Rainbow Connection

A Modern Myth

Where do colors come from?

We’ve all seen a rainbow, how beautiful it is.  It has every color we can imagine, except perhaps one—black.  Black is not a color, not really.  We never see color at night.  Not on a dark night when all that we can see are shadows.  There is no color.  There is no color in black.  And there is a reason for that.  The Cloud Maiden knows.

Cloud Maiden is a self-centered young woman.  Sometimes in winter, she gets cold.  She shivers and her teeth chatter because Old Man Sun doesn’t warm her like he should.  She thinks that she can warm things up by throwing a blanket of snow over everything.

Sometimes in spring, she gets angry because Old Man Sun doesn’t warm her fast enough.  She screams thunder and spits lightning and cries big tears in her frustration.  She has scary temper tantrums.

In summer she teases Old Man Sun.  She usually catches him when he wakes up in the morning or goes to sleep at night.  She shakes like a wet dog and sprays rain drops at him. Her spray creates a rainbow, a pretty rainbow for all to enjoy.

But Old Man Sun is usually yawning when he’s waking up or falling asleep. He sucks the rainbow deep inside of him.  When he swallows a rainbow, he always gets the hiccups.  Each time he hiccups, a puff of color comes out.  He hiccups different colors again and again and again.

Those colors fall down in different places.  Some color the flowers.  Some color the berries.  Some color the pretty stones in a necklace.  That’s why the colors of things are so bright and beautiful after you’ve seen a rainbow.  Old Man Sun is coloring them with bits and pieces of Cloud Maiden’s rainbows.

At night after dark when Old Man Sun sleeps, he is no longer hiccuping so he isn’t coloring things.

The colors in my paints here?  Why they come from the same place.  People in far away places take the colors out of those lovely flowers and pretty stones that Old Man Sun has colored with the Cloud Maiden’s rainbows.  And they put those colors in these jars and tubes so that I can use them to paint pictures—and what beautiful pictures they become.

Tonight though, the pictures will be black until Old Man Sun hiccups again in the morning.