Standing at the Foot of the Rainbow

The rainbow has long been a symbol of hope. The fact that there is not a pot of gold at the end of it has never stopped me from scanning the horizon to try to pinpoint exactly where every rainbow I have ever seen ends (or is that begins?) You want it to be magical. Perhaps, because you can only see one if the sun is behind you and the rain is in front. So a rainbow's magic is in reminding us that even when the rest of what we see is grey and we're not aware of the sun, a brighter future is all ready there, even if only in outline.

I'd like to think that our lives are one big rainbow, incorporating good and bad, dark and light, melding together the various character strands that shape the roles we perform in our daily lives; a symbol of hope. Sometimes, however, the edges appear a little frayed or overstretched, that's where "thrums" comes in. It's a word I first came across at university, starring as the fictional village setting of J M Barrie's kailyard fiction, thrums being the loose ends of thread in the loom.

It's a word that resonates for me. Life gets messy. There are lots of loose ends. Sometimes, things, people and even the stories we tell ourselves can get in the way of who we were meant to be and the life we thought we were supposed to lead. We can't see the beautiful rainbow our lives are weaving, because we are so tied up and consumed by fretting over the individual thrums that are closest at hand. But it is the ends of the rainbows that have the most potential. Its the place from which we start to weave our own rainbows.

In recent years, in my own life, I have been overwhelmed by the threads and unable to see the rainbow, let alone feel I was living it. This year I a going to make a conscious choice to weave my own rainbow and live the strands, rather than try to resist them.

Day one - 10.30am, 1 January 2019

A Personal Challenge for 2019

One part of doing this will be to take a photograph of the same spot on the Water of Leith every day for a whole year and use this as a moment of daily reflection, which I will share here. I hope that in seeing the seasons come and go, acknowledging the minute changes that occur almost imperceptibly from day to day, it will help me to step back and appreciate the full ridiculous beauty of my life.

So today, while the family either dozed or lived vicariously through Youtube, I took my first trip down to take the slimmer's equivalent of a before photo. It's a short walk; the quiet of our street, quieter still because it is the New Year, followed by the steady burble of traffic on the main road. And yet here on that self same busy thoroughfare is the Water of Leith, where turned one way you are in the heart of nature (albeit framed in the photo by the canal and railway bridge), turn around and it is a busy city street. 

Such is our life. It holds so much. Stillness and chaos in every moment. Until tomorrow, then . . .