmony, Balance, Beauty

4. Netzach - Eternity, Endurance, Dedication, Ambition

5. Hod - Splendor, Awe, Humility, Acceptance, Order

6. Yesod - Foundation, Creativity, Bonding, Sexuality

7. Malchut (Shekhinah) - Divine Presence, Physical Reality, Manifestation, Leadership

If each week has an overarching attribute, then each day of the week it pairs with one of the other attributes, cycling in a 7x7 grid to create 49 pairs of spiritual themes.

It starts with Chesed she’b’Chesed (Lovingkindness within Lovingkindness), then goes on to Gevurah she’b’Chesed (Strength within Lovingkindness), cycling through each week. Considering each day’s theme and chanting its name along with counting the Omer turns it into a sort of spiritual fitness calendar, preparing practitioners to receive revelation every year at springtime just as the Israelites might have been made ready to receive the Torah at Sinai:

If you’ve been following Rainbow Squared, that structure may look and sound familiar to you. Yes, I accidentally intuited a Kabbalistic practice when I found my way into what I now called Rainbow Squared. It progressed naturally enough, starting with one painting a day seven days a week for seven weeks using one color for each day of the week. Then I turned it into one painting a week for a year using two colors from a rainbow grid and exploring the meanings of the colors, and it was pretty much the same structure as the Kabbalisitic matrix for Counting the Omer. 

I had known about the counting of the days, but I didn’t really know about the sephirot or the matrix, and I certainly had never seen it represented in colors. In that way, the Omer did not consciously influence the Rainbow Squared grid, but here it is, and pretty unignorable.

Colors aren’t always part of Counting the Omer though. There are just as many color associations as there are potential meanings for each of these sephirot. In some systems, colors are determined individually without any overall order, and in others they follow a spectrum. The grid I made above uses the colors determined by Rabbi Zalman Shachter-Shalomi, or Reb Zalman, the founder of the Jewish Renewal movement, as most famously laid out in his rainbow tallit design. 

I keep wondering whether the sephirot would feel right in Rainbow Squared colors. Maybe I’ll try it next year.

In Practice

It was only last year that I counted the Omer for the first time. I joined a virtual cohort of other queer creatives to do it, resulting in a digital zine: A New Gift. I was in the midst of making weekly pieces for Year 5 of Rainbow Squared, so I wove in the significance of each week’s sephira into that week’s essay, creating an additional animation using its designated color. This practice was made more chaotic given that last year I was following Rainbow Squared in an emergent order, creating pieces for color pairs at random instead of the progression of the grid. I thought of it sort of like Rainbow Cubed.

It was a lot.

This year, I had some fantasies of doing a 49-day sprint of artmaking for the Omer. Because I am taking a break from making weekly pieces, I thought a piece a day might be a meaningful and (dare I say) efficient way to engage with the grid again. 

Then on the first night of the Omer this year, the second night of Passover, I found myself standing at the trunk of my car underneath the full moon at my friend’s wedding. I had just wrestled two sugar-high kids to sleep and had my prayer beads and my baby monitor both hanging around my neck, ready to Count the Omer. 

The theme for the first day of the Omer is always Chesed sh’b’Chesed: Lovingkindness within Lovingkindness. It is customary to chant the name of each spiritual theme 112 times when counting the Omer. (18 x 6 + 4 = 112. 18 is for “chai” which is the Hebrew word for “life” and 6 is for the six directions. 18 x 6 =108, which is already a holy number in many cultures, then you add 4 for the letters in the unpronounceable name of the Divine.)

As I gazed at the moon chanting “chesed” to myself again and again, I laughed, knowing that the true way to practice lovingkindness this year would be not to force myself to take on a piece a day, in any medium. Counting and chanting is enough. 

Though I guess I am also painting a 4x4 inch wooden canvas every week, sure.

Today is the 22nd day of the Omer, and the attribute is Chesed sh’b’Netzach. Lovingkindness within Endurance. Yellow Purple. It’s also the first quarter moon. So here I am, waking up at 4:30am on Mother’s Day to finish this piece since I have committed to monthly essays using that moon as a deadline. I am typing this sentence in particular on my phone back in bed while nursing my kid who summoned me pleadingly from my desk at 630am. 

