I Fought With A Color

I take pictures of yellow joyful things. I tweet them, blog them, and collect them with my friends. Kind of like slap bracelets....except my parents don't ruin my fun by telling me they are silly and too expensive.





We put our pictures together to form the Yellow Joy Machine. Anyone who has been reading this blog has heard all about it, but today I'm going to tell you a different side of the story, the secret side.

The story of Tracie and Yellow.....

My mother’s favorite flowers are yellow roses.  She had them in her wedding bouquet when she married my father.  A friend of hers dried some of those yellow roses and put them in a glass box.  That box sat in our living room for my whole life.  I don’t know if you have ever seen yellow roses that have been dried, but they always end up looking more brown than yellow.  They looked dead.

I used to sit in the living room and stare at those flowers and think how appropriate it was that they were displayed there in all their yellowish-brown deadness…just like my parent’s marriage, and their life together.  I grew to hate yellow roses.  Even beautiful alive ones began to look like death to me.

As time went by, I began to feel that way about all yellow things.  In my mind, I would see something yellow, especially something that should be beautiful and alive like a flower, and I would think of it like this...Yellow is what happens when all the purity and beauty of white dies. (dramatic much?)

Yellow shirts make my teeth look yellow.  Yet one more assault against me from this color.

I always thought that yellow crayons were too light of a color to really come out right on paper.

As a child I was sure that yellow had it out for me.  It was a scheming, plotting, hateful little color of death.  I even used to own this cassette tape that I bought out of a dollar bin in a store just because it had a song on it called “I Don’t Like Yellow” Really. I was fighting a battle with a color. Obviously it wasn't able to fight back, but that never stopped me. 

So, the Yellow Joy Machine.  Are you feeling confused?  How does this woman who is carrying on her own personal war with yellow for so many years get involved in something like this? One day on twitter Kim, Megan, and I were tweeting about collecting things that make us happy. Putting them together to form an ultimate joy machine......and somehow it became yellow. Strangely enough, I liked the sound of that. (It made me think of the yellow submarine.  I love the Beatles.)  That conversation expanded and we started looking for yellow things to take pictures of and tweet.

When I took my first picture and told my husband what I was doing he was a little shocked. “Yellow? You hate yellow!” this is a man who has heard my rant about yellow on more than one occasion.

I told him, "I know, but I think that my war might turn into negotiations.  Me and yellow, we’re going to talk."

Over the months, yellow and I have done more than talk.  I would say that our negotiations went well and when yellow needed a home I offered to take her in.  I can now spot yellow joy from across a crowded room.  I look for yellow everyday.  Even Thomas and Katarina are on the lookout for a bit of yellow to brighten up their day.

Through the peace negotiations with yellow, I learned something.  Sometimes your negative feelings have nothing to do with the color, or thing, or person that you have been blaming them on, or associating them with for many years.  Making an intention to start those negotiations with yellow opened up a whole new world of color and joy for me.

Now when I look at this yellow rose, instead of fighting with it, I can appreciate the freshness of life and the joy that it contains.

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