I remember the rainbow, so perfectly arched above the cashew trees where we collected fruit and nuts to roast for a picnic. It looked so close, so obtainable. I’d recently read about a child who’d found the end of a rainbow and I had no doubt that I could do the same. I turned to my friends, a group of children bound by the fact that our parents were the faculty, staff and students at a rural university in the Philippines, and tried to explain in Tagalog a culturally distant legend that foretold a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. Perhaps this wasn’t so far from their own dwarf legends, or maybe they just found the antics of the token white girl entertaining; whatever the reason, they joined me. We abandoned our laden baskets and raced through the trees toward the end of the rainbow.
We made it.
There was a distinct line in the light, the normal bright white mid-day sun on one side and the golden light of day’s ends on the other. We were bathed in gold, just as the book had described. We jumped, raced and twirled in and out of our patch of gold, feeling every bit as rich as if we had discovered that mythical pot of gold.
I’ve spent a lifetime seeking my version of gold in nature. I’ve traveled to every continent, not to check them off my list, but to appreciate the vast and diverse beauty housed on our planet. I trained as a biologist, getting a master’s degree before realizing that the stories I wanted to tell were not in data, numbers and statistics. I spent three years wandering around New Zealand, Australia, Southeast Asia, China and the Bahamas and during that time I came to realize that creative non-fiction writing and a camera were my tools.
I hope that my words and images might inspire you toward the end of your rainbow, to the version of gold that you seek.
