It's Not Easy Being Green...But It's Acceptable.

I took a look around me the other day and a trend of mine caught my attention: GREEN. I was surrounded by green...stuff. Not mold or anything like that but *items* that I had either purchased or had been given to me. It wasn't a major epiphany but it still struck me as noteworthy. At least noteworthy enough to blog about it...

Now, it is true that green is one of my favorite colors and I do tend to gravitate towards a particular color (hello, orange. I almost bought an orange car, for god's sake) but this was more than that and was most decidedly unplanned. It started with my Patagonia down jacket that I had gotten in October while visiting friends in Maine. I thought it would be a good thing to go under my (then taupe colored) raincoat once I moved to Portland. It came in bright blue, hot pink and some other color that was clearly not memorable enough for me to recall what it was but the only acceptable color, in my eyes at least, was green. And so, I bought it. Without realizing it, I started gathering other green accessories into my life: My water bottle, a sheet set, a yoga mat that my roommate took from the lost & found at her job, a bag my friend brought me back from Mexico, a new raincoat that I got on sale (green was, once again, the only acceptable color). It wasn't a conscious effort, it just all kind of came together that way.

Well, I'm at a point in my life right now where I'm looking for meaning in almost anything that I can get my hands on. So I decided that, of course, all this greenness must mean *something*. And, as it turns out, the color green does have quite a few meanings:

Fresh. New. Inexperienced. Naive. Lush. Envious.

These are all adjectives I can apply to one portion of my life at any given time. Some are good while others are not so good. But they are all real and true and worthy of my attention. The negative ones I can work on changing and the positive ones I can work on incorporating into more aspects of my life. The good, the bad and the ugly all exist, but it's how we handle them that matters. I could focus on the negativity, beat myself up over it, force myself to change whatever it is I think needs changing. But the truth is, that won't help, it just makes it worse. Trust me, I've been here before. So I'm embracing everything about myself, because until I do that, my life will always be what I don't want it to be.

Mistakes and wrong turns lead you somewhere. It might not be exactly where you thought you'd be and occasionally, it's the exact opposite of where you want to be. But it's where you are. And there's something comforting in that.

So, as I work through all of this, I am keeping the words of Kermit the Frog in mind: "I am green, and it'll do fine. It's beautiful and I think it's what I want to be."