OUR MIDWEEK MEDITATION: RAINBOWS

The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put
up with the rain.
- Dolly Parton

Where I live, in the hills behind Byron Bay, it rains – a lot.

I never thought, having moved from the small, grey, rainy island of my birth, that I would end up living somewhere in this mostly dry continent where two driza-bones, and two pairs of gumboots would be not a luxury, or a fashion statement, but a necessity.

But there is an upside to the amount of downward precipitation we endure – and that’s the astonishing amount of rainbows that colour our skies. Not for nothing are we known as the Rainbow region up here in the Northern Rivers.

The other morning I experienced a small moment of rainbow magic when I was walking my dogs along the side of the lake in the macadamia farm below my house. I’d gone through several showers already by the time I got to the lake, and I was feeling damp in body and damp in spirit, when suddenly, there it was – the most magnificent rainbow, curved right beside me – it seemed only metres away.

I could see its beginning and its end, and there I was bang-slap in the middle of it.

Well, it doesn’t take much for me to sing the rainbow song. Over 30 years of parenting have got it pretty firmly fixed in my brain, so I opened my arms and my lungs and shouted out to the sky: red and yellow and pink and green, purple and orange and blue, I can sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow too.

Actually the words, I’m sorry to say, are not quite accurate. In 1872, Newton named five primary colours of the rainbow – red, yellow, green, blue and violet, but later he added indigo and orange, comparing the seven colours to the seven notes on a musical scale. Or in my case the not-so-musical scale.

But I guess indigo doesn’t sound quite the same in there, and there has been (apparently) controversy for centuries about indigo because she simply doesn’t have the same colour-rating as the others. As a lowly tertiary colour, she’s lucky got a look in.

My beautiful, personal, just-for-me rainbow got me thinking as well as singing.