My workshop yesterday was at the Center for Urban Horticulture in Seattle, which is adjacent to the Union Bay Natural Area. The whole area used to be a city dump…but the city and the University of Washington Botanical Gardens reclaimed the land and turned it into wonderful little chunk of nature along the shores of Lake Washington. It is a great spot for bird watching, walking your dog, jogging, etc. Between the Horticulture Center and the lake is Yesler Swamp, which is also being developed. There are temporary trails leading down on the east and west to the lagoon off Lake Washington and plans to build a boardwalk over the wetter swamp and the lagoon to complete the loop.

This spider, which I have not had time to id, was one of several who had constructed very large webs along the east trail. The angle of the morning sun was just right so that the web diffracted the light and created a “rainbow” effect (minus the rain…I suppose it is more accurate to say the web diffracted the light into is spectrum 🙂 Whatever…the effect was quite striking.

Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f6.5 @ 1/160th @ ISO800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. 

And for the Sunday Thought. Almost everyone knows that what we call white light is really made up all the colors in the spectrum…reds and blues and greens and violets. We see it most often in a rainbow; occasionally cast on a wall by prism hanging in a window; more rarely, early in the morning or late in the afternoon when the sun is low, across the face of street sign painted with luminous reflective paint full of glass beads; and very rarely indeed in something natural like this spider web hanging in the sun. Still, often enough so when we stop to think about it, we know white light is, miraculously, all the colors combined.

But we don’t often stop to think about it. We take white light for granted. We forget that red things are red because they reflect the red light within the white…and green things are green because they reflect the green. As a photographer, ie, one who plays with light all the time, I am a bit more aware, but not so much that I can’t be taken by surprise by a spider web in the sun.

I have said before that love is the light of eternity…of, if you will, the realm of the spirit. Many who encounter God come away with impression of the pure white light…again, remembering that that light is love. And yet, since what we experience in the physical realm of time and space is a physical manifestation of the eternal, the love/light of the spirit has to be made up of all the colors of the rainbow, or we would not see all the colors of eternity. There must be a red love/light and a green love/light within the white love/light of God’s presence. Each of us, each of our lives, must reflect back our particular color. Certainly that would explain a lot about the variety of love we see in human beings.

Rarely, there might be a life, or even a second of a life, that is so lived as to show all the colors of God’s love. It might be some instant as fragile as a spider web in the morning sun beside a trail in a swamp in Seattle…but it would be a moment to treasure, a life to treasure and to celebrate. Or that’s what I think.