Rainbows are Reliable

And FINALLY to my rainbow story!

Maybe you know this already, but I didn't and if you're a naturalist 'beaver' like me ;) and don't know how to tell the time with rainbows I have a story that links rainbows with Moshe's understanding of how 'we think with our bodies'.

But just before I tell you how my body got me thinking about rainbows I need to share a little Feldi Philosophy.

Moshe says "you can't think without a body." And sometimes I hear that and wonder if I agree. I rattle on thinking all the time and it seems pretty disembodied?! But Moshe would not call that kind of 'rattling' thinking. For him thinking is not the cacophony of noise or the roundabout chaos we experience between our ears. For him that kind of thinking is dysfunctional, and of course, I have to agree.

That kind of thinking could be likened to having a muscle cramp, a twitch, a spasm or even a convulsion - it's not really what we mean when we talk about using muscles to move. For Moshe "if thinking doesn't change your action it's not thinking it's palaver... it's cerebration... it's dysfunctioning."

Let's take a moment to consider thinking more deeply. When we are born we do not have an inbuilt way thinking, or a language to think with and the reality is that from infancy all our learning is experiential.

We wire our brain and our thoughts into being through our senses, through our movements, and through our experiences. And if I grow up in say the Arctic, Ethiopia or India I would learn to think entirely uniquely for that place. I would be of that place.

We learn up from down, love from disgust, success from failure through our bodies, and there definitely is no left or right without a body. People who struggle with left and right don't have an embodied sense of the concept and so it remains an abstraction of little use.

Our posture, our actions, what we see and hear, and the wash of feelings that courses through our blood confirm our thoughts, but our body is also our conduit to the world and it provides the fruit for our thinking.

And we know this because we can feel clearly in our bodies our thoughts. Think of relaxing by the pool with a citrus minty mocktail (or something stronger!) and you'll feel it, think of driving in peak hour traffic while running late for a specialist appointment that costs $550 and you will feel it.

Thoughts are actions in miniature.

In reality, thinking, moving, sensing and feeling are not divisible.
 
But my recent experience with rainbows proved to be a great example of how my body woke up my pre-frontal cortex and got me thinking.

And so to the story....

Last year I moved to the seaish side suburb of Hamilton Hill, or Hami Heaven as one client calls it, I have been enjoying a serendipitous immersion in nature.

Over the winter months, I'd wake up and head out the front door for a gust of fresh sea air. And as I gazed out over my ramshackle suburbian vista oft to my delight, I'd see a rainbow.

Ahh what a way to start the day!

There it would be as if waiting for me to bear witness to its brilliance... and yet funnily enough it seemed always to be floating over the western side of the sky...

Now of course after being pleasantly surprised to see my rainbow westward each morning I started to wonder why is the rainbow in the same place every morning waiting for me?! I thought rainbows were spontaneous, random acts of universal magic! Not clockwork phenomena I could rely on.

And that's when I realised while rainbows are magical they are also predictable.

They are a kind of unicornian sundial of the sky and actually, I can tell the time of day by a rainbow. And if I know the time and it starts to rain I can look in known direction to see if a rainbow would appear.

But then this also means rainbows can never be in the Northern aspect of the sky. Because what I now realise, and of course it's obvious, but rainbows are always opposite the sun, and our sun is in the North.

And so my reliable rainbow is always West in the morning, South at lunch, and East as the sun heads to Africa.

And while the bottom arc of a rainbow may dip its toes into the north in the morning and early eve, I could never stand facing the North and see a rainbow. Unless of course, I went to England or Russia or Greenland, but then they would never see rainbows in their South.

And so actually rainbows are way more predictable than I had ever imagined.

Magical yes, but also reliable.

But also I can never drive under a rainbow because to see a rainbow I must be between the sun and the rainbow, like a piggy in the middle. My poised suspension between the 2 is an essential ingredient and my rainbow would vanish if I got close, although someone behind me might still see it.

And of course, it is MY rainbow, because rainbows are a unique gift for their viewer, and what I see someone else may not, because each of us sees the rainbow only because of our unique suspension between sun and rain.

And so in fact I am an essential ingredient in every rainbow.

All because I walked out my front door, faced west, eyes tipped heavenward, my brain woke up and started a whole neural explosion of learning.

Oh how lucky we are to have a body!
 
May rainbows surprise you a few more times before we say goodbye to the Southern rains.

Blessings everyone