Ramblings for Rainbows

The woman in the kayak is wet with raindrops. So is the man. We are adrift in these waters, two people let loose under the beauty of a pink Florida sunset. Nothing matters out here. Except maybe a family of birds mysteriously ignoring our stale breadcrumbs dissipating in the brackish water. I think of my favorite poem of all time, "Wild Geese", by Mary Oliver.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Everytime I read it, I get chills. Kayaking in the rain with the person you love most in the world for me is like a movie moment. It's like when you have this overwhelming feeling that you are playing out a story, and this is the romantic scene. You listen for the music, for it to swell loud as a soundtrack, but all you hear are the crickets chirping, the swish of the oars, the soft breathing of your lover.

I'm fully aware of my movie moment, everything in me is alive and full of the world. The world is not too much with us, as Wordsworth so narrow-mindedly opined. It is not with us enough most of the time. We have to go out and find it. And when nature opens her arms to me, I am eager to accept this embrace. Except if bugs are involved. I'm sort of sick of bugs and their landing whereever they want, biting whoever they want, crawling around on food at any given opportunity and having the audacity to alight on me when I was on the train yesterday. Bugs have some balls when you really stop and think about it. I'm more than ready for their extinction, no matter what ecologic consequences their absence might assign.

Anyway, the real movie moment when in my kayak on this rainy evening, transpired when for no apparent reason God saw fit to send me a peace offering...this rainbow clear across the sky, like a combination of dewy jewels, or a box of crayons dripping with tears. It's a small consolation prize for all the shit God's allowed to befall me the past few years, not to mention the existence of bugs that he still has to answer for. But it's something, and my forgiveness is easily bought, especially when the currency is rainbows.

You do not have the monopoly on adoring rainbows Lindsey . And as we have previously discussed, this affection does not make us lesbians. As for me, whenever I start to wonder if I have leanings in the Sapphic direction, I just have to have sex one time and I'm back to loving men all over again. I love so many things about them - things I will not detail here because I'm a really private person. Did your beverage come flying out of your nose from laughing too? Privacy is for cowards. Or for the mentally sane. I haven't decided yet. But either way, if no one was willing to lay it all out there and take a risk the world would be a pretty boring, Stepford place.

I used to conspire to take back the rainbow. Afterall, it was commandeered by the homosexual community without even asking the rest of humanity if that was okay. Not cool, gay people. Not cool. I've had some arguments with my gay friends about this issue, but in the end we agreed to disagree. And in the scheme of things, it is a small concession to not begrudge a battered and brave population such glorious representation. And I don't think my opinion matters much anyway. I'm like an army of one. And my only weapon is words. "The pen is mightier than the sword" is a phrase oft-quoted but really void of meaning. I get the spirit of it, and the idea of words being more powerful than violence is quaint and all. But in reality if you literally tried to fight off a sword with words, you'd probably end up with a stab wound through the skull. The guy who wrote that is an idiot, and the idiot, according to Wikipedia is a guy named Edward Bulver-Lytton. And get this:

From Wikipedia: Despite his popularity in his heyday, today his name is known as a byword for bad writing. San Jose State University's annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad writing is named after him.

Isn't that hilarious? That little snippet gave me more joy than seeing a thousand rainbows could ever bring. That's what he gets for having two last names.