Hidden Rainbows

   Low western sunlight shone through the windshield, and as the car turned a corner it beamed through a Canada Goose feather hanging from the sun visor.  Multiple tiny rainbows appeared and rippled across the feather as the car made the turn.  Amazing!  I took the feather down and angled it towards the sunshine trying to understand what I was seeing.  Repeating bands of the visible light spectrum glowed mysteriously.  Who knew that rainbows were hidden in feathers?

  

                                                       Sunshine through a swan feather

   The next day I tried a trumpeter swan feather against the sun and there again were the rainbows but brighter against the white barbs.  I researched this phenomenon and found that some feathers have convoluted air cavities that act as tiny light-scattering prisms. .Later that week my partner discovered an orb spider’s web illuminated by the setting sun.  Rainbow colours appeared on the various silk strands.  We tried to photograph it which was tricky because it all depended on the angle the camera was at.  I tried to photograph the rainbows in the feathers as well but the camera saw the event differently than I did.    

                               

                                         

                                                        Rainbow in spider`s web

  

   We began looking for hidden rainbows in unlikely spots.  Seeing the spectrum of visible light depends on light bending through water or air or transparent solid objects.  It depends on angles of light.  You have to be at just the right spot to see one.  You have to look at it in the right way.  A few inches off and it disappears.

   Yesterday, a friend gave me a girasol (around the sun) crystal.  If you look at a light through it, the fibers in the crystal create a halo affect around the point of light.  You have to move the crystal towards and away from the light to get this effect which is very beautiful.  I took it home and looked at all kinds of lights through it, happy and curious as a child.

   The way we look at things can determine what we see and how we see things.  The paradigm that we think and work in will affect how we see events and people.  After the recent Canadian federal election I heard a radio interviewer ask a guest if Prime Minister designate Justin Trudeau was a strong enough figure to lead the country.  After nearly ten years of a prime minister who controlled and micromanaged the country with a paternalistic “father knows best” attitude, we had become well used to the paradigm of hierarchy, competition and control being linked to this role.  It seemed to me that the question was being asked from this paradigm.  

    However, Trudeau seems to be working in the new paradigm of collaboration and cooperation.  The old prime minister rarely met with the premiers yet Trudeau is inviting all of them, Elizabeth May of the Green party and the other party leaders to come with him to the United Nations summit on climate change in Paris later this year.  He promises to have a cabinet with gender equality while the old prime minister reluctantly let only a few women into his.  In a CBC radio interview, Premier Kathleen Wynne of Ontario said that Trudeau will “dialogue” and “cooperate” vs a “lack of connection” with the previous PM.

   Perhaps this style or paradigm will look new to many Canadians. In the light of the old paradigm collaboration spells trouble and men who share power with women appear weak. It all depends how we look at it.  Collaboration allows many ideas that can inform each other to co-create new solutions. Gender equality offers new potentials that have not been explored yet.   If we look with new eyes, the light of the new paradigm shining through the old political institutions may reveal rainbows.