Look up

a wondrous rainbow moment

I often look up between sentences or paragraphs as my pen travels across my Morning Pages, cup of coffee at hand and most always the morning antics of the cat on a full tummy.

An audible expression of wonder escaped as I was stunned by the view out the windows that keep me connected to nature on their other side.

This was not an ordinary rainbow. The effect from the way my phone took the photo makes it look much lighter than it was. It was barely sunrise. In fact, I was so startled and awed by the brightness of the rainbow in what was only beginning daylight that I went to look out an east window to see if the sun was coming up. Barely. It was merely peeking over the horizon.

There also had been no rain, though it rained later. It was a tricky rainbow, showing up first rather than during or after rain.

I felt like it said to me, “THIS is how we are going to start November together.”

I looked at what I had been in the process of writing when the rainbow appeared, and by the way, lasted for a full 20 minutes, the longest I have ever observed. Usually, the color begins to fade quite quickly, but this one wanted to stay. It wanted me to sink into it.

Three thoughts were on the pages. One was a brief comment that while reading The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt, it seemed like in a more general way, outside the theme of this book, I wanted to put an “s” on “generation.” For in the current climate and via many conversations, there is a feeling of anxiety that crosses more than one generation. A book of its own, perhaps.

A second thought was around a word that popped into my head that morning – combo. I was thinking about how the days are filled with combos of all kinds, some that go together and some that seem not to be in any type of alignment. Our lives, our days, are filled with combos of all kinds and many combos of feelings to go with them.

Which led me to the part I was writing when I looked up to find the rainbow looking in the window. I was writing about distractions and had written in capital letters, “WHAT IS IT THAT I WANT MOST TO BE DISTRACTED BY?” I know, grammatically, I probably should have written, “By what do I most want to be distracted?” but Morning Pages do not demand that.

Some of the words I wrote were joy, attunement to beauty, the antics of Cilla, the ability to write and think and sift and sort, to be kind and loving, to believe we are rising above old paradigms that are deeply outdated and moving into a world where the combos are vastly different.

That we create a world where the combos offered and the combos we create feed and nourish our souls, individually and collectively.

I ended by writing a note of thanks to the rainbow. Not all of my dreams have come true, as the lyrics to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” speak of, and I have wished on a few of them.

This one, however, felt different on behalf not of a personal wish but a wish for this world. A world to which I bring the best of who I am and that together, we bring all of our “bests.” If we do, I believe we can diminish the anxiousness in all generations.

I invite us to join together all around the world.