Postcards & Love Notes From The Cosmic Correspondent

And A Valentine To The Gathering of Spirits Community - Things We Love

Feb 14, 2024

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rainbow on brown mountain covered with fogs — Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash

Postcards & Love Notes From The Cosmic Correspondent

I met a man this past weekend who had recently retired from his vocation as a commercial pilot. He’d spent much of his adult life seeing the world from the nose of a cockpit, looking out upon a view, that until this relative blip of a moment in history, had been unseen by human eyes. He told me that because his regular route took him across the Cascade Mountains into the misty rainforest ecosystem of the Pacific Northwest, he often encountered rainbows. He grinned with remembered delight as he described seeing multiple rainbows forming in the clouds below the plane. I loved seeing the way his voice and face softened as he spoke of what it felt like to descend or ascend through a entire field of those glowing multi-colored arcs.

Rainbows are mysterious to me, unpredictable and maybe even a little squirrelly. I remember stepping out onto my front porch, carrying my new baby daughter in my arms, to find a luminous full rainbow literally touching down in the center of my postage stamp of a front yard. I remember marveling at the idea that of all the moments of my life, and all the miles and miles of surface on our blue-green planet, this miraculous atmospheric combination of light and mist had landed in that exact then, close enough to reach out and touch. It felt like a visitation or blessing or a sign that somehow I was on the right path. It felt like an affirmation that everything (the good, the glorious and the hard as stone) had brought me to there, to stand in the presence of a miracle, with another miracle sleeping peacefully in my arms.

I remember another rainy day, in another rainy time, driving across the flat farm lands of central Illinois toward St Louis, when a series of bright, precise, rectangular bars of color kept appearing and disappearing in the sky to my left. These were not full rainbows, but as if The Cosmic Correspondent was dropping rainbow postcards along my path, saying “Dearest poet pen pal, be sure to pay attention, I’m always sending you love notes to light the way.”

Someone told me once that synchronicity is when The Holy winks. I like the image of something that is sacred threading through the world, occasionally giving me a wry, satisfied smile and a playful nudge in the side. I love imagining the man I met this weekend, winking back at The Navigator, so grateful for a pilot’s unencumbered and rarified view from the convex windows of an airplane cockpit, gliding through waves and waves of rainbow colored postcards falling through the mist.

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Practice

Breathe in and out for a minute or so.
Remember an encounter with a rainbow.
Let that memory expand in your heart and mind, breathe into that memory for the love note it was and still is.