Today has dawned in a rainbow of light: brilliant sun, no haze in the air, almost no wind, either. Before the afternoon is out, we are supposed to have the rain itself, the seasonal monsoonal variety, but for now, the only indication of potential weather is the tops of the thunderheads forming and reforming behind the peaks, sunlit from behind like puffy silver hearts.
One of the great gifts of the rainy season here is the dance of rain and light. This sky has a capacity for rainbows unrivaled anywhere else I’ve ever been.
The same light that creates them is the same light that convinced a colonizing horde that they had found the legendary Cities of Gold here, the same light that transforms the old villages adobe walls by turns from matte brown clay to gold, amber, copper fire in the descending glow of sunset.
It’s air so thin, so pure and sharply clear, that it creates “rainbows” in the sky in the dead of winter: sun dogs, standing tall in the arc of the light. It’s a function of both elevation and desert aridity, one that permits dry air before, during, and after the flooding rains of summer. Here, “it’s so humid” is the complaint on any day when the humidity passes the eleven-percent threshold.
It’s also how rainbows get made in the absence of rain here. A little water from a sprinkler, a bit of glass, even clear plastic will do it. The image above, long one of my favorites, is one Wings captured on his workbench a couple of years ago. The workbench sits just to the side of a small window; his anvil is just below the window itself. At any given moment, strands and ropes of beads and leather hang from hooks in the windowsill; stones and cabochons and bits of silver stud its surface. And every now and then, the afternoon light falls at just the right angle to catch the faceted glass ornament suspended there in the midst of all the materials of his work.
On this day, he had been creating, by hand, repoussé hearts to be used in overlay work. Unlike flat silver hearts, these are three-dimensional, not two-; puffy, not plain. He was planning to use them in a particular work, and having just finished their creation, had left them scattered in a small array on his workbench, awaiting their turn, while he moved on to the next step.
And then the light fell.
It doesn’t happen every day. It requires both glass and light to be at just the right angles to each other at the right moment. Rarer still was the chance that hearts like miniature clouds would be lying directly in the path of the light. But on this day, it happened, and even more unlikely, he was there to capture it.
It is not only the sky here that has a capacity for rainbows.
In such dark days, it’s good to remember this. We live daily with the great gift of the light; it can light our spirits anywhere.
~ Aji
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