My first understanding of the rainbow in early childhood came through the flood story in the Old Testament. The rainbow’s origin was a sign of God’s covenant to never destroy all life on earth with a global flood again. It’s a wild tale that became increasingly quaint as I grew older and questioning, and learned more about science and history.
How can you not love a rainbow? You’d have to be a jaded misanthrope
to not appreciate the visual beauty of the natural phenomenon of the rainbow.
But the rainbow is maligned in our culture. In some circles, celebrating the rainbow can symbolize a misguided embrace of inclusion and diversity, multiculturalism, political correctness.
“Rainbows and unicorns” is a pejorative phrase deployed to demean an ideal or a belief that someone finds overly optimistic. Lately it’s used to simplistically diminish progressive political perspectives that seem untenable to those tethered to a utilitarian approach to life.
Unicorns, I understand, but why do you have to hate on the rainbow like that?
The Muppets laid it down for me as a kid. It was a perfect distillation of a rainbow reflection.
Someday we’ll find it
The rainbow connection
The lovers, the dreamers and me
There is always room for a new world order of puppets & optimism, or believing in the rainbow’s promise to spirit us away from world-weariness into an elevated sphere of grace. Maybe I’m chasing rainbows, as some of my more pragmatic friends say, but the rainbow is a sign of hope. A sign of searching for something seemingly unobtainable, but still recognizable.
We were watching a political debate recently, glued to the screen and engaged in a vigorous discussion with friends. We are all junkies for this stuff, even though there’s rarely anything new to digest…but then we saw a double rainbow from the living room window. In a double rainbow, a second arc is seen outside the primary arc, and has the order of its colours reversed, with red on the inner side of the arc. It’s a sign of good luck. A sign of an auspicious future.
I was rather ecstatic. Not quite as ecstatic as the viral sensation double rainbow guy, but close. It was the most emotional response I’ve had to a rainbow. It caught me off guard. I don’t usually have an emotional response to something like this, or many things, really. Or maybe I do, when I get past the bromides and the platitudes we hear daily about hope.
I’m cynical, but not pessimistic. My cynicism springs from a source of idealism.
My thoughts can sink and fester in a dark place. I let them go there, but I don’t leave them unattended.
I’ve been struggling my entire life to free myself from the manacles of someone else’s values. I’m always searching to find a more enlightened way of kindness and understanding.
As a dad now I have a responsibilty to instruct, inform and communicate honestly without inculcating them. And I have a duty to embrace the wonderment of the world around us–a duty to sustain love and kindness.
I’ve never loved a double rainbow as much as I did that night. We found a great service where we could print the image and frame it and hang it on our wall as reminder that life can be dreary and confounding, but somewhere over that rainbow, there is a world of possibilites we will always embrace.