If we’re very wise, we can find ourselves happy with little things. For me this morning it’s the rainbows dancing on my ceiling — streaks of prism light from the six prisms given to me by family and various friends over the years, hanging as a mobile where the rising sun strikes through them and sends their colors across my ceiling. If I spin the globe ones, their colors dance among the long streaks of the others, but usually it’s enough simply to have the colors there – clear, pure colors existing as light and nothing else.

Their time is brief, as the sun rises higher and leaves them, and of course there are cloudy mornings when they do not come at all, but pleasure is no less pleasure for being passing or occasional. The pleasure is in the pleasure, and the rainbows across my ceiling are my passing pleasure, come and gone and hopefully to come again.

I begin a little to grasp how powerful was the effect of the giant stained glass windows in medieval cathedrals, their multi-colored glass throwing jeweled patterns in a wonder of colors across stone floors and worshippers, like nothing seen elsewhere in people’s ordinary lives then.

– Margaret