Over a rainbow

“I have some of the best people as a part of my world.”

When I was little I thought rainbows meant a baby had been born. I would look at those colors stretched across a giant sky and beam, wondering if the rainbow had been out for me when I was born in those wee hours of a spring morning. I still wonder, even though I know the rainbow has nothing to do with babies born. And yet, sometimes I wonder. Rainbows signify such color, life, and wonder when the sky is crying. Maybe there’s something magical in the reflection and refraction of light particles in rain. I love long drives that seem to be forever chasing a rainbow, expansive and endless sky, the same one that blankets us all.

I was talking to a friend the other night. He’s taught me a lot about the ability to stay. I was expressing how it might be frustrating for some people that I always seem to be leaving, he interrupted me and said, mads, no. You are not the one who leaves. Those who quit asking what it’s like to live in your world, are the leavers. It was a sobering thought for me.

I watched a movie about kids who were raised by the outside. There’s a scene that resonated entirely with the way I live. The dad was driving away in an empty bus they call “Steve” and you can feel the heaviness of the air. As though all the extra space to wiggle around had become claustrophobic. Several hours later he stops to make food over a fire and one by one his kids come out of the undercarriage of the bus. And in a single second of seeing them all standing there, his whole demeanor shifts. A man who looked small and shriveled in the space he occupied, now filled up every corner. I feel like that dad often. Living this nomad-roadie life, filling my bus just to leave my people behind and fill it up with new ones. But given what my friend had told me about the stayers and the leavers, I keep all my people in my bus. I’m a person who always shows up. I believe we were created to be people for people and dammit if I’m not going to do an extraordinary job for the sunshine souls that welcome me into their world.