My Livejournal friend CBPotts wrote this yesterday and I really liked it so I asked permission to share:
Last night, after supper, there was a rainbow. It'd been raining for a good part of the day - it was raining then - and it was warm, and I stood in the doorway and I watched that rainbow. It stretched not too far - one end started three houses down the road; it ended in my neighbor's pasture - a slow whale roll belly curve upward; nothing too ambitious.
It was faint, then it brightened, and then it started to fade again. It seemed to switch from rainbow to cloud second by second by second, teetering on the fluffy gray edge of oblivion, almost entirely gone and then abruptly back on, full force and bright. The pattern repeated itself, and the rainbow lingered quite a while, until the rains grew heavy once again.
It's weird, sometimes, to watch in actuality something that has a strong life as a symbol.
Rainbows for me are about tenacity - at one end, of course, is the pot of gold, assuring us that good fortune is out there, somewhere, just waiting on us to find it; a meteorological exhortation to persevere. I remember Sunday School lessons telling me, in grand detail, how the rainbow was the symbol of God's covenant with his people; that he would never flood the world again. Just hang in there, baby. Someday, these waters are going to part. A better day is coming. The rainbow is for gay pride: love will not be denied.
We've got collective narratives about rainbows; we've got personal narratives about rainbows. And I wonder how much of our experience of rainbows depends upon what narrative we're engaged with at the time we see the rainbow. Thinking "What would this mean to someone else?" Someone I know; a stranger. What would it mean to them. What could it mean to them?
At what point does the meaning supercede the moment? Story is a powerful thing. Who has time to stop and watch a rainbow? We don't need to tarry, Story tells us - you already know what that's about.
But let's say you stop, stop and watch the rainbow. The only way to deepen your understanding of anything is to pay attention to it. I didn't know that rainbows did this slow, pulsing dance; that they've patterns of existence, of being and not-being side by side stretched out across the sky - and maybe they all don't, but this one did - and I'd not known that before.
Now with this knowledge, look again to the symbol. Is it not enhanced? It's hard to maintain a belief that good fortune is out there somewhere; to remain ever optimistic. Our hope flickers at times - dim at times, bright at others. The same too, I think, can be said for the experience of faith - the two are not so different, after all - and our confidence in a promise can wax and wane. Love's journey has not been smooth.
And still it keeps on shining. There's a lesson, there, I think, but more important, now, to me, is to remember that seeing things as they are enriches their existence in Story. It's so easy to default to the symbol, to the shorthand, to the quick and easy understanding that we miss critical elements of the narrative.
It's too hard a turn anywhere from there, so I'll go now. There's work that needs doing, and I'm the one to do it. Onward, upward, forward, y'all.
