Chasing Rainbows (part 1)

(The Story of Seamus O’Reilly and the Leprechaun)

The first thing you need to know about that rainbow up there, children, is that the leprechauns have been having a joke at our expense for the last thousand years. No one’s ever gotten to the end of the rainbow, or ever will, because there is no end of the rainbow. Only those who have seen one from the air know that the rainbow is a perfect circle. Even if it was solid enough to touch, which it isn’t, and even if you could get to it, which you can’t, a circle has no beginning or end, so you’d just go round and round until the light changed and the rainbow disappeared in a tinkle of faerie laughter. The leprechauns have known this all along, of course, since all the Fair Folk can fly and they’d seen rainbows from the air centuries before airplanes had even been thought of. And that’s why they’ve spread the story about the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow – and laughed and laughed and laughed, the little devils.

But, on the other hand, a circle in the sky could be said to begin, and end, everywhere at once. When I look at the rainbow from the ground, the place that my eyes tell me is the end is in fact the place where someone else is standing miles away, looking at the same rainbow and believing that its end is right where I’m standing. Which means, if I can only see things from outside myself, if I can only bend my mind the right way, that the rainbow’s end is wherever I happen to be.

Funny things, rainbows. On the one hand, they don’t even really exist. They’re just the image the brain creates from the information the eye gathers when light hits water molecules a certain way. And on the other hand, they are the essence of all that is real – light and air and water, energy and matter in their simplest, purest, and most common forms. But most of all, they are real because we see them. Remember that, not just about rainbows, but about everything. And that’s where magic happens, where the unreal becomes real and the impossible becomes the everyday, where the Wright brothers found the way for humans to fly, where we have always flown – it’s all about what you see in your mind, in the place where the rainbow ends.

But enough philosophy, you want a good story. And I’ll tell you one, about a man who did find the rainbow’s end after all, and about the tricky leprechaun he met there, about magic and gold and quests and practical jokes and shoes with big shiny buckles. (You’ll see, later.) But first, look up once more at the rainbow before it disappears, because that’s where it all begins.

© John M. Munzer