Texas Meditations

by Michael Gos

In the Colors

Seabrook, Texas  

The universe speaks to us in archetypes—primitive mental images whose meaning we inherit from our earliest human ancestors.  

Take the rainbow, for example.  In Western culture we generally recognize it as a symbol of a promise (next time, the earth will be destroyed by fire), as a gateway to another world (Dorothy’s trip over the rainbow), or as something to follow because there is a treasure located at the end.  But those are all pop culture interpretations and they are probably a far cry from the true meanings we really recognize when we see a rainbow.  Archetypes touch a deeper, more visceral understanding in us.  And at that primitive, ancestral level, the rainbow means something very different.

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I was sitting by the pool in my backyard, contemplating relocating to Hill Country.  I always loved the small town and country environments there and the rolling landscape.  Recently, two hurricane evacuations and some serious damage after Ike had me thinking that maybe living this close to the water might not be such a great idea as I get older.  It had been raining all morning, but the sun had finally come out and, like always, I came outside with it.

Like everyone else, I have seen countless rainbows in my life—even several doubles.  But as I looked out over the lake I saw something I never knew was even possible.  I saw the end of a rainbow dropping onto the waters of Lake Mija not 200 yards from my dock.  Knowing no one would ever believe me, I ran into the house, grabbed my camera and shot as many photos as I could before it vanished.

While the sight of the rainbow was fleeting, its effects were not.  For months I was haunted by the event and what it could mean.  How many of us ever get to see what is at the end of the rainbow.  I did—and it was my backyard!  My initial feeling was that my question had been answered.  The treasure at the end of the rainbow was my home.  Leaving here, even for a life in my beloved Texas Hill Country, was out of the question.

But that was a couple of years ago and since then, things have happened that have made me start to rethink my original interpretation of the encounter with the rainbow.  First, there was a faint, but persistent discomfort.  I know that if I had the right understanding of the rainbow’s message, if I was supposed to stay right here on this lake, I would be at peace with it.  I would have absolute comfort in knowing that I was meant to be here forever.  But I don’t.  

Whether it will happen by my choice or the force of circumstance I can’t say, but to this day I continue to feel I’m not going to stay here forever.  There is somewhere else for me in the future.

If that feeling is right—and I believe we should all trust those kinds of feelings—how do I explain my encounter with the rainbow?  Was it just a coincidence?  I am greatly suspect of anyone who could have such a transcendent experience and simply write it off as no more than a random occurrence of a common scientific phenomenon. I knew that it was an important event.  But none of the traditional Western interpretations seemed to fit the situation.  That left only one possibility—the rainbow must have a different meaning.   The message of this symbol still waited to be discovered. 

It may seem obvious, but it took me several months to wrap my thinking around the idea that rainbows have two ends.  What if the treasure interpretation really did have validity, only the treasure was at the other end of the rainbow?  Then what I was looking at that afternoon on Lake Mija might be the place where the journey begins, where you get on the path that leads to the treasure at the other end.  Maybe from here my job is to follow the rainbow to wherever it takes me, having faith that what it holds at the other end is the treasure I’m looking for.  Perhaps that is the true meaning of the rainbow archetype—it shows us the path we need to take in life.  If that is so, where I stood now was my starting point. 

Just as the sun after a rain makes the colors of the world so much more brilliant, a shift in my perspective on the meaning of the end of the rainbow made my sense of what the rainbow was telling me come together.  I realized that all those interpretations we put on the rainbow might be entirely wrong.  It is more than just a path to follow.  When I was there, experiencing the rainbow up close and personal, the feeling I had was clear.  The rainbow was a metaphor for life itself.

Like the rainbow, our lives begin at ground level; in a sense we arise from the earth.  For a long time we are climbing skyward as we move laterally through time.  At some point, we come to our peak, be it in terms of advancement, income, accomplishments or happiness.  Once we hit that peak, we begin a long, slow, but beautiful descent back toward the earth from which we came.  The rainbow captures that shape perfectly.  It is more than just a symbol.  It is a picture of life itself.

I’m not sure why, but today, I suspect there is no treasure at the other end of that rainbow—only the earth.  Rather, the gift of the rainbow, the treasure, is the rainbow itself.  It is the time we spend inside the colors.  It is life.

Seeing the end of the rainbow in Lake Mija that morning was indeed a message.  There is no more time to sit around waiting. It’s time to get started on the next stage of life.