Last night was a marker; today is a the outside world’s holiday.

It’s also a Monday, which seems, metaphorically, far more fitting to the day than anything celebratory. There are certainly no leprechauns in sight, never mind any pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

There isn’t even any rain to create one.

What we do have is wind, and plenty of it — the trickster winds of a spring as yet not officially here, the kind that transform a temperature of sixty-three into something that feels more like forty. These are nothing, of course, compared to what is forecast for tomorrow, but it’s more than enough to make it a hard day.

We do at least have some cloud cover — nothing comprehensive, and nothing holds any sort of precipitation, but it’s just enough to soften the sun’s harsh glare and a few of the day’s sharper edges. Outside the ground is bare of any snow, green slowly spreading; some of the trees are budding, but too many remain wholly bare.

They will be catalogued among this year’s losses, no doubt.

But speaking of rainbows, or more accurately, of the lack thereof, they sometimes arise in the unlikeliest of places and times. Over the last few years, we’ve had one or two appear in the west, even in the morning hours; one appear in early morning in the east, not a product of rain but of a departing snowstorm; and, of course, the one that appears above in the image that is the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation: and image of the fire, the smoke, and the rainbow of light.

Sometimes, these posts go somewhere entirely unexpected — nothing like I expected when I sat down to write, certainly. And sometimes, the images I choose are not about a given photograph’s quality, but rather, about the mysteries or magic, the messages or medicine [or all of the above] it might contain. Such was the case with my choice of the image originally; very often, I find myself building a week’s theme around one particular work, especially if it happens to be new, and both of those qualities apply to tomorrow’ featured work of wearable art. But sometimes, the images that frame such works are more important for what we find in them than for any artistic composition [or lack thereof], and that will be true of this week’s posts.

Perhaps it’s simply the time that it’s needed. After all, the whole world is on fire, and true evil, a word the world doesn’t often use seriously these anymore, surrounds us on all sides now. And it is unquestionably the case that we need to turn from shallow, superficial notions of “beauty” to find the deeper meanings — and the deeper, more substantive beauty — within that which this society so loves to scorn as inadequate or worthless.

And in a week whose posts are dedicated to the medicine of the flames, I find myself arrested by the unlikely sight of a rainbow born of smoke.

Wings shot this image in digital format almost two years ago exactly: April eleventh of 2023, to be precise. It was early on a spring day, the wintry chill still real enough to require a fire in both woodstoves first thing in the morning. He was headed upstairs, his phone in his hand, and from the midpoint on the lower flight, noticed the mysterious, haunting beauty of the room engulfed in cedar smoke, the flames just visible behind it and the light filtering through the window creating kaleidoscopic arcs in all the colors of the spectrum.

I should point out here that the smoke was not in fact emanating from the woodstove; rather, Wings had just smudged the room with a sprig of dried cedar. It produces an incredible amount of smoke for a few moments only, but the cleansing scent lingers in the air long after, and it’s one of the ways we begin our days.

In this image, the smoke produced an almost moiré effect, like one would see on so-called watered silk or taffeta. Water isn’t actually a part of the process, but we’ve come ot think of the descriptor as having to do with that element. And that’s not all that surprising, given that it’s a French word that translates as “watered,” or as “shimmering,” as with what occurs when the light hits ripples. Instead, in its English application, it has mostly to do with artifacts of geometry and light: what happens when patterns composed of lines, either straight or curved but not quite identical regardless of how they appear to the naked eye, are superimposed upon one another, creating this pattern we now think of as “watered,” like giant drops.

And that is, in fact, what has happened here. The morning sunlight filtered through double panes of glass, then through the swirling lines created in mid-air by the feathery effect of the smoke. The result is not only this mid-air moiré effect; it also combines the rays of light in such a way as to produce that which we tend to associate solely with water, the rainbow, although that is itself an artifact of Earth’s atmospheric conditions, not any specific to the light itself.

And, of course, this is no ordinary rainbow; these are full-spectrum bars of light bent into arcs that slice through the air, curving back in upon themselves.

In this particular image, the visible fire is confined behind the glass of the woodstove’s door; it plays no role in the production of the ephemeral lines and whorls floating before it. But there was a flame that ignited it, when Wings first lit the sprig on cedar to produce the purifying smoke or morning prayer, and so fire plays a definitive, elemental role in the image’s creation after all.

And it reminds us that fire is medicine, even beyond the warmth and illumination it provides. Fire purifies, cauterizes; it cleanses space for ceremony and sends our prayers aloft on its smoke. And sometimes, it creates an extraordinary, ethereal beauty that is a form of medicine itself.

Of course, fire’s force can be destructive, too. It’s why we can never afford to engage it with arrogance, to treat it cavalierly, to presume, with infinite hubris, that we can always bring it to heel.

It’s a lesson, in metaphorical form that has a way of becoming all too literal, that the current crop of fascists will come to know one day as they set fires everywhere with all the glee of the most recidivist of arsonists, taking an unholy joy in burning down institutions, lives, actual people too.

Our task now is to extinguish those fires even as we stoke the ones in our hearts and spirits that compel us to such acts of bravery. It will be hard; it will be terrifying; it will even be deadly for some of us. But we can find inspiration in the otherworldly beauty of the fire, the smoke, and the rainbow, and take comfort in doing the work of healing, even if we are not fortunate to live long enough to see the results ourselves.

That is, after all, what it means to live our lives for the well-being of the next seven generations, and beyond.

~ Aji

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2025; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.