Raven Ridge Gardens: rainbows

Showing posts with label rainbows. Show all posts

Sunday, January 02, 2011

It's a New Year - Welcome to 2011

This, I am told, is an icebow: a rainbow in a cloudless and rainless but none-the-less moisture-filled sky made possible by the sun refracting off ice crystals high in the troposphere.

The icebow sat over our area of northern California (and maybe auspiciously over the Trinidad Bay Bed & Breakfast) for more than 2 hours on Dec. 30th. It didn't move and it was mostly a rather ghostly white except for the few moments when the sun broke through a thin veil of clouds and lit the halo in a beautiful spectrum of colors.

I look for auspicious signs in nature. I delight in them. Call me silly, I don't care, but even knowing the science of how rainbows occur, I think they're magical. And I think they portend good things to come.

Yesterday the clouds that have been hanging over our collective heads, raining buckets for several weeks, began to part, showing delicious patches of blue.

Today the the clouds are gone, the sky is blue as can be, the sun is bright, water droplets are glistening, making little rainbows everywhere I look.

And the Buddha who graces the pathway to our house is smiling in the sunshine.

All is right in my world.

I hope it is in yours. Happy New Year.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Autumn in My Garden 2009 - Morning Sky with Rainbow and Chickens

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Since the world fell back to a more civilized time frame on November 2nd (I'm speaking of that magical time of 2 am on Sunday morning when daylight saving time goes back to where it belongs - not on our clocks, and not, for a time anyway, skewing the lives of those of us who get up with the dawn and get sleepy when night falls), I've been happily rising at 6 am, making my tea and heading outside to watch the light creep softly down the redwood trees to finally land on fencetops, garden and chicken yard.

The neighborhood roosters will have been crowing for at least an hour and my hens are either cackling away, proudly announcing the production of each and every egg, or they are talking softly amongst themselves, waiting for the door to open, then spilling out, tumbling over each other to be first. At what remains a mystery.

All this was going on several mornings ago, when I looked to the western sky and saw a rainbow out over the ocean. It was not raining, there were just a few high clouds, but the rising sun must have been hitting the ocean moisture just right, because there it was: