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I’ll Make No Apology for Rainbow
From: pain...@aol.com
Date: July 15, 1999
Newsgroups: alt.gathering.rainbow

[I wrote this in response to a post I have now lost. From Laurie, perhaps?]

I do know the “apologia” is a grand old style, having several degrees in literature, but rainbow needs none. But I’ll respond to the spirit of your inquiry, even if mostly anecdotally. But anthropologically, sociologically, rainbow isn’t a gang or a religious cult. It is multigenerational and not a group. It is a family of many tribes so don’t worry that your happiness/bliss might be religious insanity – though we have that, too!

Take Wyoming. There I was. On my face, literally, due to thirty years of smoking at front gate on the third due to altitude sickness at the purported 8,764 ft. (That was five years ago. Haven’t smoked since!) I was disabled to the point of not being able to walk into the gathering from where we were camped at bus village until the seventh. It took hours to make the walk. Lots of osha. Lots of mushrooms. Then I walked in a long slow circle around vision council there in that awesome high valley about five times saying sweet nodding hellos to many kin. Then I went off apace toward teepee village. On the slope there I turned and wept for an hour or more, just weeping and weeping happily and luxuriously at the beauty of the mountains, the beauty of the world, the beauty of the tribes going about the business of being. Weeping because I could see the snow as it would be come February. Weeping because it was all there: The full cycle of human life in its sexual array; ugly gorgeous; old young; male female in all in some proportions; dark light; fat gaunt; strong weak; shaved hair to ankles; tall short; smart stupid; happy angry. I heard yells from the teepees. A baby was getting born there I think. Someone came up to me and told me of a death some months before of someone we knew. I craved for a huge canvas and paints.

It was all just the greatest painting ever painted! But I have it hanging in the Louvre of my heart, that great family portrait I saw before me that great summer evening in the Teton mountains. When I try to tell people about the gatherings, about rainbow this what I describe. I point out that there are no authorities in this painting. No badges, cars, desks, cash registers, stages, judges robesgavelsbenches. Just a true egalitarian tribe sans the rectilinear hide and go seek perspectives of Babylon. And the color! And the smells of super cooking! The sounds! Children laughing drumsdrumsdrums guitars bells. Women in labor yelling! Singing. Pans clattering. The sounds of bare feet on dirt paths. (I love that slappound sound.) Bagpipes. Conch shell songs of suppertime. Angry funny airhead mystical brilliant earnest sly deceptive sick healing voices speaking at councils. And all the faces and bodies and all the energies complex and simple carried around by those bodies. And the sunlight. And the green grass. And the moon and the stars and the black clouds and the rain and the snow and the thunder and the lightning. And never never never anywhere except for a few intoxicating minutes in the first floods of puberty walking on the streets in Green Bay Wisconsin have I ever felt connected to my species, the mystery reconciled, the reason for life being merely that it is! except when thus en famile, cum rainbow, a la family of living light.

Mmmmm. Mmmmm. I sure do love us!

Miranda, Raven, She Who Paints with Words

[More of Miranda’s writing can be seen here.]