Blue feels like cold lips pressed against your skin on a winter’s day. Blue is fog on the windshield even after you’ve turned on the air. It’s the color of drowning, of clarity, of desperation, of healing, of life.
Blue is fluid, healing, spirit; blue is the watery world of Pisces (my astrological sun sign; blue is reflected in the aquamarine of my birth stone. The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images notes, “Blue is linked with eternity, the beyond, supernatural beauty, religious transcendence, the spiritual and mental as contrasted with the emotional and physical and with detachment from the earthly” (Ronnberg, 2021, p. 650). Blue is a calming color and “Psychologically, blue can be seen as a midway between black despair and the white of hope and clarity suggesting a state of reflection and detachment. Linked to shadows and darkness, blue brings depth” (p. 652). On the color wheel, shades of blue are found opposite of red and orange. Blue subdues Orange the same way that water subdues fire, a cooling principle that combats heat1.
Blue is quite, it might be insubstantial, like grasping at the wind. Blue might be emptiness, a void, an absence, and blue might be the disappearance of distinction. It might also be finding your way back home, a calm serenity of liquid that soothes the parched throat of action. Blue is spiritual, like water. Blue is a fountain of begetting. Blue is change and eternity.
- Paragraph from my paper On the Prowl for Likeness: An Imaginal Approach to Dream Interpretation, written for MA DJO 825; Williams 2025. ↩︎
