You are the Rainbow

I woke up before dawn and drove up the windy deserted back road to the secluded waterfall.

Snoqualmie Falls, in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State had been a favorite place of mine since I was a child, long before it had become the tourist attraction it is today.

Although I had visited the falls scores of times throughout my childhood, still it was a magical and meditative place for me.

While later in the day there would be crowds of visitors, snapping pictures and enjoying the beauty of nature, no one would be visiting at this early hour. The sun had yet to rise and the area was deserted.

I had the falls to myself along with the woodland creatures who lived there.

I walked up the path to the area created for sightseers to get the most spectacular view; an overlook that reached out over the falls. It was created to give the illusion that there was nothing beneath you and it certainly achieved its purpose.

This particular Spring day was the perfect day to see the falls in all their glory. The water poured over the rocky ledge providing any onlooker with the full effect of the power and glory of a waterfall.

As often as I have visited Snoqualmie Falls, I will never get used to its majesty or magic.

The roar of the water was deafening; much louder that the roar of a jet plane, it surrounded me and I felt it vibrate into my soul.

The power of the water falling was so intense that the spray burst several hundred feet high. Within moments I became completely drenched from the spray of the water as it splashed onto the rocks at the bottom of the cliff.

The sky was getting lighter and I knew dawn was about to break. I found myself not wanting to move and and shut my eyes to experience the falls without sight.

As I opened my eyes, there was the sun brilliantly rising from behind the waterfall.

There in front of me was the largest rainbow I had ever seen. I felt like I was in the rainbow, or the rainbow was me. The rainbow wasn't out there across the horizon, but in and on me. I was a part of it.

In a flash of awareness, I realized how similar this rainbow is to our human experience on this planet.

We look at a rainbow as a thing, out there somewhere, but in truth it is the image we see as billions of tiny drops of moisture reflect light. Each little drop has the totality of the experience, yet as these little drops comes together they brighten our world with their collective reflections.

So too in our world. Each of us is the reflection of light. We are not separate from the experience of light but are the manifestation of its energy and beauty.

While in a rainbow, each drop of moisture transforms the suns energy into color, we each transform the suns energy into our life.

Everything, EVERYTHING we bring forth in our lives is a demonstration of how we are transforming the sun's energy.

Like the water droplets, we are a means to take the light and bring forth something new. We can transform energy into a smile, an act of kindness, a poem, or a gentle touch.

In fact, there is nothing that exists on our planet that is not a transformation of the sun's energy.
While we have yet to discover how much choice other life forms have in their use of energy to create, as humans we have the sense that through consciousness and awareness we can decide how we want to transform energy, and what we want to bring forth on this Earth and into the Universe.

What I believe is that like little droplets each of us is part of something more grand than we can imagine.

Together we create the Rainbow.




This event happened several years ago while I was living in the Northwest. Today I live in Virginia.