The Colors of Well Being

Just a week ago, we went out camping and on Saturday morning, I wrote this blog post about beginning to recognize that there are so many colors for our health and well being, while we seem today to talk about this topic only in Black and White.

When I was growing up in a Chinese household in Singapore we visited my mother’s brother and sister’s homes every week or even more often. It is so different now for my daughter as my siblings and I live in 3 countries on 2 continents. The extended family support system that I grew up in  was essential for me to gain the strong sense of wanting to thrive. I sense that my feeling that I personally DESERVE to thrive, is deeply rooted in my early childhood experience where I was part of a loving extended family, a safety net in which we all rooted for each other. Today as my daughter grows up, we have an “adopted” extended family around us in the San Francisco Bay Area – our Reading Group which began in 1983 still continues to meet every 2-3 weeks to read aloud before or after dinner or occasional Sunday brunches. The sense of “belonging” to a group of people who know you over a long period, is something my husband and I wanted to be sure to give our daughter who is now heading for college this fall.

Last week, I heard a fascinating radio show about how the words for different colors might have emerged in the past. In Homer’s poems that began in the oral tradition 600BC, the Illiad and Odyssey the most frequent colors mentioned were Black and White, by far.   Read more