I confess that sometimes I don't enjoy reading my Bible

Take and Eat, a writing prompt, a rainbow

If you prefer to listen, I sat out on the porch as it rained to record this audio for you.

So I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, “Take and eat it; it will be bitter in your stomach, but it will be as sweet as honey in your mouth.” Revelation 10:9

This morning I ate a rainbow. Doubled up and neon against the Deep Space Sparkle¹ of a November morning, it encircled my favorite landscape and landed in the neighbor’s pasture. 

I have a full and complete crush on the Meadow Green of the grass, the deep Black and Christmas Green of the firs, the fog catching on the evergreens in Wildcat Canyon. I love the land, and I want to use all caps to say it but I’m still a little shy. I love the land, in repetition and with italics, at the very least. 

I ate the rainbow because I wanted all I could get of it.

The oaks and maples are already embers below the rainbow, blazing in Terra Cotta and Bronze, and the rainbow lights them fully aflame. Earlier this morning I watched a dead snag come alive again with the discarded leaves of a Big Leaf Maple down by the creek, giant Gold foliage floating and landing on its lifeless Black body. For a minute it wore beauty, a skeleton in wedding clothes. Even the skeleton trees are beautiful and I am frustrated because I want another word for it, another way to say beautiful. Gorgeous. Stunning. Breathtaking. Jade Green and Burnt Sienna. I love the land.

Caspar David Friedrich, Mountain Landscape with Rainbow

I am eating a dark and dramatic sky now, the rainbow having faded, and I love it just as much. The earth is glowing beneath the darkness and every hint of Mango Tango and Sunglow and Golden Yellow on the mountain out my window is lit up with a fire from beneath it, flames engulfing every deciduous body. The grass is almost too green, like the Emerald crayon your 5 year old uses for all grass and trees and flower stems. Bright and unreal. Bitter and sweet.

The sky is dark but somewhere there is a light, a glowing orb. Maybe the trees themselves are lighting the world. I love the land, on repeat.

From behind me, from the east side of the house, light comes again. A watchman shines a floodlight around the canyon, looking for something; light moves across the north and over the west end of the dead end road, and I am crying, or at least, tears suddenly appear in my eyes. I’m not even paying attention—I’m texting a friend about her appointment today and praying for her with my head down to a screen, and the sky has lit again. Someone has flipped on a lamp. Portions of the world are ablaze, and I look up.

The rainbow reappears like invisible ink, just a few moments’ flash, just a gust of light and glory against the dark sky. I don’t have words to tell you how it glows, how it appears so suddenly, electric brightness right there in the sky and then gone again.

I have a memory of Disneyland at about 3 years old, of riding some kind of train though some kind of tunnel and seeing flashing images of dinosaurs on the walls in the darkness; just bits of this memory; bits of fear or awe or excitement; just enough energy to keep the memory all these years. When it was dark in the tunnel, I still knew the images were there and that they would appear again.

Gosh I love this land and I let the tears come—silly me, silly world, silly rainbows and fires and smoky fog and flashes of beauty beauty beauty. 

I take and eat. 

The cows keep grazing like they can’t look up, like Emerald grass is all they could love in the world. I suppose they really can’t look up—that they are anatomically designed to look down. I think about how my neck hurts and my shoulders must constantly be forced down from my ears; about my phone, and how I literally thanked God for the handiness of this camera in my hand when I first saw the rainbow this morning. I was walking Tim to the door, saying goodbye as he left for work, and then we were both distracted by the rainbow. I took photos in the driveway as he left, and then from the front porch and the back porch and the patio. Look up look up look up gosh I love this land.

It’s raining now. The sky is a solid White Shimmer and fog moves in to make the world feel close. I eat this, too. The glow of the trees has dampened and the cows moved off to find shelter. Puddles in the pasture reflect the sky and if I were an animal who could only look down, I would drink from the puddle. I would empty the sky and fill my greedy belly.

“Look at the world with childlike wonder, ready to be startled into surprised delight by the profuse abundance of truth and beauty and goodness that is spilling out of the skies at every moment. Cultivate a hermeneutics of adoration—see how large, how splendid, how magnificent life is.

And then practice this hermeneutic of adoration in the reading of Holy Scripture. Plan on spending the rest of your lives exploring and enjoying the world both vast and intricate that is revealed by this text.” -- Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book

This post came from a writing prompt shared by Lori Harris at

Locusts and Honey

. Apparently I’m in my Nostalgia Era, and writing on this prompt this morning brought back all the love of old school blogging. You can join the fun! Lori has a prompt for every day in November.

1. All the capitalized color names in this post came from crayola.com