Learning to See In Rainbows
Finding Joy in Contrast
We have imprisoned ourselves in a black and white version of the world. How do we evolve into the full-spectrum consciousness of the rainbow? How do we see what’s beyond the known colors?
Sight occurs in the brain. Our eyes are receptors, the organs of sight. Technically, they can receive the unknown rays of the spectrum the infrared and ultraviolet. Why aren’t they visible?
The problem abides in the brain. So does the solution.
We need to revitalize our imaginations. Put down the phones and learn to generate our own images. Repair the frayed synapses between left and right brain hemispheres.
Scientists describe the corpus callosum as white matter that connects the left and right brain hemispheres. Nowhere in the words “white matter” do I get the sense this is living tissue carrying electrical impulses back and forth, marrying logic and intuition in polyamorous splendor in order to create the perfect union of an embodied human soul.
Let’s change that.
Consider the rainbow:
In one familiar story it’s a covenant sent by God after a flood destroyed most of us to let us know he was still committed to us humans.
In other stories, the rainbow is a woman who carries messages between human and spirit realms.
In both stories, the rainbow is a metaphor, and metaphorical thinking is exactly what we need right now.
In one story God is a he, and a proper noun. He has no other name but God, and he sends the rainbow to uplift us after the cataclysm.
In other stories, the rainbow goddesses have names like Anuenue and Iris, and they themselves are the rainbow.
In both stories, the rainbow is a message, but in the second story, there is no separation between the message and its bearer. When we look at the rainbow in that story, we are seeing the goddess.
This is not a publication that favors the feminine over the masculine. I’m not trying to reclaim an ancient past, though I may refer to it sometimes, because there is deep wisdom there that can help us repair that hard, cracked bridge, so that we can walk across it with a spring in our steps toward an integrated future where we are imagining better possibilities for our world, while acknowledging the gifts of being able to create through a world of contrasts. Long live the binary. Let’s just allow ourselves to experience both sides so we can access the greatest potential of each one.
The way for us to do that, is for each one of us to see the rainbow ourselves. Stop outsourcing the spectrum to God and goddesses.
In the next story, we get to be the rainbow.
Metaphors are bridges, linking things that seem like they aren’t connected. When they land, they ring through us like temple bells whose sound keeps coming out of flowers once the ringing has stopped. (Thank you, Bashō.) When we hear the sound coming out of the flowers, we know we are part of something far greater than ourselves, and hopefully we appreciate our ears that enable us to hear the spiraling sound.
When we hear and see like this, we make the choices that will benefit the next generations. And we heal the generations before us, too.
We revitalize culture and begin to stand up taller, take pride in our accomplishments, no matter how small.
Nothing is small any more. In fact, nothing ever was. Everything matters.
When we understand our own lives as a story within many other stories, as a bridge between the human and many other realms, we begin to make the choices that can lead to happy endings for all. And by happy, I don’t mean endings that evoke only positive emotions.
One of my favorite living musicians, Nick Cave, said in an interview I watched this week, that joy is a complicated emotion, because it contains its opposite, despair. To me, the ability to experience the exultation of joy after experiencing despair, after abandoning yourself to the soul-wracking devastation of loss, is a happy ending. That is a tempered human, one who has been through the fire and become stronger for it, and who lives these truths with the self-evidence of simplicity, never denying that life, though it’s painful when you permit yourself to really be here, is a blessing.
We may not be successful in the ways we want, but when we live with this simple and painful truth as our guide, the spirit world knows we are paying attention. Feathers will drop in our paths. Mating hawks in the sky will cry out for us to look up and then disappear in the clouds on the mountain.
The Corpus Callosum Chronicles is my own excavation of mythic ground, my personal archaeological dig into the depths of my own consciousness and my culture’s. Thank you for being here. I hope my words feed the hungriest parts of yourself.
Are you ready for this journey? Pick up a shovel and be careful not to step on any bones! They are evidence of where we’ve been, and auguries of where we’re going.
Time to dig, my friends. Who knows what we’ll find? I used to hear rumors about an entire ocean inside the earth. Turns out, science now has evidence of it.
Our instruments of measurement and detection are catching up with what our ancestors once knew.
Now is the time of remembering, repairing, rebuilding, and finally, reimagining what the human experience is about.
Some things may be predestined, like the fact that this is a world of polarity, but that does not make us powerless or doomed. We get to choose. We get to wield swords of truths, and sometimes those swords look like feathers, sharp and light enough to lift us skyward.
To fly is a choice. It doesn’t matter if you have wings or not. Joy exists because there are shadows.
Knowing this, is the beginning of seeing in color.
The Dream of the Volcano is to Release the Rainbow in the Dark Cloud I knew it was long past time to wake up. The birds were just barely singing. I’d missed the daily aria, the uprise of song from the heart of the dark mountain. How do birds know when the sun will rise in the mountain’s shadow? The sun reaches the sea hours after it rises, pouring downslope to the sea like lava daring late sleepers to wake up and walk on it. Be the bird rising before the sun, the one who hasn’t missed her chance to join the song offered back to the heart of the mountain. What holds us to earth lives beneath the mountain. I want to remember that song, not to know my life by what I’ve missed. I will do what it takes to wake up. Walk over coals to the sea, offer my blistered feet to the rising. Rivers will be my guide in the rising. They will lead me to the mountain, and even if I die before I wake up, I will be remembered by the sea because I followed what my heart missed to the source of the song. And my blood sang, and the song carried all the memories of the sea back into the heart of the mountain, deep enough to anchor our rising. Offshore, the bell-buoy tolls, wake up. You have been missed by the dreaming volcano, and the mist dispersing the rainbow, rising— sunlight broken by the sea, released in song that stokes the fire in the mountain— It is time, wake up. We know the sea by how it falls and rises. What we miss keeps us from hearing the mountain. Remember the song—the colors are fading. Wake up. © Jennifer Lighty, 2024
Listen to an audio of the poem here:
Paid subscribers receive a PDF download of my 96-page book, Weaving a Basket of Words: How to Write a Poem to Carry Water. It will be sent to your email after you upgrade or take out a paid subscription. Thanks for supporting my work with a financial contribution!
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light
I continue to be blown away by the depth of your wisdom, the beauty with with you share it, and the synchronistic oracle that it offers to my life path. Mahalo nui loa!
I'm in the process of writing a children's book that shows us how other creatures see color (or not), so we can begin to notice that the physical human view of the world is only one of many. Some of us are actually color blind, and yet manta shrimp can see with 17 variations of light (rather than the 3 or 4 cones humans have been given). Seeing the world differently through various sets of lenses, perception, begs the metaphorical perspective, and invites us to open to other ways of seeing beyond our usual visual limitations. I love the invitation of this article you wrote as it pulls me out to explore seeing the world in more expanded ways and not assume that my limited perception is the truth. I love that you share your expanded view with the rest of us, so we can begin to put the puzzle pieces together to see the bigger picture that alone, we may miss in this holographic universe.
I have a comfortable fire pit with pupus that is an open invitation for mythic storytelling here in Kealakekua.
Love this so much. "In the next story, we get to be the rainbow." My 4-year old told me recently that we are all rainbows. Not just you and I and everyone, but everything alive is a rainbow. When he said that, I remember thinking, I want to live in your world! And now this wisdom from you too <3 Your writing always has a way of helping me believe and strive toward something very, very vibrant. Thank you!