Not pushing myself past my limit is Lovingkindness, and so is honoring my own deadlines. Nursing and writing feels like a pretty good example of Lovingkindness within Endurance.

I’m still figuring out how the colors connect the Omer and Rainbow Squared, but I will say that today’s Yellow Purple is one of my favorite combinations: complementary colors, and the Power of Magic to boot. As I continue to explore this creative spiritual system of my own making, it’s pretty magical to be connected back to the earth-based ritual of my ancestors. It’s a reminder that religious practice itself is magical practice: what else can you call superstitiously waving barley in hopes for a bountiful wheat harvest?

If I’m being honest though, I’m not sure I will have a particularly bountiful spiritual harvest from this year’s Omer. You get what you put in, and while it is certainly a commitment to remember to say a prayer and chant a theme 112 times 49 nights in a row, without artmaking to go along with it I find the themes aren’t really penetrating. But who the hell can concentrate on anything right now when everything is burning, literally and figuratively? 

Maybe the Omer isn’t just about reaping some specific spiritual benefit every night. It’s a durational game, a complete arc, and we’ve got 28 days to go. The next moon that I write to you, Shavuot will have just passed and with it another wedding. Plus, in other divine timing, a copy of the book Counting the Omer by Rabbi Min Kantrowitz finally arrived in the mail last night. Next first quarter moon I might have a different perspective. 

🌓

In Other News

Also during this Omer, I was on a podcast. The interview itself was actually last year, but it was edited and released last week. Remember that time an audio producer friend got a soundbite of me and I was so afraid I might sound racist that I didn’t listen to the piece for six years and then when I did I wrote an essay about it for Black White Orange? Well, that audio producer is Zak Rosen and I went on his podcast, the Best Advice Show to talk about how creating and committing to a structure for a creative practice is key to making it happen, especially when you are busy doing things like parenting. 

R2 on The Best Advice Show

Speaking of parenting and being as it’s Mother’s Day, and because I just discovered I can make buttons in these posts: if you like or learn anything from Rainbow Squared, consider donating 49 or 7 or 18 or 112 dollars to Michigan Reproductive Freedom for All in my original home state:

DONATE: Protect Abortion in Michigan

Overturning Roe v. Wade would immediately put a 1931 Michigan law back into effect that would make abortion illegal there and threaten doctors with prison for up to fifteen years for providing one. It will take time, but amending the state constitution could protect the right to abortion and (staying on the theme of this post) protect religious freedom. Did you know that in many cases Jewish law doesn’t just allow abortion, but demand it?

Until next moon.

✨

This ended up being the first of a multi-part series. Next check out Counting the Omer, Part Two or Omer 2021/5781 Animations.

I’ve started playing Threes again.

Released in 2014, Threes is a mobile phone puzzle game that consists of smooshing together progressively larger number blocks. I played a lot of Threes when it came out, inspired by friends who were publicly obsessed. You may have played Threes yourself or else encountered its more popular rip-off “2048,” which used a similar concept but with inferior design. 

In 2022, I am here to tell you that Threes is still an infinitely playable game. Challenging enough to be engaging but low stakes enough not to be stressful. Elegant. Satisfying. Cute. 

I’m not sure why I initially picked Threes up again after eight years. Now that I have, it’s taken up a hole in my time where social media used to be. I used to scroll Instagram without really knowing why or how I got there. I’d never really feel any better after doing it, in fact I’d usually feel worse. I opened Instagram during in-between moments when I needed to tune out and mindlessly swipe down. Now I open Threes instead, to tune in and mindfully swipe left, right, up, and down.

In Threes, I enter a flow state. It takes some skill not to die too quickly, not to let the little numbers totally overwhelm and ultimately clog your board. Still, Threes calms my nervous system. In Threes, the task is clear and I am in control. I am decisive, I am moving forward.

But is it antisocial? To choose to hang out with cartoon numbers instead of human content?

I realized last week that the game Threes is based around two colors: blue and red. I also realized that the graphic design client I’m working with uses the same colors, in pretty much the same shades. So for weeks I have been pushing around blue and red pixels on screens, with my finger and my mouse.

Red is blood, body, survival, and in that way it can also be livelihood, that which puts bread on the table. Blue is communication. Blue Red can also be communicating for livelihood, like I’ve started doing again in earnest. 

