The vibration of energy, of waves, color and sound is the secret signature of all things. Both science and spirituality say this. Artists, musicians and poets have understood it for millennia. I’ve been working with a friend to produce a set of meditation cards based on the chakra system. It has heightened my awareness of color in so many ways, from simple mood shifts to the resonance in my body of a particular color. How much do we really see of the colors we encounter as we move through our day?

Different colors and sounds vibrate at different wavelengths. Being a part of this system, our body acts as a prism, connecting to the White Light of All Consciousness, and refracting it into the individual colors of the spectrum. When you delighted by a rainbow or the dancing colors of a crystal hanging in a sunny window, your body is recognizing its kindred. When I pay attention to the color red or violet or green, I feel an immediate pull of connection.

To create blocks of colors for our meditation cards, I collaged pictures of natural places from magazines. As I worked, I contemplated the sources of the colors, from the whites of feathers, foam and clouds, to the indigo of ocean depths and night skies, vast realms of mystery. The green of trees, grass, frogs. The blue of sky and water. Orange and red of fire and fruit and sunsets. Yellow sunrise, lemons, gold, and flowers.

The colors we experience all spring from the earth. The sun itself, though not of this world, has its many ways of filtering through the atmosphere and appearing to us. The depths of the cosmos may actually be far beyond our planet, the “empty” space through which we travel. But in perception, that star-filled dome appears as the covering of our world.

Everything we see, touch, experience, and know comes from this colorful earth. To hold a lemon in my hand, to contemplate its yellowness, is a staggering wonder—if I open my imagination and allow it. That color of the sun, that solar radiance, resonates in my own solar plexus, the seat of my will. I am tethered, through that point in my body, to all the yellow of this world. The feathers of a goldfinch, the petals of a daisy, the morning sun reflecting off tidal waters spread over a delta—all sing to the outward-directed center of my power and action.

I read somewhere that researchers found green and blue to be the most appealing, soothing and restful colors to most people. They speculate that it’s an ancient holdover from the first landscapes in which we evolved as upright primates. The safety of open savannahs, grasslands beneath the vast dome of sky, allowed clear sightlines to potential predators. That world contained us. We belonged.

Colors feature in mythic stories, which are, after all, about this world and our relationship to it on scales intimate and vast. The sun travels by chariot through the underworld at night, reemerging in the east each morning. The night sky is the protective body of the creator goddess or an eternal repository of divine entities watching over us.

All the senses have their ways of working on both the physical and the metaphysical planes, the mundane and the subtle. We usually assume that color is in the realm of sight only. Our meditation cards include the invitation to take each color into the body through the breath. This literal in-breath of color is an ancient practice that acknowledges the vibrational, energetic aspect of color.

The Root Chakra vibrates with the color RED. It pulses with rootedness, the I AMness and vitality of the life force. It is the color of blood and fire and animal urges. We speak of “seeing red” when rage boils up with surprise swiftness, a primitive emotion temporarily incapacitating our cultured reason.

The chakra system is not arbitrary or decorative. In the vibration of its wavelength, each color has its unique signature in the All of White Light. The way our body is woven in, energetically, aesthetically and emotionally to the colors of this earth is nothing short of awe-inspiring.

Just think about it for a minute. Call up a color in your mind, breathe in that color, and let it sing its note to you. You may feel its vibration resonating in your body, in a particular region or center. Even if you can’t consciously name the effect, you can be sure it will have its way with you somehow.