Iridescence

 

Iridescence draws me and nourishes my soul.

As a child I loved the rainbow light that lay across the polished wood of our church pews, as sunshine flooded in through the stained glass windows. I liked the stained glass windows themselves, but I liked the abstract shedding of colours better, because it was all colour and no picture.

My grandmother (my father's mother) had a prism alongside other ornaments in a display case in her sitting room, and she let me hold it and turn it in the light, and I loved it so much. When she died, my father enquired if there was anything she had that I would like, so I asked for that prism, and it was mine for a while. I let my children hold it and play with it as my grandmother had allowed me to do, and in time it got broken — these things of beauty come and go, don't they, in the hands of children? But it's important to let children handle them, not separate them; that way they get to keep them in their souls even after the material thing has gone.

My grandmother also had a bracelet of crystals — the sort called Vitrail Medium, like this:

I loved it so much that she gave it to me, and I had it for a while. But then I passed it on to a friend, whose soul I could see hungered for it — she was a sad, lost kind of person, and I hoped it would feed her spirit.

Still now I am grown up I love iridescence. In my room at our new house I love the interplay of sunbeams with the lustre of iridescent artefacts.

Disappointingly difficult to capture in a photograph.

I always wear earrings, and I have several pairs in two kinds — some are pearls, with that quiet lustre that is so beautiful, and the others are Swarovski crystals. 

I like fibre-optic lamps too, and fibre-optic Christmas trees — the sort that slowly change colour, going through the whole rainbow.

And this year I have an Advent calendar that is like a peaceful rainbow, communicating the luminous wonder of adoration.

I don't want to open the little numbered windows to mark the days of Advent, because I like it so much just as a picture.

The orientation of our new house means that sitting in bed in the morning I look out on the colours of the dawn. 💖 So very beautiful.

And we have no fireplace, but in the evening I turn on the electric wood stove. The coloured light and the dancing 'flames' make me happy.