Heroes Not Zombies

You know those moments when you’re walking in bright sunshine and suddenly the world seems to go dark? You look up and a cloud has drifted in front of the sun. How long will it take to pass? If it’s a cloud with pretty definite visible edges you know it might not be too long. If it’s one that stretches from one horizon to the other, well, it’s probably going to be a while….maybe even not until tomorrow.

When I looked up to see what was going I saw this cloud. Wow, does it look BLACK! But immediately behind it I could see a bright white one too….one of those times which confirms the old saying about every cloud having a silver lining. In fact, on this occasion it was so striking, I decided to take a photo.

But, wait!

What’s that above these clouds? It’s a rainbow of colours! Faint, delicate, and more like paint on the cloud than a proper rainbow, but clear as anything. Isn’t it beautiful? I haven’t altered this photo at all and maybe it doesn’t quite capture the intensity of the colours, but they weren’t actually very intense at all. Just a hint. A bit more than a suggestion. If I’d been concentrating only the contrasts between the black and the white clouds, I might have missed it.

I look at this again now and it sets off a few thoughts….there’s the silver lining first of all, and in this week with the news full of Donald Trump and Brexiteers I’m glad to be reminded of silver linings…..just not entirely sure what they are yet!

But it’s the colour spectrum which really fires my imagination. It’s as if it is literally reminding me that the universe is diverse, that it contains many more colours than we may be aware of, that it manifests a greater range of complexity and beauty the more closely we look. The contrast between the coloured area and the black and white one, inspires me again to remember that reality is rarely, if ever, “either this or that”. Everything we see, everything we hear, everything we experience lies on a spectrum of ever evolving, ever developing difference.

Those who try to convince us that the world can be divided into “us” and “them” are proven wrong every day by the rich manifestation of uniqueness which refuses to be stuffed into one of two boxes.