Gotta have Rain for Rainbows~

Artist Unknown

Yesterday, was one of those difficult days. The kind of day, in which one can easily forget how very beautiful this world is. Or at least that's how I was feeling, coming home on a dark and rainy afternoon, standing on a wet sidewalk, waiting to cross a slippery street.

My eyes were welling up with unstoppable tears. In that poetic moment of sadness I convinced myself that the whole world was feeling my pain and even the sky was crying. As for the cause of my tears, well, I cannot say that there was some rational cause for such an intense welling up of emotion, a good reason to suffer so to speak. All I know, is that there was a deep sadness inside me, wanting to be known, and sometimes this is reason enough.  A little self indulgence from time to time is par for the course, I think.

It was in this very moment, that I said to myself, "oh come now Nao, it's not so bad, think of one good thing about this day, just one." And, despite the fact that I knew there was something, that indeed there were lots of good and wonderful things, I couldn't actually find one to sooth the ache in my heart. That's when a man on a bicycle said to me (and a small group of others also waiting to cross the street) he said, look behind you, look at that rainbow.

And just then the street light changed, and everybody rushed off. No one turned around to look at the rainbow, except me. I turned, and I looked, and I saw two beautiful rainbows stretching across the sky, wrapped in golden light.  

I just stood there for a long time looking and looking. The more I looked, the more I remembered all the beautiful things about this world. The more I remembered, the more I laughed.  Soon I was standing all alone looking crazy as a loon, laughing and crying at the same time, the poetry of the moment getting better by the second.  For there I was, doing what the sky was doing. For that brief moment my tears and my joy were mixing like the sun and the rain. 

It has been said that alchemy happens when opposites mix.  That there is a kind of ultimate union, a wholeness of the most holy kind when fire and water can meet and transform.

And that's when it occurred to me to look all around, before I decide that there is nothing good about any of it. Sometimes there are rainbows behind us and we don't even know it.

Just then, in the middle of my poem, a man in his 60's walked by smiling in a long raincoat, and he said to me, "isn't it one of the best ones you've ever seen."

And I looked at him with a face streaming with tears and a smile as stretchy as the rainbow in the sky, and I said, "Yes, yes, it is."