Stepping Into Rainbows

My home environment is crucial to my well-being. It’s where my last thoughts of the day slip into dreams and my first thoughts in the morning surface. It’s where my everyday activities morph into routines, challenges, adventures. It’s my safe place to heal from physical or emotional hurt, my quiet retreat from aggressive marketing, both commercial and political. It’s my special little hidey-hole where sometimes rainbows play across my front room rug. When this happens, I often smilingly step a foot into their glorious hues, my way of claiming their promise of hope and good fortune –or simply as a celebration of gladness.

Sometimes I feel a little surge inside my diaphragm, a spontaneous joie de vivre that spreads upward to my heart then outward through my entire being. I’ve gone through dark times when I felt unrelenting sorrow, when my insides felt twisted and smashed against my spinal cord. When I wondered if I’d ever again feel an unrestrained spark of joy. In time, I always regain a sense of wonder and delight, the bedrock of my happiness. It taught me to believe that goodness can prevail over malevolence, that humanity’s lurching toward fairness and morality is not futile.

When we see rainbows after a downpour, they aren’t just arcs in the sky –they’re actually full circles. NASA says that from the air, the entire 360-degree circle is visible. They’re created when light bounces inside a raindrop and back out again. In my ever-imagining mind, this explanation extrapolates to my stubborn conviction that teardrops can come full circle into joy, given enough time –and distance from the distraction of earthbound uncertainties.

A rainbow showing up on my rug is created when light passes through the beveled edge of glass on my coffee table which acts like a prism. Not as glorious as a 360-degree rainbow circle, I’ll take it just the same! Stepping into it, I might even do a little dance of delight, thankful that such a vivid array of colors momentarily found its way into my life.