Picture This: Celtic New Year Rainbow

I journeyed into the Celtic new year with invocations upon my lips from frozen Glendaruel to the misty western sweep of Cowal. From the Samhain dark rose 1 November with bluster and brilliance, the portrait of mid-autumn in western Scotland. Miles disappeared underfoot on Argyll’s ‘secret coast,’ the miniature road following the graceful arc of Loch Fyne from Otter Ferry to Barnacarry and on to Strachur. At Old Castle Lachlan the amber light, sieved by clouds and shattered by the hovering rain, bent into an earth-spanning rainbow, a perfect parabola of hue and spectrum. The lightsmiths had come.

The old ways still hold sway in Scotland’s wild reaches. People yet whisper that the Otherworld is closest to our own at Samhain and Beltane, and that rainbows are the surest sign of Presence. To call this view beautiful would be trite if the appreciation of beauty weren’t indicative of a deeper, primordial sense of rightness and intuition. It has taken me a decade to understand this, that the experience of beauty is an invitation to look in, feel, and decode the fragments of ourselves: The earth around us is the rosetta stone for our encoded souls. The birth and death of a year calls for gratitude and thanks, but also wisdom, for greatness is the consequence of ordeal, not ease.