Rainbows All Day

The day looked like no surprise. It was cloudy and rainy like yesterday, the day before and the day after tomorrow, but at this time of year that's no surprise around here, as the fall of summer chills into winter over the brown, sleepy earth.

But then came a surprise at one point early in the gray morning, when I looked out the window grumpy at upset plans with more rain before my eyes, and saw the brightest, finest, clearest rainbow I've been privileged to behold in a looong time, right inyerface in the dark north, stretching in jeweled glow from lake to mountain, broad and intense as light alone can be in a perfectly faceted moment. There are few perfect moments of any kind, but this - magic in the darking rain and mood - it was like suddenly living more life than a moment ago.

The arch of colors we can see (and colors we can't see) was low to the ground from the angle of the sun, each tint clear, yet without distinct edges of beginning or ending - like the rainbow itself - of the sky, yet apart, without edges, like the colors as they came from gray sky somehow to red > orange > yellow > green > turquoise > blue > purple then sky again, journeys of light I saw as a performance, each color flowing into the next...

As the day went on and the air grew even darker, time after time I looked out the window with less and less dark a mood, and each time I looked  there was another skyheart rainbow out there in a slightly different place, the light itself in a fine mood, brightling all the way to dusk.

My rainbow quotient is filled now, and with no effort on my part, a reward for just looking out the window now and then into apparent gloom, with a kind of hope the sky gave me. Even telling of it brings smiles to granddaughter faces...

Rainbows all day will do that for you.

THE BIG RAINBOW

We enjoy full and long-term rainbows all the time out here in the countryside, as compared to the barely distinguishable fragments of arc we used to glimpse between buildings in the city sometimes, already kind of faded and archaeological, like a suddenly exposed artifact that disintegrates on contact with modern urban air, such as that is, but these gateways of light we see arcing from mountains to Lake are real rainbows, wide ones, bright ones, deep and full ones all the way from here to there, in the true meaning of those terms as used in the countryside.

This rainbow I'm looking at now reaches from down on the lakeshore all the way to Hiei Mountain, pots of gold everywhere, from violet to orange with all the colors in between, and while gazing right at the rainbow you can't help but ponder the fact that you can't find its edges - though the rainbow is distinct, isn't it - yet it isn't, is it - and none of the individual colors themselves have an edge, though they too are each distinct but not, which leads you to realize right on the spot, fully rainbow-minded by now, that this narrow band of colors we are gifted to perceive is but a short segment of the Big Rainbow; that sound waves and gamma rays are vibrations on the same continuum, as are all other 'waves,' including us (and why should we in our existence see only this little portion, could we bear to see it all?), that in a way we're seeing with our ears when we hear sound waves, hearing with our eyes when we see light waves, and hearing/seeing with our skin when we feel heat waves, all part of the one continuum we chop up into different senses because that's the way we self ourselves and word the world; and in the very same dark-age way that we used to think the world was flat and still think of the sun as rising, so we continue to believe our senses separate, our perceptions isolate, each as distinct from the others as we ourselves are from all that we perceive, all as clear as 20/20; and there at the edges, where the senses get fuzzy, the dogma begins...

THE SOURCE OF RAINBOWS

It comes to me in the knife-edge cold of the winter night, out here on the deck for one last look at the stars before sleep, that what we all need, what we all seek in the streets and rooms, meadows and museums of our ways, is a place to wonder. Not to be taught, but to wonder. Not to be told, but to wonder: completely from and by ourselves. Where are those places but out in the nature of things, as out in the winter beneath the stars without explanation? Where but in the sudden realization of how remote we are in the vastness we are one with, and in that wall of sudden awareness discover the bright door that opens in ourselves; then to walk through...

FREEWHEELING GOLD

Freewheeling down the mountain this morning into sunrise I ran into a minisquall from a thick silver band over the lake that the sun had just risen above, and the placid bright blue air was all at once a quick wind filled with fat drops of gold falling molten on the ground. As I rolled over all that wealth I looked to my left and saw that the road was curving into the tourmaline wall of a rainbow arching higher than the mountains; soon all the air around me took on the glow of revelation and I was gliding through an ambience of emerald, ruby and topaz over a long and curving road of solid gold. Some folks think a lot of money makes you rich.