The Woof of a Rainbow

 Last night after the storm I was standing in the backyard on a hillside gazing at a new rainbow, expecting it to fall on my head at any moment.

My dog turned away quickly to face the house. I spun around and saw my landlord and his dog, out for their evening constitutional. I waved my arm to him and pointed to the sky behind me. He ran back into the house.

He wasn't frightened of the rainbow, as I was, but was calling for his four-year-old son to come out and see it.

Soon he and the boy were making their way out to view the colorful arch in the sky. I quickly went into my apartment and grabbed a camera.

He took pictures with his phone and I snapped away with my small but powerful compact camera.

"That's the best rainbow I've ever seen," my landlord said.

I looked at it from several angles and multiple ways, trying to find the right composition in the camera. I snapped away, taking too many pictures. Then I just decided to enjoy it and forget about the danger of it falling on me.

That was pretty silly.

The landlord explained to his son that the rainbow was formed when the water droplets remaining in the sky after the storm caught the light of the setting sun. I added that the droplets broke up the sun's rays into the colors, like a prism.

It was a little too much for the boy. He lost interest and stomped around in the many and various mud puddles. Our lectures were lost in those mud puddles.

What did he care how the beautiful arch in the sky was formed? People are always trying to explain things, sometimes to their detriment, so perhaps the boy was right to ignore us. The ancients thought rainbows were formed when the messengers of the gods left a trail of color behind them. That's a pretty story, perhaps preferable to our story of droplets and prisms.

There are plenty of other explanations of rainbows, some scientific and others just silly.

We poke and prod everything, and thereby diminish the intensity of experience.

John Keats, the English poet, had an explanation for our explanations.

Do not all charms fly,

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:

We know her woof, her texture; she is given

In the dull catalogue of common things.

Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings.

Keats was not referring to our canine companions when he talked about the woof of the rainbow, but its substance. Our dogs, by the way, were perfectly happy just to exist with us, but they did not experience the rainbow on our level. They barely knew it was there. They barely knew its woof.

So maybe there is a middle ground of knowing, when we experience most intensely without getting caught up in the details.

Maybe it's enough simply to gaze at the glories of nature without needing to stomp around in mud puddles after trying to consume too much information about them.

Go find your own rainbow.

Look at it as you will.

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