Rainbow High

"You wouldn't tell a toddler to never hope to reach the sink. Why would you tell yourself that you could only achieve that which you've already experienced? You are still developing, aren't you?...Your heart is the compass between the landscape of what you currently know and what you can yet know in your lifetime." --Tama Kieves

I realized after I read this that I really have been trying, rather hard, to achieve that which I've already experienced. I've been bemoaning the fact that I have "failed" in many ways because I didn't achieve the pinnacle of--what I now realize--is what I have already experienced. I have teeth in need of tending. I'm a little softer around the middle. I'm not the picture perfect superwoman, or at least the 21st century's definition of it.

Maybe those "failures" are simply signs that whatever experience was to be had is now earned, and there is an entirely new experience waiting to challenge and delight. Maybe I actually have indeed achieved what I needed to achieve, whether or not it may look that way. Each new experience is built upon the one that came before. It has it's own meandering trajectory, but it's the experience that is important, not necessarily the accolades.

I am attracted to the idea of listening to one's body and feeling the truth in one's heart. It's only recently that I've begun to think this of as tool, a compass, my true North. I truly believe that great things are afoot, even if they take form in the shape of only very small miracles.

Here's an example. I was on the subway going to my brother's house. The train goes above ground right before I'm supposed to get off, so I put my book away and looked outside.

There was a rainbow outside the window, so brilliant that a surprised "Oh my God!" escaped my lips. The man sitting across from me looked up, concerned. I said to him, "Do you see the rainbow?" And not only did he turn around, but everyone in the subway car did too. It was intensely bright--it didn't even look real. This is a rarity in NYC, but the fact that it arced across the entire sky was something I had never seen before in my fair city. I tried to snap some photos before it washed out of the sky:

And a little closer:

My rainbow companion (who I would find out later was named Jim) told me that it was "a good sign, a very good sign" to have this rainbow in our midst. Between the butterflies that have been following me, and now this rainbow, I don't know exactly what the message is, but I really, really like it.