Red Blue is also about bodies and communication, how bodies communicate to get their needs met. I communicate with myself in many ways, and criticism is one of them. Beating myself up is part of how I get things done. Relentlessly questioning whether what I am doing in any given moment is the best use of my time, saying mean things to myself about it either way.

So it’s no surprise that I also criticize myself for playing Threes. For “wasting time.” Self-help mogul Louise Hay (whose advice one must take with a teaspoon of salt) says that procrastination is a way of delaying your own good. Putting off the things that would move you closer to accomplishing your goals by filling the time with something else. 

There was a grant opportunity for performance art that I worked on the last two months with every intention of applying. And ultimately I just couldn’t get it to the finish line. I was too busy with work, too busy with small children, just overwhelmed. I let the deadline pass. And I am so disappointed. 

But that wasn’t because I was playing Threes. The amount of time I spend playing this mobile phone game is an indicator of the state of my mental health, not the cause of its deterioration. Threes is a symptom, not the problem. 

Even as somewhat of an extrovert, I’ve learned how much artmaking requires some amount of solitude. As covid calms or at least we pretend it does, activities and events are piling up in my world again. Even when they are fun, adding them on top of the already delicate balance of work and family and art feels like I am navigating a game board of Threes. Taking on more than I have the capacity for and then clogging when I can’t do it all.

Threes is not like Tetris, where new blocks fall faster and faster as the game progresses. The blocks in Threes have bigger and bigger numbers, but for each turn you can take as much time as you want to decide where to move the next block. You can theoretically set your own pace, though this is much harder to pull off in practice. Often when I die in the game it is because I find myself swiping quickly and rhythmically, when maybe if I had given myself permission to take my time I could have made a better sequence of decisions.

I’ve been struggling to keep it together lately. I am blessed with quick moods, so I don’t stay in any particular funk for a debilitating amount of time. But I’m more fragile, more ready to blow, more ready to fall apart at the smallest provocation. Yelling at my family, yelling at myself, then afraid of myself. If I could slow down in the moment, maybe I could pause before losing it. If I could slow down long before the moment, maybe I could not be so wound up in the first place.

I actually dictated a couple of these paragraphs to myself on my phone from a hot tub. It’s Spring Break for the kids so we took advantage of the privilege of remote work to visit some friends up the coast in the redwoods. Coincidentally, the same friends who originally got me into Threes. When I got in the hot tub by myself, the kids were long asleep. It was quiet and dark, no lights except the stars behind the silhouette of the tall trees and the glow of my phone (in dark mode, of course). The moon was a sliver, a crescent new moon off to the west on its way below the horizon. I couldn’t see it just then, but I had caught a glimpse of it earlier so I felt aware of it hiding behind the house. I was naked. I was warm. It was wonderful.

And even in the midst of that splendor, I had to battle away the thought that I should be doing something else. That instead of getting in that hot tub at 9PM I should have sat in front of my computer screen for another hour or two being “productive.” But wouldn’t that also have been wasting time I could spend with these trees? Wasting time I could be spending with myself?

When time feels scarce, it’s hard to remember that not every minute needs to be accounted for. I guess in a way Rainbow Squared was (is?) trying to hold on to so many minutes. I wanted to take all the hours days weeks of just keeping it together while taking care of small children and turn the time itself into art. Like Maintenance Art. 

The moments I can steal to play a game on my phone feel transgressive. The moments I steal to make art used to feel transgressive too, until I found a way to bludgeon myself with them. Produce! Produce! Produce! In some ways, pushing numbers around on my phone screen is a way of finally doing what I want for its own sake in the fucking moment.

Except now here I am, turning even that into Art. Writing an essay about the time I spend on a phone game, dictating to myself in a hot tub to turn that time into Art too.

In case you missed it, for the next while I’ll be sharing updates monthly on the first quarter moon, like this one.

Why the first quarter moon? I already receive some email newsletters on new moons as well as on full moons, but none on the first quarter specifically. Rising midday, the first quarter moon is still visible in the evening, as opposed to the third quarter moon that comes out late at night. If the new moon is about release and renewal, and the full moon is about culmination, the first quarter is about what happens in between. The first quarter moon is about building and creating. Rainbow Squared is also about building and creating, about process, in a constant state of becoming.

Thanks for reading.

🌓