The rainbow taught me Persistence.
The crayons lay in a box. There were a lot of colors, and that was how I liked it. I started with a red crayon. I checked the paper label: “R-E-D”. Good, this would be red, the first color of the rainbow. I carefully stroked the red crayon in an arc from the bottom left corner of my white paper to the center at the top, and then down to the lower right corner. I held the sheet of white paper in front of me and inspected the clarity and boldness of my drawing so far. Satisfied, I added a curve running parallel to my first arc using an orange crayon. I proceeded with yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. I tore a piece of clear Scotch tape and folded it into a loop, stuck it onto the back of my masterpiece, and attached the rainbow to the wall of the family room. I stared at my artwork. A four-year-old, I dreamed of becoming an artist. I had faith in my talents, especially if I could already draw such pretty rainbows. Yet, whenever I looked at my art a second time, flaws would begin to rise to the surface. The arcs were not symmetrical, the orange was too thick, the violet looked too much like the indigo. So, the rainbow was re-drawn on a new sheet of white paper, re-attached to the wall, re-examined, and re-drawn again. Until it reached a level of satisfaction. A near-perfect rainbow drawing completed, I would take a break for the day.
The rainbow taught me Unity in Diversity.
Sunlight shone on the leaves crushed into the earthen floor and traveled softly through the mazes of shadows. Splotches of green had persisted on some of the leaves as remnants of the summer. Then, brown haze and orange haze and red haze all over again. All I saw were colors, lines, dots, and reflections of light. Everything was, and yet everything ceased to be. All was one and one was everything and anything – I was slowly beginning to… see.
The Gift of Seeing, reserved for the most talented of artists.
Perhaps I was just forcing myself to see.
No. I am not “forcing” myself to see anything.
It simply “comes” to me. I’m just artistically oriented.
Or was scientific knowledge interfering with my artistic viewpoint?
Rainbows. They are just white light that is split, and then perceived by receptors in our eyes. When we see the sky, it is only blue because nitrogen and oxygen molecules that make up 99% of the atmosphere scatter short blue light the best, and we perceive the sky as blue. The longer wavelengths are seen when the source of light - the Sun - is in line with our vision, and so we see a redder Sun, the oranges reflected by air molecules to give a sunset. When we see plants, their chlorophyll absorb red and blue light, having evolved to absorb the light that is most abundant (red) and the light that contains the most energy (blue). When they reflect green light, we perceive the plant leaves as green.
God did not paint the world with different colors.
Different colors are only due to reflections and absorption of different wavelengths of the same electromagnetic waves.
I wanted, with all my heart, to perceive the world like an artist. I wanted to see the world to sense the world to know the world to... Ah. Be the world. And in the process of seeing the world and sensing the world and knowing the world, I would know my place in the world, I would know that I am merely a fragment of the same world that everyone else is a piece of. I would know that we share elements in our composition… That we are each nothing but a strange mixture of hues and shades; the differences we notice among each other are more often than not merely reflections of different wavelengths of light against different media. The true differences between us… I want to understand.
