Transformation
© Colleen Rae, 2011
I lived in Perth, Western Australia in my early twenties. I used to stand washing dishes and watch the double rainbows ebb and flow outside my kitchen window. For some reason, Perth seems to be the capital of the double rainbow.
And once from an airplane window, I saw a circle rainbow. I hadn’t known they existed, but apparently, they’re a fairly common sight out airplane windows.
A few years later, back in the states, living in a little New Mexico town, I looked out the window one cold winter morning to see over a matte gray sky an iridescent shimmer of a rainbow perfectly capping the mountain that rose above town.
Not long after that, driving through a dark desert night, I saw–and it’s still hard to believe I saw it–a horseshoe-shaped rainbow brilliant against the blackest of skies. The person riding with me said enchanted, “How can you look at that and not know there’s a God.”
That seemed an odd statement then; I was too much of the scientifically oriented person for that. To me the enchantment of a rainbow stopped with the equally enchanting mysteries of refracted light and the frequencies each of those colors hummed along on.
But then in Peru in 1981, while hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu with some of the more famous scientists in the world, I left my scientific leanings aside and discovered awe.
One of my fellow climbers said, “Look it’s raining over there,” and I turned just in time to watch fairy lights painting their mist across the blue of the sky, arching a rainbow up and over the mountain above the village far below. I stood transfixed as then the other end of the bow seemed to shoot from the earth and vision itself up out of the mystery as though it had been there all along, hidden behind the sky. As both ends of the bow met in a fluorescence of color, the color deepened, brightening to an intensity I’d never seen in any other rainbow, the bands wider than I’d ever seen them before. Each color purred against the blue.
I stood in the cold and let the color take me in, wrapping its way through all the sinews of my being. And then in the misted light around the rainbow, another faint full bow whispered into being. A double rainbow! A mirror image of the other, its colors running from red to purple as they danced toward us where we stood. It was a wondrous moment, and with all such wondrous moments I had to close my eyes before it was done–saturated by the sheer power of beauty. Too much would make it slip into the familiar, the common, the known. Better to leave it while it still sang its awe song that filled my soul with such ineffable joy. And in that moment, as I closed my eyes, I knew the truth of what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote:
Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God.
- Posted in: Uncategorized
- Tagged: Joyflow
